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At most press events I attend, the demo stations sport top-of-the-line gaming headphones — you know, the kind that feel like butter on your ears — to drown out the din of the venue and facilitate communication during multiplayer games. Yet at a hands-on session for Brink the other week, headphones were nowhere to be found — a conspicuous absence for a team-based multiplayer shooter.
Turns out that was intentional: Voice chat is actually turned off by default in Brink. Developer Splash Damage knows that one foul-mouthed, racist idiot (and there are plenty of them on Xbox Live and PSN) can ruin the online experience for everyone, so they've decided to craft a game where you can cooperate with others to pull off complicated objectives — all without uttering a single word.
The end product works surprisingly well. My fellow writers and I — none of whom I'd met before — completed two challenges as a cohort of silent killers with time and lives to spare.
Brink's game world consists of the Ark, a massive utopian city floating on the waters of a postapocalyptic, flooded Earth. Two factions, the Security and the Resistance, fight for control of the Ark. Both sides feature four classes: operative, engineer, medic, and soldier; you can swap classes at any time by accessing a terminal at one of your command posts.
Smartly, the console tells you how many teammates are suited up as each class, so it's easy to maintain a balanced crew suited to any objective. We played as the Security, and one objective tasked us with escorting an injured comrade. After accessing the console, I saw that our team was stocked with medics, so I picked the engineer in order to lay down remote turrets at choke points and protect our escort as the medics fed him health packs.
Your decisions are also aided by the fact that objectives are plainly outlined in your HUD. Another objective had us swiping an important medical vial and bringing it back to an evac point. So I suited up as a soldier (for a good balance of speed and health), snuck my way in to where the vial was located, then hoofed it to the waiting helicopter while my colleagues laid down suppressive fire.
Both challenges required precision teamwork skills, and yet we didn't need to speak one word to get them done. The braying morons who love to lob hate-filled insults on Xbox Live are going to hate Brink because of that…and that's more than enough to get me interested.