Brink

Brink is a team based shooter from Splash Damage. The concept is a solid one: complete objective based missions with a team of allies in a set time limit. The game uses a class system similar to Team Fortress, albeit not as well implemented. However, Brink completely collapses under a mountain of technical issues and a general lack of content. Splash Damage had a chance to break out of their niche and appeal to a much wider audience, but ultimately the numerous problems of the game will relegate enjoyment of it to a handful of hardcore fans.  

 Brink sets up an interesting fiction. On a sea based city called the Ark the last remnants of humanity gather after world wide disaster. Class conflict and power games occur, thus forming the games two factions. However, Brink never does anything with this setup other than a few shallow cutscenes between missions. There is no storyline in this game, and no narrative direction. 

Brink has a nice graphical style to it, with a cartoon like design that reminds me of Timesplitters. Its character models have slightly elongated faces and are customisable in appearance, but none of it is visually striking. The levels and environments are all bleak in their colour scheme, with metallic greys and rusts dominating the game. The game is poorly lit and the backgrounds like the sky and buildings look ok at a glance, but when looked at closely they look faded and out of scope. There is a horrible texture pop in issue in the game. At one point I stopped to look at a banner on the floor only for its details to painfully and slowly pop in over about 4 seconds as I watched. The pop in is everywhere, from walls and floors to the characters faces and clothes. Brink is an ugly game with murky colours and dark lighting with a common grease like look to the backgrounds. 

The voice acting in Brink is very poor, with bad accents and forced monotone voices being common. The lack of story means that the characters are meaningless and the cutscenes serve only to exhibit the awful voice work. There is no music sound track to speak of, leaving a serious void in this department. The weapons do not even sound impressive when fired, reducing the satisfaction of actually being in a fire fight. Explosions are done so poorly that it is laughable when they should have been the nest part of the combat. 

Brink has a measly 8 maps to play in, with the single player and multiplayer being the same thing. There are 2 campaigns to play, one as each of the factions. However the campaigns are basically the same levels with the objectives reversed. Its a very poor set up for a game which is about objective based shooting. You can play with human players, and you should, as the AI in Brink is horrible. The AI characters will struggle to carry out the objectives, forcing you to do them. They will consistently fail to protect you while you do the objectives, and commonly get in your way while you do them. They will walk into walls, fail to use tactics and just be a general mess. The bots seem to get better as the objectives reach near completion, leading to some frustrating moments of the match being prolonged. The weapons have a good level of customisation, but there are not that many differences between weapons, resulting in a strange situation of there not being many weapons in the game. The broken AI really does ruin the game, so Brink is to be avoided at all costs if you do not have people to play it with. 

The technical problems of Brink do not stop at bad AI and texture pop in. The game suffers crippling lag online on a regularly basis. This destroys the very core of the game, as if its unplayable online then you will be stuck with the bots. The game is unpausable even when playing offline, a game design choice which I hate. The menus are nicely presented and look god, but the layout and design of the games 8 maps are poor, with linear corridors being the meat of the maps. The characters are animated horribly, as are the grenades and the jumping. The game makes a half hearted attempt at implementing parkour elements but this completely flops as its so shallow and has little effect on gameplay. The interactions between the classes are good, with engineers being able to buff team mates, operatives acting like the spies of Team Fortress, medics healing and soldiers doing the fighting. Its a pity there are so few levels because the classes are done well. 

Respawning points are thinly spread in the game, meaning that a lot of each match is spent running to the fights. The weapons are universally underwhelming and feel like toys, the sound design is poor, the graphics are bad and the technical problems ruin any satisfaction that the game could give. The games structure is inaccessible, its levelling up system is bad as key abilities need to be unlocked before you can use them. The character customisation is unnecessary and pointless and the game lacks any production values that make it worthy of being a full price game. Repetitive gameplay and boring levels are the final nail in   the coffin of this miserable game. The developer doesn't even care about the customers enough to programme proper bot behaviour into the game or fix the multitude of problems, this game should not be on store shelves.

• Stylised character design
• The interactions of the classes are well designed
• The customisation is a nice touch

• 8 maps is not nearly enough
• Repetitive levels
• The 2 campaigns are the same as each other
• No story
• Weapons feel like toys
• Horrible animations and level design
• Broken AI
• Multiplayer is very laggy is the host is bad, which is often
• Not fit for purpose

• A game that only focuses on team combat can't even get the AI programmed right

• 3/10