Brink

I have been waiting, holding my breath in anticipation of Brink for as long as I can remember. Once upon a time, I jested at the idea of mixing Battlefield with Mirror's Edge. I thought 'Well, that will never happen, nobody could possibly ever make that game.' Then came Brink, a class-based, first person shooter that boasted an interesting creative direction, a fairly intriguing universe and, above all, parkour. I was sold. The trailers revealed a game that looked like a polished, first person shooter that was able to seamlessly blend a single player experience with a multiplayer, a tight and polished game that was the summation of my wild imaginings. In reality, Brink is a not-so-hastily but still incredibly sloppy game that lacks content, staying power, or anything of merit to make it even a decent game.

Brink's strongest points are it's character creation process and how it manages to make a class-based system really work on a console. Though there are no sorts of sliders for you to create your character, there still feels like there's a fairly diverse level of skins, models and faces to choose from, with Splash Damage even offering up your choice of voice actors from a salty Jamaican to a nasally WASP. The biggest flaws in the system lie in your inability to use your own color schemes for your character and the permanent choices the game allows you to make far too early on about your appearance while you're still stumbling through the countless menus that make up Brink.