Sounds good to me
I think Metakill is right. It should be possible with all the recent technological advancements that have been made in game engines.
Red Faction has its GeoMod tech, Severance has it's great shadows and rippling reflections, and there are other games out there implementing realistic ballistics tech so you have to start thinking about wind velocity when targeting at range.
Why not use a simple portal to emulate the effect of water refraction?
Water (or any transparent/translucent liquid) has always been tricky to show in games. Noone has yet developed an engine that shows water realistically. Some have proper rippling reflections (like Severance), some have translucency (like Unreal), but few have both, and none to my knowledge currently have water refraction.
If any engine should be able to pull this off, it should be the Unreal 2 engine.
However, it depends how hard it is to do, and whether or not the time spent putting such a feature in is considered worthwhile enough. If it has no real effect on gameplay, then they should leave it out, and concentrate on making the game longer and more complex, IMHO.