An amazing campaign. Terrific multiplayer. And now a separate co-op mode that’s worth $60 all by itself? Infinity Ward’s not letting up, and the new Call of Duty will simply blow you away.

Now is not a good time for coffee and donuts. Concealed in a parked car in a Rio de Janeiro shantytown, you’re staking out an informant who can lead you to a high-value terrorist target. Sounds pretty intense, right? In Modern Warfare 2, it’s the calm before the storm. In a moment, the informant emerges into the daylight, and a van screeches up. Some rough customers pile out and approach the informant… who takes one look at them, yanks out a pistol, and kills them all before you can blink. Then he turns and looks directly at you. And starts firing.

“Roach, get down!” screams Soap MacTavish, the SAS solider you played as in the first Modern Warfare. Your face pressed against the glovebox, you look up in time to see your driver’s head explode, spraying gore everywhere. You have a moment to marvel at how spectacular the graphics are — can the way that blood splatter glistens in the Brazilian sunlight actually be pretty? And then…holy crap is it on as you and Soap pour out of the car in hot pursuit.

Checking out a never-before-seen single-player level in Modern Warfare 2 always gets our pulse pounding, but we gotta say, it’s actually not the coolest thing we saw during our trip to Infinity Ward. That honor goes to the new co-op mode, which will hook you on Call of Duty like never before.

Let's Go, Roach

When you fire up Modern Warfare 2, you land on a screen where you can launch the campaign, multiplayer, or Special Ops — the new co-op mode. You’ll see your completion percentage for each one, and Infinity Ward community relations manager Robert Bowling says that’s no accident.

“The big thing I don’t think people realize yet is just how expansive SpecOps is,” he explains. “It’s definitely not a tacked-on mode. [Modern Warfare 2] has three major parts that had equal dev time and equal polish. None of these are a bonus feature — none of these are Nazi Zombies.”

And then to prove it, he took us through all the meat in this mode. You can actually play SpecOps solo if you want, but Bowling smiles as he suggests that you won’t get far that way. The ticket to survival is a friend, and you can play SpecOps split-screen or on Xbox Live with two players max. Just remember, there’s no dropin/drop-out like Left 4 Dead, so you’ll want a reliable partner who sticks with you.

SpecsOps is broken down into five groups that escalate in difficulty — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo — and you can earn up to three stars for completing each of the 23 missions. You get one star for finishing it on Regular difficulty, two for Hardened, and three for Veteran. Since it takes 14 stars to open the next group, there’ll be no strolls in the park.

But there will be a fistful of intriguing gameplay you won’t see elsewhere in Modern Warfare 2. Bowling explains that a lot of the ideas that turned into SpecOps gameplay came from quality single-player concepts that didn’t quite fit into the campaign’s flow. “SpecOps was where we didn’t want to compromise on story, but we still wanted to have cool co-op moments,” he says.

The usual suspects are here, of course. Assault sends you through a level to take down targets in a set time while avoiding civilians. Stealth has you sneaking past everyone, and Wave Defense spawns five increasingly harder waves — just like Gears 2’s Horde. Elimination drops you into a level with a set number of spawning enemies, and — praise the Lord, pass the ammo — you kill them all.

But then there’s the creative stuff. “You remember the AC- 130?” grins Bowling. (He’s referring to the gunship you manned in Modern Warfare, unleashing devastating fire on ground forces from a black-and-white view above.) “You replay that, except one guy’s in the AC-130 and one’s on the ground.” The player in the gunship handles fire support, while the man on the ground has a laser sight on his rifle to call down death from above. That’s one of the few game types that require two players, but others that caught our eye were snowmobile time trials and snowmobile combat, where you’re racing against — and shooting — your “friend.”

Roach, Take the Shot!

Bowling starts things off by playing solo through a Delta-level Elimination mission, and harrowing is a good way to describe the job of taking down the 40 adversaries converging on a cabin in the woods. He plays it smart, planting claymores in doorways and popping up in windows to tempt ghillie-suited snipers to reveal their position by taking a potshot. Some enemies won’t come to you, so eventually it seems wise to move out into the forest…until a juggernaut charges him. “They’re an enemy you won’t find anywhere else in the game,” Bowling explains.

“They’re huge guys in bomb-squad suits, and the only way to take them down is a high-caliber weapon like a 50-cal or a Desert Eagle. Explosions only take them to one knee. When they’re coming at you, it’s terrifying.” Yes. Yes, it is…but Bowling goes prone and lays into him with the 50-cal, dropping him in the nick of time.

After he notches No. 40, we got to play through two other missions alongside him, and to put it plainly, it was freakin’ awesome. First up was another Elimination round, this time through a marketplace in Rio de Janeiro. We advanced slowly through a warren of run-down houses, eyeing roofs and intersecting alleys for new angles of crossfire. It was a madhouse as people ran everywhere — hostiles, plenty of civilians, and even some vicious attack dogs. In the chaos, we took down one innocent by mistake, and then we got too cautious…which gave the enemy a chance to flank and finish us. Sorta like in Gears, your partner has a chance to revive you, but here it’s not instantaneous — Bowling had to hustle over and hold X while a meter quickly filled up. There’s no saving or checkpoints in SpecOps, so as the finish line approaches, the paranoia of not wanting to choke in the home stretch really builds.

