Nonetheless, Brink is an exceptional team shooter, smart, supremely well balanced and with a unique, exciting art style. Splash Damage struggles to ease the player into its workings – evidence, perhaps, of the studio's background creating free mods for hardcore Quake players, who never needed much hand-holding.
But the clean menus and HUD have a slickness and simplicity of interaction that elevate the squad-shooter genre to a new level of style and polish. Likewise, in moment-to-moment play, this is often a more engaging, tighter experience than Valve's Team Fortress 2. For those who can leap that first hurdle, Brink should run and run.