To fend off any potential haters - I don't have (much of) a problem with the mechanics of Brink - as a class based multiplayer shooter it's pretty good - it does a lot of things differently than other games and it manages those things pretty well.  I've played about 16 hours of Brink and I've had a pretty good time with it.  I'll do a "What Brink Gets Right" post sometime after this one.  Now to the meat.
 
Narrative
As a campaign based game it's laughable at best .  The cutscenes only purpose, it seems, is to hide the matchmaking going on in the background.  It's a hollow shell of a story with no life or characters to fill it out.  They only other story telling happens in audio logs that you can choose to listen to if you feel like it while you're customizing your character.  It seems like the plot is so disposable that you can not even be aware of half of it unless you go searching for it.   It seems more like the idea was to cut production time (in an interview with the developer they say they've been working on Brink since BEFORE the first left 4 dead) by not really including a single player campaign than to try and have a well thought out coherent story.  So ultimately anyone looking for a good single player experience is going to be left wanting.  More annoyingly, anyone looking for a good multiplayer experience is going to be hampered by the confines of the objectives of the "story" within the mission.  But more on this later. The only other thing i can say about the story is that it's entirely disingenuous to say that we're seeing "both sides" of a conflict when each side's campaign has missions that the other doesn't have.  If you play as the resistance you don't shoot a missile at the ark founders tower as it happens in the security campaign.  (You do get to do it in a "what if" mission outside of the normal resistance campaign) You essentially have two slightly different stories where the side you play as is clearly good and the other side is clearly bad.   No shades of gray that were hinted at in the pre-release hype-train.  What a sad half assed cop-out in a sad half assed campaign.  It is a shame as you can see the promise in the back story but the developers failed to deliver.

This would have been a much much better game if three or four things would have been done:

1) Ditch the story altogether - set it up, give a back story but don't try and tell any real narrative outside of mission objectives. That way they could have been randomized and given fresh life to maps that will age very quickly.  Anyone familiar with Killzone's Warzone mode will know what I'm talking about.

2) No campaign = lower price - For all intents and purposes there is no single player campaign in this game.  I think expectations would be in the right place if this were cheaper at launch - $45 - $40 seems about right to me.

3) More maps - 8 maps? Really? and that's for both "single player" and multiplayer.  Even for a downloadable multiplayer only title that's a little thin much less for a $60 disc title.

4) Integrate the systems - This is one of my only mechanical beefs with the game.  The character customizations are great - too bad once i start a game i can't change anything more about my character other than his class and guns (only guns, not attachments).  I'd love the ability to change my weight since that has such a big impact to gameplay - or to give me the option to tie together certain weapon sets with certain classes so I'm not wasting valuable time dicking around with that stuff in game.  Or even let me switch characters around in game so that if i need to switch to an engineer i have my engineer character all customized and ready to go. There are really great systems in Brink but it's like they don't talk to each other or are just layered one on top of the other with nothing that breaks through and combines them in some meaningful way.

I'm very much of a split mind on Brink.  It has issues but it's pretty fun to play.  But I still feel like a sucker paying $60 for it.

To fend off any potential haters - I don't have (much of) a problem with the mechanics of Brink - as a class based multiplayer shooter it's pretty good - it does a lot of things differently than other games and it manages those things pretty well.  I've played about 16 hours of Brink and I've had a pretty good time with it.  I'll do a "What Brink Gets Right" post sometime after this one.  Now to the meat.
 
Narrative
As a campaign based game it's laughable at best .  The cutscenes only purpose, it seems, is to hide the matchmaking going on in the background.  It's a hollow shell of a story with no life or characters to fill it out.  They only other story telling happens in audio logs that you can choose to listen to if you feel like it while you're customizing your character.  It seems like the plot is so disposable that you can not even be aware of half of it unless you go searching for it.   It seems more like the idea was to cut production time (in an interview with the developer they say they've been working on Brink since BEFORE the first left 4 dead) by not really including a single player campaign than to try and have a well thought out coherent story.  So ultimately anyone looking for a good single player experience is going to be left wanting.  More annoyingly, anyone looking for a good multiplayer experience is going to be hampered by the confines of the objectives of the "story" within the mission.  But more on this later. The only other thing i can say about the story is that it's entirely disingenuous to say that we're seeing "both sides" of a conflict when each side's campaign has missions that the other doesn't have.  If you play as the resistance you don't shoot a missile at the ark founders tower as it happens in the security campaign.  (You do get to do it in a "what if" mission outside of the normal resistance campaign) You essentially have two slightly different stories where the side you play as is clearly good and the other side is clearly bad.   No shades of gray that were hinted at in the pre-release hype-train.  What a sad half assed cop-out in a sad half assed campaign.  It is a shame as you can see the promise in the back story but the developers failed to deliver.

This would have been a much much better game if three or four things would have been done:

1) Ditch the story altogether - set it up, give a back story but don't try and tell any real narrative outside of mission objectives. That way they could have been randomized and given fresh life to maps that will age very quickly.  Anyone familiar with Killzone's Warzone mode will know what I'm talking about.

2) No campaign = lower price - For all intents and purposes there is no single player campaign in this game.  I think expectations would be in the right place if this were cheaper at launch - $45 - $40 seems about right to me.

3) More maps - 8 maps? Really? and that's for both "single player" and multiplayer.  Even for a downloadable multiplayer only title that's a little thin much less for a $60 disc title.

4) Integrate the systems - This is one of my only mechanical beefs with the game.  The character customizations are great - too bad once i start a game i can't change anything more about my character other than his class and guns (only guns, not attachments).  I'd love the ability to change my weight since that has such a big impact to gameplay - or to give me the option to tie together certain weapon sets with certain classes so I'm not wasting valuable time dicking around with that stuff in game.  Or even let me switch characters around in game so that if i need to switch to an engineer i have my engineer character all customized and ready to go. There are really great systems in Brink but it's like they don't talk to each other or are just layered one on top of the other with nothing that breaks through and combines them in some meaningful way.

I'm very much of a split mind on Brink.  It has issues but it's pretty fun to play.  But I still feel like a sucker paying $60 for it.