McTavish is back in this strongly cinematic sequel to Call of Duty 4. But don't worry — you'll still be the one shooting all the scenes.

Of all the places you could stop for a smoke, this has to be the least relaxing — teetering on an icy ledge, several thousand feet up the side of a snow-covered mountain in the middle of enemy territory. Needless to say, “Soap” McTavish — the main character in Call of Duty 4 and now your companion in Modern Warfare 2 — is harder than Tyrannosaurus teeth.

You’ll discover that MW2 is all about stunning environments, and this vertigo-inducing backdrop that begins our demonstration is a perfect introduction to the sheer scale and beauty of what Infinity Ward is aiming for. Once McTavish finishes off his cigarette, it’s back to scaling the sheer cliffs with ice-axes. It’s a steady ascent, with Soap charging ahead of your character, Roach, like the seasoned pro he is.

At one point, the pair have to make a leap over a huge chasm. Soap makes the jump first, but when it’s your turn to vault the gap, you come up short. There’s a heart-stopping moment as you start to fall and begin scrabbling to dig in with the axes, but you manage to get close to the top and McTavish offers a helping hand to haul you up. Once you’ve reached a plateau atop the mountain, where the terrorists have inconveniently sequestered their base, Soap orders you to pop out an Aliens-inspired motion tracker: the heartbeat sensor. It’s mounted on your gun to allow you to pre-empt enemies in what are rapidly approaching blizzard conditions.

Inching toward the enemy encampment, you come across two guards on patrol. You’re using suppressed weaponry so as not to raise the alarm, but if you don’t kill them both at the same time, there’s a danger the surviving guard will make a noise. To solve this problem, McTavish counts down from three for a synchronized takedown — a pleasing change of pace from the usual running and gunning. Once you reach the entrance to the base, Soap scrambles up a small incline and settles there with a high-powered sniper rifle; he’s going to cover you while you infiltrate the base.

What follows is a brilliant stealth section through the heart of a swirling blizzard, where patrolling guards crumple as McTavish takes their lids off in a puff of red mist. Best of all, you’re not constrained by scripting — lunge forward and knife one of the guards just as McTavish says “He’s mine…” and he’ll grumble “…then again, maybe not.” The game is designed to be adaptive, so while it’ll have scripted moments that add to the Hollywood atmosphere, it’ll shrug off your pesky interruptions with style.

So Long, Stealth

Slinking around the base, your objective is to place a satchel charge on the aircraft-fueling station and then reconvene with McTavish at the entrance to the main building complex. As you burst through the door, Soap sprints ahead and tackles a guard patrolling the corridor, plunging a knife into him. It’s moments like these, with their fluid motion-captured animation, that really justify Infinity Ward’s insistence on maintaining a solid 60 frames per second. The difference being that, unlike many developers, IW can pull off such silky-smooth action at no discernible cost to the detail of the environment and characters.

Once you download the intel from a nearby console, it’s time to make a stealthy escape, but as you try to sneak out of the hangar, it’s clear that someone has noticed your intrusion into the facility. The huge doors at the end are open and you’re confronted with a line of extremely angry insurgents. Stealth goes out the window as you initiate “Plan B,” which is unsubtly blowing the satchel charge on the fuel tanks. The entire place is plunged into chaos and the pace changes again: now it’s an all-out firefight as you rush to escape the area with all your vitals intact. You’ll still need to take cover, of course, but keeping quiet is no longer necessary.

With the state of alarm comes a scary new threat — snowmobiles. These fast-moving vehicles encircle you and rain machine-gun fire, forcing a hasty, slippery retreat down a steep slope. As the skidoos give chase, you’re given a brief moment to pop some of the drivers. McTavish has a more elegant solution that’ll help you reach your extraction point more quickly: Hiding behind a small building, he pops around the corner and clotheslines one of the skidoo riders with an ice-axe to the chest.

Hopping on the snowmobile, you’re treated to a frantic chase down the slopes, with enemy skidoos giving chase. You’ll be forced to weave through trees, skitter across a frozen lake, and avoid strafing fire from a low-flying helicopter, all the while unloading your own bullet-flavored justice from a pistol. After a minute or so of a high-speed slalom between pine trees and enemies, you’ll careen toward the extraction area and the welcome sight of a helicopter ready for takeoff.

