These shoot-outs aim for realism of total destruction

Try this experiment with your favourite first-person shooter game: take a gun and shoot up the room. Or drop a few grenades and see what happens. The effect? Nothing, most likely.

In most first-person shooters, bullets and bombs do damage to the enemy but have little effect on the surrounding environment. Certainly, you can bust up a few windows or flower pots, but this is more for cosmetic effect than a full-fledged effort to inject some realism into the game.

Now, a new Electronic Arts title due out in March next year aims to change all that. Black, from the company's Britain-based Criterion Studios, wants to raise the bar on what the first-person shooter can be. Its philosophy is that every bullet fired in a game will having a damaging result, either on the enemy or the game's environs.

'Guns are the stars of our shows and bullets are our babies. We want every bullet to have a cause and effect,' studio marketing director Roy Meredith said.

'If you shoot glass, it's going to shatter. If you shoot wood, it splinters. If you shoot concrete, big slabs come off. And the best one is, if you shoot plaster, it gets really dusty.

'You can barely see what's going on. You can't see your enemy any more. You can see the flashes from the muzzles of their guns.'

Black is not about just using your gun to kill the enemy. It is about using the surrounding environment as well. Signs, walls, doors, columns and windows can all be shot. Make any of these fall on the enemy to achieve 'black ops kills' and score higher points.