Activision teed us up with a preview session for Modern Warfare 2 at gamescom in Cologne today. Given that we'd had a pretty in-depth preview session recently at E3, the focus was entirely on the new Special Ops mode - which is Infinity Ward's version of co-operative gameplay.

First, let's take a brief moment to remember the last billion years of games (particularly FPS games) that have been released without co-operative play, despite gamers clamoring for it non-stop. OK.

Special Ops mode basically consists of a bunch of different levels - not related to the single player campaign - that players can team up and bash their way through with buddies, either in split screen mode or via the Internet. You can't play through the whole single player game in co-operative mode, but apparently as much effort has gone into making sure SpecOps is a fun, complete component of the game as was put into the campaign and regular multiplayer.



The missions are typically short, sharp and loud. Activision producer Vince Fennel sat us down and walked us through one of the levels - his first attempt ended in a bloody smear on the pavement as he got a bit ambitious, but he was able to knock it off on his second attempt in only a couple of minutes. It was demonstrated, somewhat inexplicably, by Vince just playing it alone, so it was hard to gauge any of the actual co-operative nature of this new co-operative mode. But it looked pretty cool anyway.

As always I thought it would be interesting to find out how the multiplayer model was going to be glued together for the PC. The console versions are definitely using the normal online matchmaking services, but PC owners are going to be in an interesting situation, because unless it uses peer-to-peer, the normal mode of gameplay is on dedicated servers run by third parties. No information is available on this subject yet, but they mentioned this is something we can chase up with them.

Overall, it certainly looked like a sweet game - crazy awesome visuals, lots of fast-paced action combined with neat slow-mo scenes with bodies and bullets and blood flying all over the place. It would have been nice to see a taste of the game actually operating in co-operative mode though, so we'll be reserving judgment on that for a bit longer yet.