Brink Preview
Splash Damage and Bethesda take first-person shooters to the Brink.
UK, August 26, 2009 - Brink is many things; a game that meshes single-player and multiplayer into one seamless whole, a game that brings hardcore PC ethics to the console audience and a game that's overflowing with style. It's all these things and much, much more - but one thing that sticks after our recent extended look at it is this: Brink is one seriously loud game.
Maybe it's the way the crack and ping of gunfire bounces around the corrugated iron shelter where our demo takes place, or maybe it's the awesome amp setup that makes each gunfight feel like someone's playing the spoons on our eardrums. Either way, when we meet with the game's senior designer Ed Stern an hour later, there's still a ringing in our ears.
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/101/1017951/brink-20090825053345949.jpg)
Brink's characters are cartoonish and photorealistic all at once - their eyes in particular are uncannily human.
"Our audio director is Chris Sweetman, who was audio director on Black and Burnout Paradise," Stern tells us by way of explanation. "He's a maniac – and I say that with love – but he's an absolute maniac. Already the audio's better on this than it's been on our last two games."
He's not the only high-profile hire behind the game; the resumés of Brink's staff read like a list of the great and good of the past few years. "Our lead level designer is Neil Alphonso from Killzone 2 – and also we've got pretty hardcore level design department including Dave Johnson who did Dust [a revered Counter Strike map], which you may have played at some point – our art director Olivier Leonardi worked on the first Prince of Persia, lead character artist Tim Applebly did Shepherd for Mass Effect and our lead coder, Dean Calver, did Heavenly Sword…"
This is Splash Damage's first foray onto consoles following the critical darlings that were the Enemy Territory games (the somewhat less successful console version of Quake Wars was handled by a different team), and it's an undertaking they're not taking lightly. "We made a point of going out to hire the very best people," says Stern. "We've had to grow – we've come from this hardcore PC background and we didn't have the expertise to make this game, we had to go out and get it and persuade them to trust us: it's going to be good."
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/101/1017951/brink-20090825053345527.jpg)
The story centres around the Ark, a floating city at sea.
Brink has clear links to Splash Damage's earlier games – at its very core there lies the strong-beating heart of an objective-based multiplayer game, with it's skirmishes played out on large maps and with a strong taste for character progression and the doling out of experience points. All of which are solid, if unremarkable, foundations for a contemporary first-person shooter. What makes Brink remarkable, however, is the game's multitude of trimmings.
First up is an approach to movement that, while brazenly borrowing from DICE's Mirror's Edge, revitalises first-person shooting. Centred around the SMART button (that's Smart Movement Across Random Terrain, acronym lovers) it offers an athleticism that's unprecedented in such a game. One example best highlights its function; when faced with a doorway latticed with infrared security beams, the player has three options. The first one's simple enough - run head-on, trigger the alarm and prepare to fight.
The other two are both facilitated by the SMART button - look up as you approach the obstacle and it prompts a vault, look down and it sends the player into a slide underneath the beams. Both moves are conveyed with convincingly weighty full body animations, and the feature's functions stretch well beyond the basic example we're first given - later on, for instance, we see the player leap up to overhanging platforms and across small chasms. It's a feature that makes for motion that's as kinetic as its gunplay, and it more than lives up to its name.
Another part of Brink's make-up that helps differentiate it is its assured art direction, treading a fine line between photorealism and the cartoon excess of Team Fortress 2. Powered by a heavily retooled iteration of id Tech 4, it's best displayed in the Container City level that makes up the latter part of our demo. Here, some of gaming's hardest worn clichés are seemingly subverted by turning the first-person staple of crates and iron into a vibrant map where rusted reds sit beautifully alongside azure blues.
"We're pretty pleased with that," says Stern. "There's a reason why there're lots of games that contain warehouses full of crates, because – in terms of geometry - it's a relatively efficient way of doing it. Don't get me wrong – there are some brilliant levels that involve crates in warehouses – but we specifically wanted to do stuff people hadn't seen before, so it's a different setting, it's a different art style. The whole feel of it, hopefully, is a bit different."
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/101/1017951/brink-20090825053344918.jpg)
An abandoned airport houses one of Brink's maps.
Different, too, is the look of Brink's protagonists, and although their roots are in the muscled iconography of what's an achingly machismo genre, they've been painted with a Pixar-like brush resulting in an abundance of character. They're open to customisation that offers generous depth, and each move of a slider in the creation menu will have an effect on the battlefield – create a stocky character and, as you'd expect, they'll be slow to move but more able to take hits, while a wiry frame ensures speed at the cost of endurance.
Characters have all classes available to them at any one time, and while the list is limited to four types – Operative, Medic, Soldier and Engineer – they're each almost infinitely customisable using upgrades earned through harvesting experience points throughout the course of play. While this might sound typical for any online first-person shooter, the way it plays out on the battlefield is anything but.
Maps are foreshadowed by small cut-scenes, establishing a narrative that involves two factions – the authoritarian Security and the libertarian Resistance. The demo we see on Container City takes this further, with the cut-scene bleeding into the first few minutes play as an unseen Resistance sniper takes down one of the player's Security group and attempts to pick off the rest.
Working through the tangle of iron – with a little help from the SMART button – the player soon comes across a hard-fought battle between the two factions, and the din of gunfire ricocheting across the containers is deafening. Sliding into cover, it's straight into the action, and what follows is a pitched battle that sees each team attempting to fulfil a number of objectives while fighting off the opposing side.
![[IMG]](http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/101/1017951/brink-20090825053346324.jpg)
Seeing SMART in action in the heat of a battle is dazzling.
Watching the demo with a fixed grin, we're never quite sure if what we're watching is single-player or multiplayer, but what we do know is that it looks like an absolute riot. The distinction between the two is so well blurred that it's only later that we realise that what we were watching was being played by several real-life players – and when the game ships, every position can be taken via drop-in/drop-out online play.
"The single-player/multiplayer thing, it's been a weird series of mindsets," explains Stern, "and the stereotypical thing is you're good at the single-player game, you're really enjoying it, you go online and it's such a different experience, you're bad at it and you fail to enjoy it. We're passionate about multiplayer objective gameplay, it's fantastic, but they can also be the most annoying thing when you're trying to play a game – so we're trying to guarantee all the stuff that's great about it and remove all the irking stuff, and make it completely seamless and consistent."
From our eye-watering and ear-popping first look, it seems that Brink is fully capable of fulfilling Splash Damage's mission in blurring the lines between single and multiplayer, and doing so in a way that's fast-paced, gutsy and full of thrills. Brink is more than just noise – it's also shaping up to be one of the definitive shooter experiences of next year.
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