haha...right on. I can only assume that this was not filmed with the in-game engine. If it was....omg.... but yea, looks good. Let's hope it lives up to its predecessor.

1. It's pretty damn real. Once bullet will take you out.

2. No running and shooting. If you shoot while walking/running you're not gonna hit anything. You need to go prone, aim through the (realistic) sights and fire single rounds or short, controlled bursts.

3. It's wide open. You can go anywhere on the island at any time. Though the missions typically constrain your location, it's about as open as possible.

4. You can drive and fly anything...boats, helicopters, tanks, cars, jeeps, APCs, anything.

5. Easy map editor... there's really no map editor, actually. The maps are static. But you can add stuff to them...like people and buildings and machine gun nests, etc etc, and then script everything. It's not too hard, either. I built some insane fights just for the hell of it.

First and foremost, the scale of the game needs to be expressed. Dragon Rising presents a 135 square mile island, with an engine offering a draw distance of up to 35km. This isn't an exaggeration - we've seen it with our own eyes as a Cobra helicopter rises above the hills to reveal the extraordinary vista. The new engine is designed to allow a great deal of stuff on screen at any one time, which is essential for one of the game's most distinctive features: shooting people from miles away.

Codemasters' aim for the game is to create a balance between the ultra-realism for which the original was famous, and creating an evocative simulation of being involved in a war. This extends from intricately accurate physics, right down to different bullet calibres making different sounds as they pass your ear, penetrating objects to appropriate depths. A column of smoke after a missile is dropped on a building gradually drifts away as the breeze carries it, while the resulting concrete dust billows and spreads below. Get caught in it and you'll have trouble breathing, and maybe even collapse.

This is not to say it's going to be anything other than brutal. While there are difficulty settings, these aren't going to change how the AI treats you, or give you improved health. You're still a fleshy human even if you ask it to be easy. Instead you'll get more technical support. Easy will offer you a compass that shows you sighted enemies as red marks, and on-screen info gives you useful advantage. Put the difficulty up to its highest and you're not even going to get a crosshair.

Co-op changes how the game is approached. In the single-player campaign you play as one character, and leave the sniping, etc., to the AI experts in your team. Enter co-op and you can play anyone you choose. In fact, if you're finding a particular section of the single-player game too difficult to pass, you can switch into co-op mode, get a few friends to help you out, and then drop back into offline mode and carry on.

"Why? Because the purpose of the game is to show what combat experience is like. The truth is, in combat you don't bunny-hop, you don't run at the enemy blazing away, you don't hide behind rocks and feel better. You get a bullet in the face and you bleed to death. If you hit the spacebar you'll dive to the floor, because what's the most important thing you can do? It's not jump, it's get your face in the dirt as rapidly as possible. When you're carrying 170lb of gear several miles, the last thing you'll fancy doing is star jumps while somebody's shooting at you."