Multiple Tangoes

It’s clear even from this short demonstration that Infinity Ward is taking a somewhat different approach with Modern Warfare 2 — this is much more like the opening of a James Bond film (Tomorrow Never Dies, specifically) than Generation Kill or Jarhead. The decision to drop “Call of Duty” from the name is clearly a reflection of this more cinematic approach to combat. Nevertheless, the game is very much a “true” sequel to the first Modern Warfare, continuing the story directly after the death of Zachaev in Call of Duty 4. In the absence of a leader for the Ultranationalists, Zachaev’s righthand man, Makerov, rises to power, and it turns out he’s even more bonkers than his boss.

The aim of this demonstration was to show off not only the evolution of Infinity Ward’s technology, but also the sheer variety of objectives and play styles that are crammed into just a single 15-minute mission. “It’s definitely a balance,” says Vince Zampella, CEO of Infinity Ward. “We don’t want it to just be all action — there have to be peaks and valleys that emphasize the high points. Maybe there are tense situations like the stealth section with the heartbeat sensor — it’s not all action, but you’re walking around and you see the dots lighting up around you. There’s still some tension there.” It’s easy to dismiss this as a matter of pacing, but it’s clear even at this early stage that Infinity Ward’s approach is much more sophisticated than that. It’s not just a case of tension-building lulls followed by utter carnage; it’s more bite-sized chunks of different activities, each of which will provoke a different, nuanced thrill for the player.

Another major change is that the battle has moved from traditional militarized warzones to areas where civilians will be put in the line of fire. This setup was hinted at in the teaser trailer, which featured imagery from a Russian airport and the sounds of the public going about their business. We were treated to a short sequence from a mission in the slums of Rio De Janeiro where, after tailing a van through the streets, the player vehicle is hammered by a hail of bullets. What follows is a frantic chase through populated streets and into the shantytown favelas, as you’re hot on the tail of a fleeing arms dealer. “You’ll fight non-militarized combatants,” Zampella explains. “It’ll be guys in pretty much normal clothing but with weapons and flak vests, mixed in alongside civilians. So you’ll have to work your way through, picking targets.”

The Co-op Challenge

While the campaign mode is still a strictly single-player experience, there will be a bite-sized co-op Challenge Mode, which launches you into an area riddled with bad guys and tasks you with cleaning them all out as fast as possible, either alone or with a friend in tow. “It’s similar to the airplane run at the end of Modern Warfare,” Zampella explains. “It’s small snippets and you’ll unlock certain ones as you play through the single-player game. You’ll basically time yourself and say, ‘Hey, I beat Gulag Showers in a minute forty; how about you?’”

Infinity Ward plans to include “as many Challenge Mode levels as possible,” and they’re discovering more and more ideal areas for them as they build the game. From the level demonstrated — which was a relatively confined space — this isn’t a careful, deliberate clean-up executed with tactical military precision, but a frantic firefight that will trouble even the most hardcore Call of Duty veterans.

It’s worth mentioning that Infinity Ward demonstrated Challenge Mode in split-screen — which will no doubt be fantastic news to all the gamers who still value cooperative couch play and miss it when it’s not there. However, the studio remained quiet about whether the mode would be Live-compatible. We don’t want to make promises Infinity Ward can’t keep, but we’d honestly be surprised if it wasn’t playable online as well.

Define "Reality"

Modern Warfare 2 certainly makes a lot of changes to the core Call of Duty mechanic — turning the action set pieces and scripted sequences into Hollywood-scale moments and ramping up the variety within a single mission — so it’s no wonder Activision and Infinity Ward decided to ditch the old name for this sequel. Zampella is keen to point out, though, that while it may not be an attempt at absolute realism, the game will remain convincing. “It’s all very story-driven. We consider this an entertainment experience. It’s like an action movie that you play, so everything’s built around that,” he tells us. “We’ve never gone for realistic — more for authentic. So if you see a soldier, his gear’s going to be authentic, he’s going to look legit, his tactics are going to be real, but obviously we go over-the-top on some things where it has to be fun. We’re not building a sim; we’re building a game.” And it looks like it’ll be a hell of a ride.