One of the reasons Dead End Thrills exists is because, sometimes, it’s nice to enjoy a game without the frontal assault of bullets, wisdoms and PR psychobabble that comes along with them. And, as a writer for magazines, it’s nice to enjoy a game without worrying whether it’s average, above-average, not-quite-awesome, ballbags, or whatever else you can glean from a one-digit score. Oh, that score, which travels so far beyond all that cumbersome review text. I had to slap one on a review of Brink once, and I can’t say I enjoyed it much. I don’t like feeding the unthinking machine that is Metacritic, and I’d rather not risk the livelihoods of people with passion. I must be getting old.

Brink is a tough game to call, as quixotic as you’d expect from FPS crusaders Splash Damage. It’s a game that gives you more than enough to be interested but not quite enough to be hooked. It’s gorgeous, dashing, loud and fancy-free. And it’s broken, being fixed. Now try summing that up in a number.

Mercifully, this is not the place for an aching recap of Brink’s structure or how its story, somewhat understandably, struggles to hang together. Instead I get to talk about how its world, a beseiged utopian eco-city called the Ark, hangs together magnificently. Better, for sure, than almost any FPS since Half-Life 2. Brink is a proud, sometimes seemingly awestruck tribute to modern ‘green’ architecture, with its flowing, non-rectilinear shapes and exotic surfaces. It has no shortage of inspirations, and it’s no coincidence that both it and Mirror’s Edge make prominent front-end use of relief models.

Unlike the anonymous world of DICE’s game, though, the Ark has something to say. It is that very real kind of endeavour that makes you wonder just what we’re trying to save: the Earth or the lifestyles of its rich and famous. The oligarchs in the majestic Founders Tower have doubtless convinced themselves it’s the former, while the invading survivors of a Waterworld-style apocalypse might argue. The cliché would be that the truth lies somewhere in between, but there’s no such comfort here. The truth is too malleable for that, and deciding it is what many in the game seem to be fighting for.

Anyway, back to the architecture. No one inspiration takes priority in Brink, though with such assertive idols as Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster, neither are they hard to spot. Foster + Partners’ Masdar City maybe has the edge. Its focus on sustainable, zero-everthing ecology; the neighbouring Abu Dhabi International Airport; the banning of all but mass public transport; the intense clash of science, research and commercial interests; the vast nothing of remote isolation: all that’s missing are the needle-like Founders Tower, the giant Container City favela, and of course the multiracial cast of navel-gazers and fire-starters who’ve brought the Ark to ruin.

Irresistible as it is to smash the living fuck out of a designer utopia, there is nothing truly chaotic about the Ark. Whether it’s the stencilled graffiti or the supposedly ad-hoc layout of Container City itself, it’s all so meticulously designed. The latter’s idea of an expressive vertical neighbourhood owes as much to New York City as it does Rio de Janeiro – which is where we say hi to Axis Mundi’s proposed rebuild of The Museum of Modern Art, and pay particular attention to the familiar interlocking ‘SmartBlocks’ and inside-out decor. “In a city where more than 300 languages are spoken,” the company declares, “architecture can celebrate that diversity.” In speaking a few such languages themselves, the Ark’s walls say as much about large-scale game development as they do this ‘urbanism of difference’.

Moreover, this being a modern multiplayer game where players expect a few narrative paper trails, they tell us a fair bit about the Ark’s science-fiction. It’s written on them in every showy whiteboard, pretentious slogan, and eco-smug lecture to tourists and cameras. Perhaps more impressively, it’s even mapped onto them. Where the landlocked Masdar has its Palmwood (developed from coconut palms), the Ark has fictitious ‘Arcoral’, and boasts gorgeous in-game wall textures to prove it.

For a game based an old version of id Software’s id Tech engine, Brink is every bit as surprising as the now almost necromantic Call Of Duty. Prey’s another one, and there’ll be a collection along for that grisly spectacle pretty soon. I don’t have all day, though, so I’m referring you to programmer Charles Hollemeersh for the lowdown on Brink’s id Tech 4 implementation, which covers its virtual texturing technology (successor to the megatexture), character customisation module, and lighting in depth.

Capturing this game wasn’t easy. Not only is it limited to FXAA-based antialiasing thanks to its OpenGL renderer, but it’s also suffered a shambolic series of updates to its client and server options. The ability to run maps in development mode came and went and then came back due to security concerns; the ability to alter the game’s timescale didn’t come back at all; and the massively useful demo recorder, which would have made character and action shots a cinch, didn’t even arrive in the first place. After the complete feature-set of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, this was all a bit of a let-down. Another niggle is that FOV is locked to a range of 70-110, which puts it about ten higher than you need to avoid ‘fish-eye’ bending. Eco-friendly, I’m guessing, doesn’t always mean user-friendly – but then I guess I’m not the user they had in mind.

Some other things. One of the flashier debug features of id Tech is a super-nifty screenshot function which doesn’t just up-render to massive resolutions but can also do custom multisampling. It’s only just started working in Brink and even then has caveats. The only way I could get it to behave was by disabling the offscreen buffer the game uses to ensure post-processed screenshots, and I went one further (than perhaps was necessary) by disabling the post-proc altogether. I don’t like vignetting (simulated light falloff, aka darkened corners), and that was the only way I found to kill it. This is the future, not some shrinking memory; why developers have such hard-ons for some of these lens defects, I don’t know. The downside was a loss of brightness and colour so severe that I’ve had to restore it in Photoshop. I don’t like doing that much, either.