Gamescom hands-on: 'Brink'

Despite being at a games convention for the best part of a week, our hands-on time was surprisingly limited. The longest play session was with Splash Damage's Brink, a first-person class-based shooter with a heavy online focus. While it's a title that sounds particularly unoriginal on the surface, it was one that really benefited from having proper hands-on time to highlight how well designed it was, and proved to be one of the biggest surprises of the show.

To say that the game is a cross between Call Of Duty and Team Fortress 2 is a lazy but quite fitting comparison. Control-wise, it was near identical to Activision's best-seller, having the same feeling of momentum, iron-sight mechanics and button layout, making the jump into the game a very straightforward process. There is a free-running component that allows you to traverse over objects much like Mirror's Edge, but it was something that we never really tapped into during our session. The Team Fortress link comes through the class-based and objective play, letting you swap between different specialities to get various tasks done.

The demo we played was set at a dockyard, occupied by AI terrorist bots guarding a chemical weapon inside a maze of shipping containers, cranes and boxes. Each class had a role to play in getting a drone from the pier to the bomb, as the Engineer was able to repair the drone when damaged and Operatives able to hack a crane to move it over a destroyed bridge. Though there was a core path for the drone to travel down, side-routes across walkways and through corridors provided plenty of flanking opportunities and ways to surprise the enemy. Once the drone reached its destination, the bomb had to be carried manually to a helicopter, ending the mission.

While the mission itself had multiple stages, the objectives were effectively labelled to show what class was needed where, and outside of these tasks, each of the four classes had their own unique abilities to help other players. The Soldier's prowess with explosives was improved and could provide ammo to teammates, Engineers could buffer weapon damage and construct turrets, and the Operative could play dead or disguise themselves as the enemy. The Medic was the safest bet for newcomers, allowing health to be boosted at the start of the round and to assist in reviving teammates. Not only could you change class from a station during the mission, but each one had the same weapon selection and shooting mechanics, making play balanced and invite experimentation.

Your character will remain persistent across both the single-player and online modes in terms of abilities and appearance, and the game rewards experience points for literally everything, from landing a few shots into the enemy to using an ability as soon as you respawn. Personal experience has shown team-based shooters to be mixed in the way that they handle rewards and display objectives to the player, but Brink was a remarkably hassle-free journey from start to finish, and was also incredibly fun to play throughout. This is definitely one to watch.

Brink will be available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC early next year.

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