Brink

Review from Nat - Monday, 20 June 2011 @ 3:29pm

Brink was a game that from the outset, I knew I wanted to love. It was the first game in two years I pre-ordered, that I pored over previews of and gameplay videos prior to release. After playing the game through and writing an initial review, I decided that I didn’t care for it . However, after the monstrous hype-train I’d strapped myself to the front of for the previous six months, I didn’t feel comfortable posting it straight away – there had to be something I had missed, so I went through and played multiplayer for another two weeks.

It’s now been a month and I’ve played through both sides of the campaign from start to end three separate times – once each on 360, PS3 and PC. I’ve logged a collective playtime of over 50 hours, and whilst I never hit rank 5 with any character, I played as much as I physically could have.

Unfortunately, it didn’t change my original opinion. Brink is not very good.

Brink is best described as a class-based, team-based first person shooter, where your squad of rag-tag terrorists or omnipresent police must accomplish a number of set objectives around the map. Despite its somewhat convoluted genre choice, the core gameplay is actually pretty cool. Each map is tied to a specific string of objectives, with both sides trading responsibilities to capture control points, escort VIPs, run objectives across maps or construct barriers impeding opposition progress. As one team attempts to complete their set and win the map, the opposition endeavours to hamper their progress through the most natural impedance method, a shot to the face.

Story is unimportant to Brink, and is only expressed through miniscule cut-scenes before levels.

I really enjoyed the objective-based nature of Brink. Each class supports the team in a different way: Medics provide health and revival; soldiers provide ammo refills; Operatives sneak behind enemy lines and sabotages defensive structures, whilst engineers provide weapon buffs and defence. The combination of these buffs is integral to team success, making sure that players stick together and help each other out. Further, each class can only accomplish a few different types of objectives each, meaning that all players and all classes must work together to achieve the teams goals – no more sitting and sniping whilst everyone else does all the work.

It’s also worth drawing attention to how the requisite levelling-up system works, whereby doing almost anything in the game remotely related to the continued survival of the team is rewarded with XP. Buffed an ally? XP bonus. Shot an enemy? XP bonus. Stood near an objective whilst someone else took control of it? XP bonus. Even something as simple as having your match open for outsiders to join in automatically earns you a 20% XP buff. It’s a wonderful system that rewards smart gameplay. Shooting enemies actually gets you some of the least experience, whilst buffing your team and accomplishing objectives gives far higher bonuses. Again, this encourages smart, team-based play and is definitely the high point of Brink.

Strategically assisting team-mates is the key to success.

From that point on, however, Brink starts to fall apart. Whilst its underlying concepts are great in theory, they fizzle in execution. Poor communication, long the killer of team-based games, really takes away from the experience. When players do not operate as a team, buffing each other and achieving objectives, the game becomes a frustrating mess of shoddy first-person shooting, poor hit recognition and boring, repetitive gunfights with boring, repetitive weaponry. Once the fun of a great team is removed from Brink (as will happen in about 50% of all matches), Brink becomes a wasteland, devoid of entertainment. By comparison, at least when the same happened in Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the shooting and primary mechanics were still fun. Brink, as a shooter, is not an enjoyable experience.

Brink straddles the barrier between the Call of Duty rapid-fire, quick response shooting and the slower, more methodical Battlefield: Bad Company 2 style of combat in an unsightly way. Headshots are still almost instant kills, but the rest of the body acts as a bullet sponge. It makes the weaponry feel weak and ineffective, and it is incredibly frustrating to shoot at an enemy soldier for five seconds, before getting killed from a headshot from behind whilst he gets away with nothing more than a couple of scrapes.

Prior to its release, brink touted the introduction of the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system like it was the second coming of the Messiah, looking to combine first-person shooting with “parkour elements”. It’s a cool idea, but it really adds nothing to gameplay. Instead of having to press a button to climb over cover or terrain whilst running, it simply does it automatically. I mean, I guess it’s a neat feature, but how is “Climb on things better!” a worthwhile bullet-point on the back of the box? In my experience, the SMART system did nothing to make gameplay any more enjoyable or streamlined – it simply ceased to exist in my eyes.

