Amidst the PS3 hype there's a solid showing of PlayStation 2 games, one of the best being SOCOM U.S. Navy Seals Combined Assault. It's a little bit baffling as to why Sony and Zipper Interactive elected to create yet another PS2 iteration instead of making use of the next generation hardware, but the game is still highly enjoyable.

The theme of Combined Assault is team work. Instead of going solo or giving orders to a bunch of NPCs you can actually play through the game's missions cooperatively with up to three other people, and the best part is this all takes place online. Getting solid online co-op to work over an online network isn't exactly an easy process, as the pipes needed to transfer the immense amounts of data between players are far too small to provide for a smooth gameplay experience, but it appears that Sony's definitely onto something, as the game seems to run quite smoothly, so we're very excited about the possibilities.

Combined Assault does feature a single player component, but the focus has been squarely placed in the co-operative missions, all of which feature various objectives such as blowing up a bridge or taking out a series of evil doers. But there is voice chat, so you'll be able to relay info to your friends and vice versa.

The game's controls should feel familiar to anyone that's ever played a SOCOM title. L1 allows you to swap weapons, clicking in L3 changes your rate of fire, Select brings up the map, R2 brings up your inventory, R1 fires, Triangle changes your stance (crouch, stand), Square is jump, Circle is pressed to chat with others, and X covers all of the game's contextual actions. And naturally, you'll move and aim with the analog sticks. It's definitely an easy game to pick up.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy to look at. The game is quite pixilated and it's just not as sharp as we expected. Of course, this is probably a direct result of staring at PS3 games for the past couple of days, an experience that has clearly warped our sense of how good or bad PS2 titles look. So with that being said, Combined Assault looks very much like a standard PS2 SOCOM title, and unless its developers kick up the visuals a couple of notches, it's not going to be all that visually impressive,

Dated graphics aside, we're looking forward to playing the game a bit more in depth so we can further explore its co-operative features. We'll have more info in the very near future.