Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught Co-Op Hands-On

It's fair to say that EA's Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been a resounding success, selling 5 million copies in two months across all formats. The next big milestone for developer Dice will be the first-ever co-op mode for the Battlefield franchise, which is called Onslaught. The co-op mode will launch as downloadable content for the game "soon" on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and we got to play it in London recently.

Here are the basics: Onslaught is a completely new gameplay mode that fuses elements of the single-player and multiplayer game. You can play it in single-player or co-op online, using the characters that you've built up in the multiplayer mode. There are four maps in total--Valparaiso, Atacama Desert, Isla Inocentes, and Nelson Bay--some of which will offer "sandstorms and night combat" according to producer Bjorn Johnsson.

The idea behind Onslaught is to capture a series of locations as quickly as possible, with overall times sorting the best of the best on the game's leaderboards. If team members die, they can respawn either on another team member or back at the team's original base if they want to use a vehicle. There's really only one way that you can fail, and that's if all team members get taken out at once, so it's your job as a team to keep at least one person alive at all times.

We got to play a game of Onslaught on the Valparaiso map and chose to spawn as a medic in the hot South American jungle. All of your gear from multiplayer will be available in Onslaught, so if you've spent hours unlocking and fine-tuning your favourite class in competitive multiplayer, it will be just as powerful here. Onslaught was great fun--enemies would surround and flank us as we captured points. We naturally fell into the habit of dropping health packs and reviving downed teammates as the medic.

Onslaught will also include eight new achievements and trophies, as well as four different difficulty levels, including casual and hardcore. The add-on is "coming soon" according to Johnsson, although he was elusive on the exact date, as well as the price. Watch out for more on Onslaught as soon as we get it.