Game Preview: 5 Things You're Gonna Love About "Brink"

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Saying that Brink has persistent characters with deep customization options doesn’t sound all that impressive...until you see it in action. With permanent tattoos, face paint, and plenty of gear to choose from, you can put together some truly impressive looking characters—you’re only minutes away from making the skinny hippie murder hobo of your dreams, complete with dreadlocks, green war paint, and a riot helmet. Weapons get the same treatment. Brink has an impressive array of unlockable components (Custom muzzle brakes? Sweet!) that are available for purchase with earned XP, so your tricked-out assault rifle will look as badass as you do.

Parkour and free-running have become staples of high-intensity third-person action games, but it's never worked that well in first person shooters (Mirror’s Edge was as likely to inspire nausea as an adrenaline rush). That’s set to change with Brink’s SMART system (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain), a fancy bit of game design that takes a look at a player’s surroundings, guesses what they are trying to do, and helps them accomplish it in the coolest looking way possible, with as little controller manipulation as possible. You’ll be flipping around levels like Jason Statham in The Transporter at the push of a button.

Most games put you in the role of the Chosen One—the only person who can save the city/country/world/universe. And not to sound lazy or anything, but that’s an awful lot of pressure to be under. In Brink, you’re just a dude. You show up occasionally in cut scenes (almost always stuck with a shit job like "driving the truck" or "carrying around a heavy crate"), but only in the background as the other characters do all the talking. They worry about saving the city, all you have to do is show up and shoot stuff. It’s exactly the kind of vacation we can get behind.

Brink hits just the right spot on the scale between lifelike and stylized: detailed enough to be visually engrossing but cartoony enough to not get bogged down in gritty gray reality. Because of its small art team, the look of the game is unusually cohesive and gleefully idiosyncratic (there are plenty of visual in-jokes and references to other games to be found by eagle-eyed players). It's also uniquely English; plenty of the characters would look at home among the crusty punks of Camden Town or in the stands at a Wolverhampton game. Or a Gorillaz album cover.

If you are into objective- and class-based gameplay, there's plenty to love about Brink, which takes some important cues from the best titles in the subgenre: Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The game boasts four classes (Soldier, Medic, Engineer, and Operative) that encourage teamwork through the support role each class offers (ammo replenishment, healing/revives, etc.), as well as a variety of dynamic objectives that set the pace of the action. From what we've played so far, the foundation is there for a great new shooter, and we’re psyched to see what the final build looks like.