In my brief hands-on time with Modern Warfare 2 (a.k.a. Call of Duty 6), I was a little surprised to discover that multiplayer shooters now have tanking!

If you're an MMO player, you know tanking. You're the fighter who can take a lot of damage without dishing much out. So the monsters whale away on you while your compatriots stand back and do the actual damage. In a shooter - particularly a quasi-realistic one - you can't have a guy stand there and get bullets pumped into him. But then along comes Call of Duty 6 (a.k.a. Modern Warfare 2).

After the jump, read about what the riot shield does to multiplayer matches.

Activision let a bunch of us press folks bang briefly on the multiplayer last night. We all got to play a few rounds. But since they reset the accounts with every new set of players, none of us got to play with the advanced unlockables. And what a boatload of those you'll get! If you liked the unlocks in Calls of Duty 4 and 5, you're going to have a field day here. You're getting custom kill streaks rewards, scads of configurable weapons, brand new equipment, and more perks than you can shake a stick at.

But right off the bat you have access to the riot shield for your equipment slot. When you equip this thing, you can't shoot because it's a big heavy plate that takes both hands. However, as near as I can tell, nothing can shoot through it. Maybe a .50-calibre round from a Barrett can pierce it. If I was a game developer, that's how I'd do it. Also, remember to crouch when you've got the riot shield up. You don't want your legs shot out from under you.

In our games last night, there was a clear progression as folks got used to the riot shield. The first reaction was to shoot wildly at it. Surely it would take enough damage that it would get blown away, like your armor in Quake! When that didn't work, the inclination was to get in close or work around it (it was at this stage that many players got a face full of riot shield). Then there were some wonderfully goofy encounters in which a couple of guys with riot shields faced off against each other. "So, uh, what do we do now? Wait until our friends show up? Switch to our weapons? Beat the shields into each other? Sit and look at each other through our visors?"

After a couple of rounds, riot shields turned into grenade bait. Of course, the riot shielded player could try to throw a grenade back, but that was just fine. Picking up a grenade and lobbing it back meant lowering the riot shield and being vulnerable to gunfire. So - a-ha! - the counter to riot shields is grenades.

One of the later unlocks is a blast shield that protects you from explosives. I expect that will further complicate this wonderfully complicated picture.

I had a great time playing Call of Duty 6 and I'm really psyched for it to come out. However, I've already been enjoying this sort of tactical interplay in Section 8. That back and forth between different equipment and weapons and loadouts. Section 8 is great at that. The difference is that Call of Duty 6 seems to play it even more broadly. A supposedly realistic shooter out-wackying a sci-fi shooter! What have we come to?

Another difference is that Call of Duty 6 is going to sell like hotcakes. And since so much of the multiplayer content has to be unlocked by ranking up, it's got the powerful pull of personal advancement, of new toys, of rewards. Not to mention the powerful pull of the Call of Duty branding, and Infinity Ward's slick talent for accessible, deep, satisfying multiplayer action. For the single player, I've already got a big red circle around November 10th on my calendar. Just for the heck of it I'm going to draw another one around it for the multiplayer.