Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

To win the round, you have to either be the only person who escapes or, more likely, a traitor, killing your colleagues and taking their money. Once someone becomes a traitor, you're truly on your own. Not only have to deal with each killed player respawning as a cop, but you also have to avoid being killed by other alliance members, keen to get your ill-gotten gains and get a kill bonus into the bargain.

To make matters even tougher for the traitor, the person you killed gets an even bigger bonus if they kill you as a cop, plus you won't respawn if you die. Reward: meet risk.

In the all-new Undercover Cop mode, this element of betrayal takes an even more chilling twist. The Fragile Alliance premise remains exactly the same, but with one crucial difference - one of the team works for the police, and has to stop the heist and prevent any crook from getting to the escape vehicle.

With the cop chosen at random, none of the other players will know who's gone undercover - meaning that matches can play out in an agonisingly tense and paranoid fashion.

The key is to try and suss out any telltale signs, like the fact that they're 'missing' their targets, and that the actual uniformed police won't shoot the undercover cop either. The trick to being a convincing cop will be to try and make it look like you're doing the same thing as everyone else for as long as possible, before taking out stragglers unseen by the pack.

In Cops and Robbers mode, meanwhile, the action takes a classic team mode flavour, with between four and six cops and robbers on each side.

The name of the game here isn't so much the killing but the money. The cops have to stop the money being stolen, while the robbers have to make off with as much of it as possible within the four to six minute time limit over a serious of rounds. Simple.

With infinite respawns and no ability to harm your fellow team-mates, this is a rare opportunity to work together, but remains great fun despite the inability to betray your friends.

Usefully, IO has also included an offline training 'Arcade' mode to school players in the ways of Kane & Lynch 2 multiplayer outside of the more unforgiving realm of online.

IO's multiplayer game director Kim Krogh explains: "Arcade mode is basically a single-player version of Fragile Alliance. It started out as a tutorial, but I wanted to do something different, so I quickly turned it into Arcade mode.

"It's you, simply playing together with seven NPCs, you get three lives, and you continue as long as you escape. Every time you don't escape, or don't make it, you lose one life, and you just continue as long as you have one life left. For every round, the difficulty ramps up, and one way it gets harder is that the other seven players will eventually turn against you if you haven't got enough cash.

"If you don't work for the alliance and don't do your share of the killing, if you don't pick up the money, they won't share with you, so they'll turn against you, and in that way we slowly introduce you to the game mode and what the idea is and how the other players play: they will turn against me if I don't do my part of the job, but they want me in the game if I'm really, really good at it," he adds.

With both online and offline leaderboards promised, players can also go for bragging rights, with scores automatically sent to all your friends playing the game.