Brink
Preview
On the brink of a new kind of FPS game?
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on PC
Smart movements
Another welcome gameplay feature is the so-called SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system. Similar to the movement of Mirror's Edge, it allows you to simply pick a direction and move. When you press the SMART button (Shift in PC's case), your character will automatically navigate a course towards the location that you are aiming at. This means that instead of getting blocked by a table or a chair in the middle of the room, your character will instead jump or roll over it. Similarly, this allows you to ascend to an advantageous position without having to remember which key to press in order to activate a jump or a climb action. This should make movement a much more natural process in the game and allow the gamer to concentrate on what's important: killing the enemies and devising clever tactics.
Customization
This is perhaps my personal favourite. FPSs rarely give you any chance to customize your character, but Brink will allow you to pick your race, body type (only muscular machoes so far, though), clothes, and weapons. It will also allow your character to develop his/her skills and abilities along the way, and switch roles when missions require it. By the time you've got some completed missions under your belt, you should be able to identify with your character a lot more than you would with the usual pre-set characters in other games. Naturally, this will also make you and your friends more easily recognizable if you happen to play in the same session. And, what's best: since there's no separate single-player and multiplayer and co-op modes, you can develop the same character in all contexts.
Graphics
Judging from the material out thus far, Brink will have a nice, unique graphics style. The proprietary technology used in Brink is called Virtual Texturing, and the developers claim that this will enable them to render the characters and environments in great detail, as well as give them access to improved lighting and atmospheric effects. The character models are decidedly cartoony in their design, featuring exaggerated body dimensions and interestingly sloping head shapes. However, in close-ups, some characteristics of their faces, such as the eyes, are perhaps the best conceived digital representations of human originals that we've seen thus far.
Standing on the brink
Overall, Brink sounds like an interesting new approach to the shooter genre and will certainly receive more attention before and after its release. A lot depends on Splash Damage's ability to flesh out the story and the missions in a way that will make the game world engaging for the single-player. This requires a lot of variety for the missions and a relatively clear story to play out, instead of random missions that never affect the overall story. Judging from all that we've seen this far, it seems that there's something to root for.
