The snow sequence, where the player takes on the role of Gary "Roach" Sanderson, is meant to appear early on on the campaign and serves as a first burst of tempo-changing action. You'll first have to climb up that icy cliff with previous series protagonist "Soap" MacTavish showing you the ropes and telling you what to do. You'll be armed with a silenced Bushmaster ACR with a flip-out side-screen that gives you a heartbeat sensor. As you'll be slowly making your way through a blizzard at an airfield, the heartbeat sensor gives you the jump on the bad guys. You can flip the sensor out and back at will by pushing left on the D-pad, but it's attached to the rifle. So if you're using something else, that won't be an option.
After silently eliminating some enemies, Soap takes up a sniper position while you work your way across the airfield to plant some explosives. This is right around the point in the demo when I noticed that the enemies drop customized weapons, sort of like the multiplayer in the previous game. So you'll find rifles with different attachments, like an AK-47 with a grenade launcher attached, or a FAMAS with a red dot sight.
After setting up--but not detonating--some explosives on the airfield, you meet up with Soap, watch him knife a dude, and head inside to download some data from a computer. While you head up to take care of that, Soap gets caught and is left surrounded by enemy troops with his hands on his head. He coolly tells you to go to "plan B," you detonate the explosives placed earlier, and all hell breaks loose. There's a cool slow-motion moment as the explosives light up the airfield and all the troops who were previously training gun barrels on Soap start flipping out and getting very disoriented. This is where you and Soap start mowing them down as you attempt to escape. And this is where the snowmobiles come into play.
Getting attacked by armed soldiers riding on the back of snowmobiles seems like it would be a very unpleasant experience. But not as unpleasant as getting run over by a snowmobile seems. The player died during our demo by taking one fast-moving snowmobile to his center mass. What you're supposed to be doing there is shooting the riders and gunmen off of the snowmobiles. Eventually you do that to two of the machines without banging them up too badly, giving you and Soap time to commandeer a pair of them and make a break for the extraction site. This becomes a pretty slick chase sequence where you have to steer your snowmobile while also dumping rounds out of a pistol to clear your path of enemy snowmobiles. There are tree-filled parts of the chase and some huge jumps that give the entire sequence a very action movie kind of vibe. You'll even ride the snowmobile over ice-covered lakes while a helicopter tries to shoot up enough of the ice to make you fall in. But, provided things go your way, you'll end up at the extraction helicopter. That's where the demo faded back to the title screen.
Infinity Ward isn't really saying a whole lot about the other parts of the game. They did say, however, that the voice work was placeholder. We also know that the action will shift between at least two different playable characters. We also know that the game is running on a new renderer with streaming technology built-in. This should allow for larger levels without sacrificing any up-close detail. Things like fire and explosions look great. Really, the whole thing looks great. It looks better in the ways you'd expect, and the sequence shown comes across as a larger battle with the pacing and feel of an action movie. All in all, it's a game that I would very, very much like to play. But, then, I felt that way coming in to E3. All this demo really shows is that, yes, Infinity Ward knows what it's doing. I'd say "look for it on shelves this November," but then you probably already knew that, didn't you?
Here's a bit we recorded immediately after seeing the MW2 demo: