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2011's Brink was supposed to be Splash Damage's magnum opus. Stepping away from their lauded Enemy Territory series, Brink was a radical new title bursting with ideas. SMART movement! Context-sensitive objectives! Dynamic maps! Multiplayer narrative! It was a tantalising prospect. Yet for all its ambition, Brink proved a misfire, simply because it wasn't much fun to play. It was too slow, too lightweight, and its map design seemed to funnel players into irresolvable battles of attrition that rendered many of its ideas impotent.So its unsurprising that, from what we saw in the recently run closed beta, Dirty Bomb is Brink's polar opposite. Well, perhaps that's overstating it. It's not a dizzyingly complex grand strategy or an existentialist pixel-platformer. It's another team-based shooter, and there's only so much possible variation within a genre. Yet whereas Brink's emphasis was innovation, Dirty Bomb sticks to what it knows. Instead it's all about providing a multiplayer FPS that feels as good as is humanly possible. Having spent a few whirlwind evenings in its company, I'm pleased to say that things look promising.
Dirty Bomb pits two teams of five players against each other in a series of objective based maps, all of which are set in a near-future London that has been evacuated after an unspecified disaster (Boris Johnson, renegade bankers, unmitigated hubris, take your pick). Now Britain's capital plays home to several private military companies all fighting one another as they plunder the abandoned city. Presumably in the expansion pack, Glasgow explodes from a collective overload of schadenfreude.
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