The shooting feels dull and ineffective, with little characterization between weapons.

The sound and art design in Brink are both quite serviceable. The character customization options are deep and varied, which makes for a great, inimitable experience in every match. The levels are detailed and unique; however, they suffer significantly from texture pop-in on all three platforms. The sound design upon the levels is great and the background music suits the mood of the action well, however, the constant-voice over is nothing short of audio spam. If a five-second period went past without some terrible Jamaican-accented CPU screaming (through my headset mic, no less!) “Going to capture the enemy supply point brotha! Supply point captured Brotha!”, then you knew something had bugged out and the game was about to crash, again. It was infuriating to constantly have your AI team members tell you about what they were about to go do when it was invariably completely unrelated to the primary objective, which leads seamlessly into my biggest problem with Brink.

Had Brink have been advertised as a multiplayer-only shooter with the option to play through the story as a sort of training mode, the problems with the AI may be easier to overlook and their crimes would be somewhat more forgivable. However, as Brink was established to be as much of a single-player experience as it was multiplayer, I have no qualms in pointing out that it has quite possibly the worst AI in a big-budget title that I have had the unfortunate experience of playing in my meagre existence. Teammates consistently concern themselves only with accomplishing secondary and tertiary objectives, despite frequent requests to the contrary. Medics are nowhere to be found. Nobody buffs anyone.
Support characters erect turrets to guard our home base – a location, I might add, that already has two indestructible turrets to guard it. The AI is nothing short of atrocious and leaves the game nigh-on unplayable as a single player experience. They cannot shoot straight, accomplish objectives, provide support or defence. They are nothing short of useless, and it constantly feels like you are battling an enemy team alone. It is not a fun gameplay experience in the slightest, and is something I hope to never have to play again. Playing the game on multiplayer alleviates this somewhat, by replacing the insipid AI with human players, but that simply draws attention to the ordinary and repetitive gameplay.

The wild and varied characters available for creation is awesome fun to mess around with. (click to enlarge)

I have a myriad of problems with Brink, but I think its greatest crime is how it is completely unnecessary. Whilst it does occupy a unique segment of the market, it only does so by cribbing ideas and gameplay systems from so many different sources that it can’t really be considered a member of any existing genre. It’s hard to justify who this game is for, or why you should purchase or even rent it. It’s a competent team based multiplayer shooter, but that’s all it is– just competent. It was an experience I spent more time frustrated with than I did enjoying myself.

For all its entertaining features, Brink simply isn’t fun at it’s core. Creating unique characters was fun, but I’ve already played Spore. The art style was enjoyable, but I’ve already seen it in Fallout 3. The string of objectives idea is cool, but it was just as cool in Bad Company 2’s Rush mode, and the shooting just isn’t enjoyable at all. I imagine if you collect a bunch of friends together and play a massive session on Xbox Live it could be a bunch of fun, but I’m 50 hours in and I haven’t experienced that yet. Plus, if you’re honest, even Uno would be fun with that many people. Brink isn’t so much of a “better off next time”, but a “better off without”. What it brings to the table is mostly regurgitated content from other titles, with the occasional chunk of originality floating within. However, I don’t want to play a game comprised of only a few good chunks, and neither should you. With a heavy heart, I have to assert that Brink is, disappointingly, not worth the price of admission.

Pros

• Cool concept, with both sides involved in the war sympathetic and easy to relate to.
• Awesome level of character customization.
• String of objectives style gameplay is fun variation from the norm.
• Encourages team-based play and online play in smart, effective ways.

Cons

• Horrendous AI - easily some of the worst I've ever had to struggle through.
• All weapons feel weak and ineffective, with little differentiation between different models of the same class.
• Audio spam courtesy of previously mentioned Horrendous AI
• Absolutely no assistance on how to play or controls - find it out your damn self.