My Random Thoughts on Brink
Note: This is an old post from May 29, 2011. I’m reposting it here since it represents a good example of the kind of content I want to create from here on out (i.e. more list-based material).
I’ve been wanting to say something about Brink for quite some time, but I wanted to make sure that I gave the game a fair shake before committing anything to writing. From my Steam profile, you can see that I’ve dropped about eight hours on the game, so hopefully that makes my opinion somewhat worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the positives, shall we?
Positives:
1) Tries to be different: In a world crowded with military shooters, it’s refreshing to see a game that completely breaks the mould. Brink doesn’t just tweak the formula - it completely throws the formula in the garbage. Now granted, the idea of a mission-based multiplayer shooter is hardly a novel concept. Those of us who played hours upon hours of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory know all about the wonders of mission-based gameplay, and Team-Fortress 2 definitely rocks that style better than anyone else. That said, Brink is undoubtedly a game that stands out in today’s world. You definitely won’t be confusing this with a game like Call of Duty, Killzone 3, or Bad Company 2.
2) Character customization: I’m the kind of person who goes nuts whenever I’m given the ability to customize my character in a game. My Lion and Gau in Virtua Fighter 4 were decked out with the craziest accessories you could possibly find. They didn’t really resemble the stock characters anymore, but that was the point. They became creations from my own imagination. It works much the same way in Brink. Everybody starts from the same canvas, and there is enough customization to make something that is uniquely yours. There is a problem with the character design that I will discuss a little later, but the idea here is a really cool, I would love to see other games implement a system similar to this one in the future.
3) Looks nice: It isn’t going to take the world by storm in the way that Crysis did, but Brink is definitely a pretty game to look at. The levels could use a little more in the way of unique aesthetics - it seems most of them are either “office” environments with a bluish tone, or “slum” environments with more a brown tone - but the designs are all executed well, and Splash Damage did a good job of creating a game world that you can immerse yourself in and imagine yourself as a part of. When it comes to game design, that is a huge win in my books.
Negatives
1) Imbalance: This is the game’s biggest weak point, and it is absolutely impossible to ignore. Every game has its share of poorly balanced maps, but they’re usually exceptions rather than the norm. In Brink, literally every single map is an exercise in frustration due to a combination of map design and action speeds. In the eight hours I have spent with Brink, I have only seen the offensive team win in a handful of cases, and they were all situations in which the offensive team greatly overpowered the defensive team. When the two teams are evenly matched in terms of player skill and teamwork, it usually boils down to a stalemate in which the defensive team dog-piles the objective while the offensive team feebly attempts to make a small shred of progress in the allotted time. If the developers were to decrease the amount of time required to hack/build/detonate an objective, that might mitigate the problem. Until then, we are left with what ultimately boils down to a glorified game of team deathmatch where the kill counts are concealed and meaningless.
2) Guns don’t feel powerful: This might have to do with the sound effects, or it might be the result of numerous factors, but there’s no getting around the fact that the guns feel like pea shooters. Switching from a game like Black Ops (or even Counter-Strike for that matter) to Brink is a night-and-day difference in this regard.
3) Hard to tell classes apart: Yahtzee did a fantastic job discussing this, and so I’ll just direct you to his review. To be fair, it would be hard to include a rich set of character customizations if you had stock characters that look radically different from one another, but fighting games have accomplished this task quite well (case in point: the aforemetioned Virtua Fighter).
4) Parkour movement is clunky: Again, Yahtzee explained this better than I can, but it’s hard to take advantage of a parkour system when you don’t have an intuitive sense of where your legs are. Perhaps having the game switch to third person when you hit the shift button would help, though purists may not like this option very much.
5) Poor unlock system: Isn’t it funny how Call of Duty 4 was one of the first games to have an unlock system, and to this day it’s still the best in the world? The beauty of Call of Duty 4’s unlock system was that it didn’t make high level players significantly advantaged over low level players. Rather, the unlocks just granted you with a little more variety. Unfortunately, Brink is full of questionable unlocks, such as the engineer’s turrets, which become more and more powerful as you continue to rank up. The gun attachments are handled fairly well - they grant you certain advantages while adding their own handicaps - but the skills should have been looked at a little more carefully.
6) Buggy: The game has already been patched a couple of times, and it seems as though Splash Damage is on the case with this one. However, for a game to be released in this state is inexcusable, and it makes me recall that cynical argument about how modern games are oftentimes glorified betas as opposed to finished products.
Overall, it’s a game that has (had?) tremendous potential, but it just gets dragged down by numerous small problems that coalesce into something that is impossible to ignore. According to the Steam stats, this game already has fewer concurrent players than Empire: Total War (a two-year old game) and Bad Company 2 (a one-year old game). Furthermore, the game only leads Day of Defeat: Source (a positively ancient game) by a slight margin. While I hope that Splash Damage can fix some of these problems and nurture this game to health, I fear that it might be a little too late for it to achieve its full potential.
