Brink Review
An engaging online multiplayer game that falls short in some aspects
Coming to us from Splash Damage, the developers of the much-beloved Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Brink is a class-based FPS that blends the archetypal shooter class types with heavily objective-based multiplayer gameplay and unique first-person traversal. Since it was first teased almost two full years ago at E3 2009, Brink has seen both its fair share of hype and delays, originally being slated for Spring of 2010 but eventually being pushed back to the Fall and then finally the Spring of 2011. Normally, when a game sees many delays it isn’t a good sign. It means that things are going a bit wrong, aspects still need to be tweaked, or bugs need to be fixed. So does Brink live up to the hype it has received over the past two years, or is it just another example of how the oft-delayed game still comes out a bit half-baked?
The answer, of course, is it’s a little bit of both. Portions of Brink’s hype, mostly those surrounding its multiplayer experience, are easily lived up to, but others, notably those teased the earliest on in Brink’s development timeline, fall well short of even being generally acceptable.
Visually, Brink is a striking game. With wonderfully animated, if brief, cutscenes scattered throughout the gameplay experience, uniquely European character designs, and a sleek and effective UI, Brink stands out from the crowd of first-person shooters we have been subjected to throughout the last several months. That said, the game’s setting, humanity’s final refuge after what effectively boils down to an apocalypse dubbed The Ark, visually fits along the lines of Brink but does so in a much less inspiring way than the over-exaggerated, hyper-realistic character models. Maps tend to vary between standard sleek, clean high-tech areas comprised mostly of soft colors and ramshackle environments with walls and buildings made up of rusting storage containers and industrial piping. In these latter levels, it is hard to remember any sizable portions that weren’t mostly rusty-red or orange in color. Both map types lead to relative visual boredom after the first few matches. It would have been nice to see Brink’s exceptional design in some areas carry over to the maps as well, especially considering that this is a game played in the first-person perspective. Your character might look awesome on the menu screen, but due to the nature of the game, you’ll find yourself looking at the not-so-nice environments more than you will your awesome character.
From a gameplay perspective, many of Brink’s mechanics are things that have been seen before in many other class-based shooters. The player is given the ability to switch off-and-on between classes that effectively boil down to the archetypal soldier, spy, engineer, and medic. The player’s character levels up across all gameplay types (singleplayer, multiplayer, and challenge modes). As the characters ascend in level, they are given more and more options in terms of clothing, accessories, and most importantly, overall and class-specific abilities. The abilities here are wide, varied, and they really require the player to make some specific decisions on how they want to want to cater their character to their specific gameplay style. This isn’t simply a list of abilities that you want to eventually purchase all of, especially when your money may be better spent elsewhere. For example, one ability allows you to enter a third-person perspective while taking an objective, hacking computers, etc. while removing your ability to move around while doing so. The third-person perspective can be a great way to know when an enemy is approaching from behind and allow you to quickly get the jump on them at just the right moment, especially if you are a shotgun or submachine gun wielder, but you may want the ability to quickly dodge enemy fire while taking an objective if playing a more run-and-gun character. Both ways have their advantage. While the player may be tempted to follow in the footsteps of other games and purchase all of the abilities they can get their hands on, it may not always be fitting of their situation or play style.
Interestingly, Brink doesn’t really contain any specific game modes; instead there are a number of missions that can put either side, depending on their level of success, through a variety of different objectives in a single match. Initially, one team may be tasked with placing an explosive charge on a doorway and guarding it long enough for the charge to detonate while the other team must defend the door. If the door is properly defended, the mission ends there, but if it is destroyed, all is not lost for the team originally tasked with defending it as the objective changes and the players move deeper into the level. Objectives range from bomb placements, NPC escort missions, item captures, and computer hacking. While the objectives are standard affair within the game’s genre, it keeps things interesting and fresh when you are tasked with some or all of them across the timeline of a single mission.
Brink’s singleplayer “campaign” is all a bit of a lie, and it is good to know this up front to avoid unnecessary disappointment. Populating multiplayer matches with bots and capping off the beginning and end of each campaign with extremely brief cutscenes full of nameless and bland characters, the campaign is as much a singleplayer experience as playing Battlefield 1942 by yourself was: It’s an imitation of the multiplayer that works decently but pales in comparison to the true online multiplayer gameplay.
Brink is a game that is all about online multiplayer, but more specifically, it is all about the party-based online multiplayer experience. While playing the basic online pickup game can be extremely rewarding, it is just as likely to lead to extreme frustrations if your teammates are less than desirable. In a team deathmatch dominated world, many players are either unable to or do not wish to make the necessary changes in their gameplay habits in order to better suit the team-based objective gameplay present in Brink. Because of this, you may find your team has far too many soldiers given the fact that only an operative (the spy class) is capable of completing the current objective and that most of your players are not really supporting one another. Obviously, this all changes when you pick and choose the people you play alongside a bit more carefully, establishing a full party of friends all using voice chat, is by far the best way to play this game because only then can you both completely count on your fellow teammates but also effectively communicate and work together. A small number of coordinated players can single-handedly alter the course of a mission, and they’ll probably have the best time doing it too.
Upon release, Brink quickly ran into a massive number of technical issues, most noticeably the game-breaking lag that turned the multiplayer into something closer to a photograph slideshow than a video game. Splash Damage responded with a day one patch, which helped some of the technical issues, and even followed up a few days later with another patch. As it stands now, Brink is a relatively bugs-free experience and something that can be easily played online as it was originally intended, but it is hard to think that the game didn’t lose a decent number of players in those first few days who would rather simply move onto or back into other games than give the developers time to fix issues that they, truthfully, should have ironed out prior to the game’s launch.
Brink is a game that does what it does, and rather well. Unfortunately for one reason or another, it (and those responsible for its production) seems to fight against this. It is a multiplayer class-based, objective-focused shooter taking place in a unique world without any grand narrative behind that world. Brink wants to portray itself as something more than that which is unfortunate because it not only leads to player disappointment, but greatly downplays and insults what the game does so well: the multiplayer. They tack on brief cutscenes with nameless, momentary characters before and after bot-populated multiplayer matches and expect you to accept that as a true singleplayer campaign. Plenty of other games have embraced their multiplayer-only roots in the past and seen great success because of it (most importantly Team Fortress 2 and many entries in the Battlefield series). It is a shame Brink hasn’t done the same. This is a game that provides a more cognitive multiplayer experience that is getting lost under a few too many technical flaws and disappointments spawned by the contrast between promise and reality.