As the online action began, my sixteen-person squad was filled with various editors, Ubisoft folks, and the odd Red Storm employee. We kicked off the tour with the co-op campaign, but I want to mention another mode first: Helicopter Hunt. We played helicopter hunt on a daylight map with plenty of hard cover, but the idea of taking the new "time of day" option and setting sixteen Ghosts against wave after wave of helicopters just as night falls is awesome. With a recommendation to take automatic weapons and ignore shoulder rockets, we set out to bring down thirty helicopters in ten minutes. As we frantically ducked for cover, waiting for the helis to briefly expose their weak points, we almost managed to stay in control. Almost, except that at the five minute mark Apaches started appearing, spraying us with rockets.
Those twenty-nine remaining enemies aren't long for the world.
We did even worse trying to complete a co-op Stealth Recon mission. If you're spotted in these, you have 30 paltry seconds to take out the enemy's entire "platoon" before they sound the alarm and you fail the mission. Beyond some obvious issues with new players trying to find the silencer on/off button (you still have to pick a silenced or regular weapon variant when you spawn), our group of elite helicopter killers simply could not get through the mission without that jerk of an alarm going off. This is actually one mode where having all sixteen possible players might be a liability You might want to go through with just a few choice mates whom you can count on to tag headshots and avoid tossing grenades, what with discretion being the better part of valor and all that.
