Sony's surest bet for this year has to be Resistance 2. The game is the follow-up to the system's (far and away) best launch title, and it's coming from Insomniac, which has proven itself to be an extremely reliable card in Sony's deck. The game was on display a couple weeks ago over in London, but we had the chance to check it out stateside today.

As was the case a couple weeks ago, Insomniac is only showing off multiplayer, and only on one stage. While we would have loved to have gotten a glimpse at the single-player aspect, we're pretty much already sold on the multiplayer thanks to its rather inventive squad system.

As the game supports 60 players, letting everyone run around with no real goal other than to kill each other would quickly devolve the game into chaos. To counter this, Insomniac has instituted squads and a series of goals for each of them. You're automatically placed into a squad at the start of a game, and you'll quickly be given an objective. It might be to defend a certain point, for instance. The cool thing is that your squad will have a rival squad throughout the game, and said rival will always get the opposite goal as you. So, if you're defending a point, it'll be the other squad that's attacking it.

While that's cool, the system works well because of how objectives change mid-game to keep things fresh. So while you might need to attack or defend a point for a bit, you'll eventually be moved somewhere else, perhaps to help a troubled squad. Should your team have a hard time completing a goal or you find yourself being slaughtered by the other team, the game will assign another squad as back-up to your objective. That team will of course bring its rival squad with it, but the skirmish should be evened out a little more.

Even though Insomniac still has a ways to go, all of this worked very well in our time with the game. Though the server was packed, it always felt like the game was very focused and that we knew what we should be doing at all times. The system also worked well in changing up the number of people we were fighting, as some battles would only put us against a half-dozen other troops, while another objective that had us providing back-up would have us fighting amongst two dozen folks in a tight spot.

Another cool aspect to Resistance 2 that we were able to check out is its new rewards system. For every bullet that you land, or for every objective that your team completes, you're awarded some battle points. Once you have enough of these, you'll be rewarded with a small boost to your stats. This might be more health, quicker movement or perhaps even accuracy. It's a small boost, but it's enough to make a difference and keep you on a roll. While this sounds like it'll reward the best players and punish the worst, these bonuses only last until you die, and then you have to start over. Not only that, but once you've gotten an upgrade, a giant multiplier will appear above your head to let your opponents know that you're worth more points as a kill now. So while you may have slightly more health, everyone will be gunning for you.

Besides slight stat boosts, one cool thing that you'll earn is some sort of Berserker bonus (the name on that is pending). Right now your only available bonus is a shield that'll wrap around you as a half-bubble and make you pretty much invulnerable from enemy fire for a good 30 seconds or so. It's similar to the energy shield in Halo 3, except that this shield sticks with you and follows you wherever you go. Insomniac promises that this won't be the only bonus in the game, but it was all that we had to play within the demo build.

What we've played of the game was really fun, and it appears that Insomniac has done a great job of keeping everything focused while maintaining 60 players at once. It sounds like E3 may be our first chance to see the single-player portion of the game, and given how good the online is at this point, we can't wait.