A wasted Effort
At the time of writing this PSN was still down so I haven't managed to play any multiplayer so far, may adjust review and score later.
Brink is an interesting case study for why looks aren't everything. At a glance Brink appears to be a beautiful looking first person shooter, with a unique and interesting visual design and colourful environments that other shooters could only dream of. Underneath the brilliant aesthetics however Brink is a very shallow half finished game.
The game consists of essentially one mode were objectives are given to either side, with one team attacking while the other defends, the modes vary slightly but usually come down to either hacking something, repairing something or escorting either a human or robot across the map. This sounds like an pretty decent multiplayer mode in a larger game, but that is the problem, it isn't, it's the entire game.
During combat you are tasked with completing certain objectives, and each of these objectives usually requires one of the games different class types to complete. The classes are very unbalanced, with both the Medic and the Engineer feeling incredibly powerful (The Medic can heal himself at almost any time to over 100% health, revive other team mates from a distance and even eventually unlock the ability to revive himself, while the Engineer can create turrets and land mines while also increasing his weapon damage drastically) while the operative and solider are left with disguising as an enemy and having extra ammo available to them. The classes aren't the only things that feel unbalanced though, objectives such as hacking a computer terminal are incredibly difficult to complete on your own, it can take around 3 minutes of almost constant hacking for the gauge to fill to 100% completion, while a single enemy can undo all of that work in less than 10 seconds, obviously this has been designed to encourage team work, but when the bots don't want to help you complete a task, and they rarely do, you are left to suffer this poor balance choice alone.
'Campaign' mode, as it's called, is supposedly the single player story of the rebels escaping the ark while the security forces attempt to keep the peace. In preview events and trailers the team at splash damage were adamant that the story mode in Brink would be impressive and would blend seamlessly with your online experiences and on that last point at least they are correct. Brinks campaign does blend seamlessly because it is the same content. Not repackaged in some interesting new narrative with twists in the story or filled with any kind of scripted events, its simply the multiplayer mode with 15-20 second cut scenes that make little sense attached to the beginning, with bots.
Now that I have brought them up, the bots in Brink are dreadful, Bots on your side will constantly ignore the main objective on any map and instead chose to either attempt secondary objectives, which are pointless if you lose the match due to failing the primary objective, or they chose to simply run into gun fire. The enemy A.I isn't much better, with combatants from either team occasionally running past each other entirely on there way to go and waste time on a secondary objective somewhere else. This problem only gets worse however as you advance your character to higher levels, the higher the level of your character the more competent the enemy bots become, they still wont complete many objectives or do anything useful, but they certainly will be able to kill you from ridiculous distances that you could only dream of achieving.
Once you have been killed by the bots on higher levels of difficulty you will also notice one of the games other major faults, the map designs, while large and visually interesting are labyrinthian in design and don't ever achieve any interesting choke points for combat, this design choice is made worse by the fact that once you have died, you will be forced to spawn back at the very back of the map and when your objective can be easily take almost a solid minute of running to get to, only for you to be instantly killed by the laser sharp shooter AI in seconds it can get very frustrating.
Overall, Brink isn't a very good game at all. It feels both over designed in looks while being unpolished and heavily unbalanced in game play. I usually try to avoid the debate about how much a game is 'worth' but in this case, Brink is not worth full retail price. Brink does have it's moments when all the design choices come together and it's great fun, but like a planetary alignment it comes along to rarely and is over to fast to be worth your time.
Brink is an interesting case study for why looks aren't everything. At a glance Brink appears to be a beautiful looking first person shooter, with a unique and interesting visual design and colourful environments that other shooters could only dream of. Underneath the brilliant aesthetics however Brink is a very shallow half finished game.
The game consists of essentially one mode were objectives are given to either side, with one team attacking while the other defends, the modes vary slightly but usually come down to either hacking something, repairing something or escorting either a human or robot across the map. This sounds like an pretty decent multiplayer mode in a larger game, but that is the problem, it isn't, it's the entire game.
During combat you are tasked with completing certain objectives, and each of these objectives usually requires one of the games different class types to complete. The classes are very unbalanced, with both the Medic and the Engineer feeling incredibly powerful (The Medic can heal himself at almost any time to over 100% health, revive other team mates from a distance and even eventually unlock the ability to revive himself, while the Engineer can create turrets and land mines while also increasing his weapon damage drastically) while the operative and solider are left with disguising as an enemy and having extra ammo available to them. The classes aren't the only things that feel unbalanced though, objectives such as hacking a computer terminal are incredibly difficult to complete on your own, it can take around 3 minutes of almost constant hacking for the gauge to fill to 100% completion, while a single enemy can undo all of that work in less than 10 seconds, obviously this has been designed to encourage team work, but when the bots don't want to help you complete a task, and they rarely do, you are left to suffer this poor balance choice alone.
'Campaign' mode, as it's called, is supposedly the single player story of the rebels escaping the ark while the security forces attempt to keep the peace. In preview events and trailers the team at splash damage were adamant that the story mode in Brink would be impressive and would blend seamlessly with your online experiences and on that last point at least they are correct. Brinks campaign does blend seamlessly because it is the same content. Not repackaged in some interesting new narrative with twists in the story or filled with any kind of scripted events, its simply the multiplayer mode with 15-20 second cut scenes that make little sense attached to the beginning, with bots.
Now that I have brought them up, the bots in Brink are dreadful, Bots on your side will constantly ignore the main objective on any map and instead chose to either attempt secondary objectives, which are pointless if you lose the match due to failing the primary objective, or they chose to simply run into gun fire. The enemy A.I isn't much better, with combatants from either team occasionally running past each other entirely on there way to go and waste time on a secondary objective somewhere else. This problem only gets worse however as you advance your character to higher levels, the higher the level of your character the more competent the enemy bots become, they still wont complete many objectives or do anything useful, but they certainly will be able to kill you from ridiculous distances that you could only dream of achieving.
Once you have been killed by the bots on higher levels of difficulty you will also notice one of the games other major faults, the map designs, while large and visually interesting are labyrinthian in design and don't ever achieve any interesting choke points for combat, this design choice is made worse by the fact that once you have died, you will be forced to spawn back at the very back of the map and when your objective can be easily take almost a solid minute of running to get to, only for you to be instantly killed by the laser sharp shooter AI in seconds it can get very frustrating.
Overall, Brink isn't a very good game at all. It feels both over designed in looks while being unpolished and heavily unbalanced in game play. I usually try to avoid the debate about how much a game is 'worth' but in this case, Brink is not worth full retail price. Brink does have it's moments when all the design choices come together and it's great fun, but like a planetary alignment it comes along to rarely and is over to fast to be worth your time.