…of the beta release of Battlefield: Bad Company. 
First off, the graphics are quite lovely. The day/night cycles are dynamic, and the area fog and sunlight effects are pretty dramatic. Most of the board is dynamic, and can be blown up (more on that later), and the effects when blowing a wall out is always a sight.
The sound is really intense, right up there with Bioshock, and extremely well-mixed: voice chat is mixed properly to the center channel, the sound effects are actually dynamically chosen and mixed in real-time based on “what is important to hear”, sort of like a movie soundtrack; I’m hoping this always works as well as it did through my couple of rounds playing. There is an option in the Sound settings to specifiy what kind of sound system you have (TV, Hi-Fi, Home Cinema), and the sound is compressed the further to the “left” you go. Setting it to Home Cinema yields the best results of course.
The mode that I played was an attack/defend mode, where you have to blow up two boxes filled with gold (or defend against that). When you die, you can spawn either at a location or with your squad (the latter is a nice touch if you want to get right back into the battle after the respawn time, although vehicles and such are back at the “base”).
As for the environmental destruction…it’s not QUITE what they were saying. Each wall has 4-6 damage points, and if you shoot a grenade (or something else that blows up real good like) anywhere within one of those sections, the area will explode. Exactly the same way. Every time. It looks really great, and if you’re running around, you likely won’t typically notice it. But it isn’t truly dynamic, which is what I thought they were going for. It’s certainly better than something like Call of Duty, where you might get trapped by going up in the attic (I actually escaped death for a moment by shooting a hole in the attic wall and jumping out to safety in one round), but it wasn’t quite how I thought they would implement it.
It’s also a bum deal that things you’d think would work don’t seem to. Like, if I’m on the 1st floor and there’s a sniper on the 2nd floor directly above me, shouldn’t I be able to shoot the floor out with a rocket? And handheld grenades do NOT have even CLOSE the same damage potential that grenade launchers do, which was a little strange. I couldn’t destroy almost any environments with my handheld grenades, and that was a major drag. Also, while I haven’t tested it too thoroughly, I couldn’t seem to shoot through walls (a la Call of Duty 4 Perks) with bullets to hit someone. Strange choice for a game that advertises dynamic geometry in the buildings…
All in all, it’s a fun game, and the production values (even in the beta) are really swank. The “DEFENDERS WON” streak across the screen made me think I was watching TNTHD, and the music is very Battlefield-esque over-the-top, but with some funky twists (the intro music is EA-licious). You can tell they spent some money on the presentation.
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