Brink

Team shooters have pretty much settled into nice, comfortable, easy-chair gameplay: you spawn, you shoot one of a few different guns, you teabag your victims while insulting their sexual orientation over voice, you die, and then you re-spawn only to do it all over again. It’s not even the game developers' fault anymore – shooters now introduce themselves as 'like Halo but' and are judged by how closely they follow the mould. So what could Brink possibly bring to the table?

Well, not a hell of a lot.

Brink’s developers talk a good game, what with all the character customisation, specialised classes, open weapon choices, neat movement options and whatnot. The UI looks slick and stylized, and there’s even a Snow Crash-inspired story to boot. But let’s not kid ourselves – there isn’t a hell of a lot of new ground broken here. Class based shooters all take their cues from the still-awesome Team Fortress 2, and while this game certainly learned the right lessons, for all the hoopla, Brink is just fluff.

It’s fun fluff, no mistake – the classes all have neat tricks to deploy, each to suit your aggressive or supportive play styles – but there’s a lot that’s just unfinished, unpolished or outright broken. There’s no one idea that holds the gameplay together, no unique tactics that set it apart (the Engineer class is a straight rip from TF2, right down to the turrets), and ultimately nothing memorable.

Some games don’t have to justify their existence, they can just be fun for what they are. Sadly, Brink suffers from a lot of great competition, and without a good reason to put them down, it all goes down like a flavour of the week. [Alex Cole]