Review :: Brink

“These dudes are the enemy, go and shoot them in the face.”

In a world where Call Of Duty and Battlefield dominate the multiplayer shooter market, it’s going to take something fresh and interesting for players to turn to another game. This is where Brink was supposed to step in. A multiplayer focused first person shooter, with an interesting art style and a different take on objective-based gameplay. Although interesting in concept, Brink is a game that fails to deliver on almost everything it had going for it.

It’s clear that, developer, Splash Damage tried to make Brink completely different from all the other hyper-realistic shooters on the market. It was immediately identifiable, it’s caricatured art style and steampunk-esque, futuristic, setting making it stand out from the cluster of other first person shooters out there. It does this pretty successfully, but suffers from major doses of repetition. Whilst the characters and environments differ from other games on the market, they’re not all that different from one another. In short: Everything in Brink looks kinda the same. The missions set in the near-pristine, white utopia controlled by the Security all look like they were set in the same mall, and those set in Resistance controlled areas don’t seem to leave a single, rusty brown, junkyard. Each mission blurred into the next, with boredom increasing with every completed objective.

This wasn’t helped by the tiny amount of story, inserted before and after each mission. The cutscenes did nothing to peak my interest in what was going on and, in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting much. That being said, it would’ve been nice to have a little more motivation than ‘these dudes are the enemy, go and shoot them in the face’. It’s a shame, because the story definitely has potential. The idea of a Resistance movement/trying to suppress a totalitarian regime has a lot of scope, and whilst have been on the generic side, it would have been more interesting than what’s there. The fact you play as a nameless, somewhat faceless, nobody didn’t help me connect to what was going on either. The dual campaign – one which is exact same story told from the two opposing sides – did more to hinder the experience than anything else. Playing through this thing twice was something I didn’t want to do.

That’s not to say that the mechanics are bad. In fact, from a gameplay perspective, Brink is pretty sound. The movement of characters works well and it’s easy to differentiate between the three character ‘sizes’. The smallest character model can parkour his way through the environment with ease, whilst the heaviest of guys will take a little longer. As with almost everything here, this is flawed too. The game is fairly well balanced, but choosing the mid-range character model makes a play through a little too easy. The movement itself is great. I loved the feeling of freedom when running around the environments, clambering over (and under) any obstacle in my way. The main problem lies in the gunplay. Whilst you can differentiate a machine gun from a pistol and a pistol from a shotgun, the weaponry within each category feels exactly the same.

This doesn’t help in a shooter that wants to compete in the big leagues, especially when it comes to online multiplayer. With the whole campaign being playable with and against other players, the distinctions between the weapons needed to be greater than it is. Though I don’t know how many people are going to stick with the game. The objective system is a great feature and I really enjoyed choosing which objectives to take on based on my class. However, I found that teamwork is a necessity if you want to win. This is something I wasn’t getting from my fellow players or from the AI bots.

Brink is a very flawed experience, but it had potential. There’s mechanics here that I’d love to see implemented elsewhere and the art style really impressed me. Had it had a little more time spent on it, it could’ve been really special. As it stands, the gameplay isn’t all that fun, the online is inconsistent at best and the environments get very old, very fast.