Today we got the first footage from Splinter Cell: Conviction's six-hour long co-op. It shows off some of the cool moves players can pull of and shed some light on the backstory.

Splinter Cell: Conviction isn't just getting a 6-hour co-op, it's also getting challenge modes. Referred to as Third Echelon Missions, these challenges will be spread across a variety of six maps, based upon four levels seen within the co-op campaign and two exclusive to the challenges. So far, four modes have been confirmed: Hunter, which requires the player to clear the map of enemies; Infiltration, requiring the player to clear the map without being detected; Last Stand, tasking the player with protecting an EMP warhead from waves of enemies; and last, Face Off, which has two players going head-to-head with AI enemies spread throughout the map.

We'll keep you updated as we get more details on these new modes.

In the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine UK, it was confirmed that Splinter Cell: Conviction will include a co-op campaign that will act as a prologue to the game's primary campaign. The co-op portion is roughly six hours in length, adding a significant amount of gameplay to the game. The co-op emphasizes cooperation and communication while showing the development of the mode's two characters.

Players are put in the shoes of Daniel Sloane-Suarez, aka Archer, and Mikhail Loskov, aka Kestrel. The game's co-op designer, Patrick Redding, described how not everything between the two characters is fine and dandy. In fact, they don't really get along at first. "They don’t really like each other or trust each other," Redding said. "But you’ll hear in their dialogue, moving through the missions, that their trust is slowly building."

Redding also described a portion of the co-op's storyline. It takes places two months before the events in the Conviction singleplayer campaign. Our two protagonists start out in a St. Petersberg mob den, trying to find out who, within the Russian Intelligence, stole EMP devices and sold them to the mafia. "You are going into this really seedy, gritty underbelly where we can put the whole graphical horsepower of our engine and the Xbox 360 to work giving you the lurid texture of this place, commented Redding. "If Sam Fisher is our panther, then these two guys are like a couple of Velociraptors taking down the herd."