PAX’09: BRINK

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On the Friday of PAX, I got the opportunity to see Bethesda’s new, European made IP, BRINK. The demo was hands off, and played for us live by Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgewood.

The demo started out covering the character customization and and creation screen. The unique thing about the way it’s done in BRINK is that your appearance directly affects the gameplay, much like the weight of your armour in Rainbow 6 affected your speed, the size and build of your character affects your ability to do acrobatic movements in BRINK.
The basic premise of the game is this; a future floating see city, it lost contact with the rest of the planet. Chaos broke out, and the city split into two factions, the militarized, well staffed and equipped security, versus the guerrilla force of the surviving civilians. Either side is readily available for play at any time. It plays out as a first person shooter, but with a strange and exciting mix of acrobatic maneuvers reminiscent of Mirror’s Edge.

The acrobatics work off of a system called the ‘SMART, or Smooth Motion AcRoss Terrain system, which the player can choose to initiate at any time with one quick button press which then in turn changes your entire movement in the game world. For instance, with the SMART system off, if you sprint at a railing, you’ll stop when you hit the railing, with SMART on, you would instead vault over the railing with out the need of a secondary button press, a sort of meld between Mirror’s Edge’s first person movement and Assassin Creed’s single button free running system.
The addition of the SMART acrobatics helps keep gameplay smooth, fluent and more realistic than your average shooter. Now, instead of the average soldier bunny hopping across the map to avoid fire, he now has the option of sliding, wall running or rolling into cover or even under closing doors just to have the opportunity to kick an enemy in the nuts and then slide back.
The missions progresses as a Battlefield esque team based class shooter, with dynamic mini-mission optionally popping up in your HUD, accepting and completing these optional mini missions grants varied amounts of XP. Many of these optionally missions are there to help guide you towards a faster and easier completion of the original main objective. For instance, if a engineer class would be opportune latter on in the mission, a mini mission would pop up, rewarding you with 50XP to change over to the engineer class. The missions stretch from something minor like that, to something like interrogating an enemy, or to blow up an obstruction and open up a back entrance for 400XP.

Although the game is in pre-alpha, it already looks amazingly promising, and I cant wait until its at a point where the public will get to see some more of it!