User blog comment:Yanxa/Concerns about ME3 after playing the demo.../@comment-4737548-20120216165803/@comment-1691295-20120217095935

No it doesn't. It's universal cooldown. Some things like Grenades and First Aid don't have a cooldown, but most powers are still tied to the universal cooldown.

The real reason is that the demo saddles every class with an extremely high-weight weapons load out. This negatively affects cooldowns. Normally no class but the soldier would be carrying 4 heavy weapons.

Playing Multiplayer, characters are limited to 2 weapons, and allow weapon customisation, so you can get a much better feel for cooldowns. For example, my Infiltrator has a Viper and a Phalanx equipped, and cooldowns are very very very tolerable.