Brink

With the challenge level completed, I get to invest all the XP and unlocks I've earned in character, weapon and ability customisation, ground well trodden by existing previews and videos. I end up with a facial tattoo (amusingly, tattoos in-game are genuinely permanent) and a wolfy moustache and matching hairdo. The ability perks are a mixture of obvious (Sprinting Reload, Sprinting Grenade Throw, Grenade Shooting) and cunning (like an on-screen indicator for when you're in someone's sights), but my favourite one listed is the Lazarus Grenade: "experimental pharmaceutical aerosol bomb - you revive all downed team-mates within its healing cloud". Boom.

Finally I get to try a campaign mission. For the opening, lavishly detailed in-game cut-scene our Resistance squad leader is giving a rousing speech to a band of fighters, my custom wolf-man included, about our assault on a nuclear reactor, which we're trying to take control of to use as a bargaining chip in our ongoing dispute with Security about resources.

Initially you might play this mission on your own with a team of bots against another team of bots, which is what I'm doing. As you get better though, the game may prompt you to invite a few human friends onto your team, and then perhaps strangers. It can also populate the opposing team with real enemies. You're all playing the campaign, but you're also engaged in multiplayer.

Sadly we don't get to see this in action, but we are told how it will work from the opposite perspective: Security players will be told that the Resistance is storming the reactor to wipe out power across the island. How well the two individual narratives hold up despite their opposing conditions will no doubt be vital to Brink's success on the single-player side of this increasingly blurred single/multi divide - but with Splash Damage adamant that you won't be able to max out a character on a single playthrough, the implication is that they will be distinctive enough on all fronts.

It's all brilliantly, horribly ambitious. Splash Damage, and particularly moneybags Bethesda, wants Brink to be of an equivalent quality to a Modern Warfare or Team Fortress - accessible yet deep, innovative yet familiar, single-player yet multiplayer. And actually that's a lie: they don't want Brink to live up to a Modern Warfare or Team Fortress, they want it to be better.

The game is full of neat ideas already - even incidental ones, like a signal strength indicator on your portable hacking device so you can initiate a hack and then hide a small distance away from the target at the cost of hacking speed. The bigger ideas are appropriately bold, and there's something happily, proudly videogame about it compared to other similar endeavours. Brink embraces its hardcore origins. Through evolving mechanics, it seeks to diversify the traditional feeling of a first-person shooter for all - not just for those casual consumers.

Yet despite playing it, and despite having etched most of the framework and feel of the game out of access to its bold, lavishly funded development already, there are still more than six months to go and Brink is still unproven. It feels like it will take a larger-scale, multi-person hands-on session over a few hours to start to nail down how well the game really works, and the controlled conditions of a press demo may not be appropriate. In the meantime though, Brink at leasts shows enormous promise to support enormous ambition.