The mission's name is a reference to reconnaissance by fire, a military tactic which seeks to determine enemy positions by using probing attacks against them, trying to draw the enemy into returning fire and exposing their concealed position.
During the initial section of the level, the enemy snipers are modeled identically to the All Ghillied Up skin for the operator Grinch, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Despite using a bolt-action rifle, Price handles his sniper rifle to fire semi-automatically.
If the doors are opened while the player uses the snakecam, they will not get out of the snakecam's feed and the NPC cannot proceed into the building.
Several vehicles can be seen with license plates featuring 2003 or 2009, those numbers are references to the release years of Call of Duty and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 respectively.
Two different stories are said by Laswell and Price while describing an operation, depending on the dialogue options the player chooses. In one scenario, Price claims that he dressed someone up in a gorilla suit to distract a high-value target before they slipped on ice, forcing Laswell to grab him immediately. In the other story, Laswell claims that Price displayed a cardboard cow in front of the target's vehicle before detaining him.
Before that conversation, Gaz asks how Price and Laswell met. Both answered that they met in a football/soccer match then recruited for an operation.
Should the player choose to go loud and clear the area at the beginning of the mission, Price will comment on how Gaz has come "a long way from [his] day in the Police force", referencing the Piccadilly Circus attack in 2019.
The clothing that the Las Almas Cartel wears in this mission are the same clothes AQ wears in some missions like Countdown. Additionally, two solders in the cartel are the same found in Al Qatala