When the last enemy fell, we were already a bit bug-eyed from the intensity, but it was time to tackle an Assault mission through a Russian gulag. It felt a lot like being in a sewer, except that opponents high up on a ledge were constantly attacking both our flanks. We tried to hold them off while Bowling dealt with the frontal ground assault, but both of us went down a lot — fortunately never at the same time. Some enemies came at us with riot shields, and to handle them, one of us laid down suppressing fire to catch their attention while the other circled around to flank. The tension was forget-to-blink thick, and it was a blast to work as a two-man unit against foes that were constantly trying new tactics and moving to new positions.

When the last shell clattered to the floor, we realized that SpecOps felt like the perfect marriage of Modern Warfare’s singleplayer intensity and the addictive replayability of its multiplayer. It plays like something both brand-new and familiar. “There’s a lot of freedom for designers to explore some crazy ideas,” agrees lead character artist Joel Emslie. “It’s its own entity, and when they started opening up the floodgates, there was a lot of room for things I never thought I’d see in a game.”

Give Me a Sit-Rep

Rewinding a bit, you might’ve heard about the hubbub over what this game is named, and that commotion actually leads to an interesting point. “We wanted to make sure people knew it was a sequel to Modern Warfare,” explains Vince Zampella, Infinity Ward’s studio head, and then he asked us to name the second Star Wars movie. Umm…Empire Strikes Back? “It’s really Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” he continues, “and we are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It’s a game that exists in the COD universe, it’s a sequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but we don’t want people to call it Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — it is Modern Warfare 2. We left it off at the beginning to let people know that.”

So why, then, did Infinity Ward decide to make its first true sequel — one that revisits familiar characters and plotlines? “It was the first time we could tell our own story,” Zampella replies. “With World War II, we were confined to history, but with Modern Warfare, one of the big things we could do was really craft a story. It’s a great world, you’re invested in it already, and we want to continue that.”

“And from the character side,” Emslie adds, “you can have someone you’re tied to emotionally — they’re characters that you want to lead you into bad places.” Infinity Ward’s keeping quiet about exactly what those places are and who, aside from Soap MacTavish, you’ll go into battle with, but we do know this: Modern Warfare 2 picks up after the first game, and you begin playing as Roach, the FNG in Task Force 141. A multinational special-forces unit, they’re all about seeking out high-value targets with the ultimate goal of tracking down Makarov, this “mad dog inside Zakhaev’s organization who took power after you killed Zakhaev at the end of Modern Warfare,” Bowling explains. “But Makarov’s goals are much different — and much worse — than Zakhaev’s ever were.” In the effort to find this monster, you’ll go all over the world on covert missions.

But first, you have to get Roach into Task Force 141, and the game opens with a mission called “For the Record” where he proves his mettle. “Task Force is a real special-forces unit that you have to be hand-chosen for, and ‘For the Record’ identifies you as someone who is eligible,” says Bowling. “Task Force is much more about covert ops — you have to understand the greater good, not just the end objective, and the means to getting there is typically very different than the black-and-white objectives of standard infantry.”

Take Clean Shots

Returning to that stakeout in Rio, Soap and Roach are there to locate an arms dealer named Rojas, who left his prints on shell casings at “a previous scene,” and that’s as much detail as Bowling will give up. You (as Roach) lead the charge, dashing madly in pursuit as local militia come out of the woodwork to take shots at you. As you close in, Soap orders you to drop the informant by shooting his leg, and when you do, Soap hauls the terrified informant into a garage for interrogation…ominously sparking a car battery in his face as you continue deep into the shantytown in search of Rojas.

You’re joined by Royce and Ghost, and everything seems quiet at first, with Royce reminding you to watch your background for civilians. There’s a brief moment of calm, then someone points at you and yells, and all hell breaks loose. Militia appear everywhere, standing out in the open to fire at you as attack dogs come snarling after you. We even hear babies crying as civilians flee past Roach.

“These guys are not military,” Bowling says. “These are just guys who live here, and Rojas pays them to come after you. They have very untrained tactics.” That they do, and the Task Force squad has no trouble putting them down…until suddenly, Soap’s screaming at you over the radio. The informant gave up Rojas’ location, and there’s no time to wait for backup, so you haul ass to a new part of the shantytown just in time to see Rojas flee along the rooftops.

A hair-raising pursuit follows. You have to plow through hordes of militia without losing or killing Rojas, which means sprinting like a maniac while still keeping a level head about who to shoot when. Eventually, you corner Rojas on a balcony, and as you train your sights on him, Soap leaps through the window behind him, tackling and restraining him in the kind of “hell yeah!” finish that is so very Call of Duty.

Bravo, We've Got the Package

But where else will we go in the game? What kind of new weapons will we use? Did Price really die at the end of Modern Warfare? These and many other questions were met with a friendly but firm shake of the head. Infinity Ward just ain’t revealing more.

If you’re frustrated by that, Bowling wants you to know that the studio’s doing it for you. “We want that player experience, the first time they play it, to literally floor them,” he asserts. Between the epic single-player sequences we’ve seen, the way we’re desperately itching to play more SpecOps, and Infinity’s Ward’s impeccable multiplayer track record, we’re inclined to trust him on it. Especially when Emslie chimes in with this last word: “We’ve done some stuff that I think would be considered the pinnacle point in certain stories, and we have multiple of those things happening. You’re going to be freaked out. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.”