Players seeking a strong narrative will need to venture elsewhere. Brink plays out on ‘The Ark’, a man-made construction which has become an unsustainable environment. When population overtakes resources, you’re left with a chaotic scenario where the authorities are trying to establish order - unlike the bandits who are fighting for their freedom, left to rot by the government and fending for themselves. It’s a modern take on population growth and how a government grows distant from the people paying taxes. Brink rarely gets you emotionally tied, even when you discover that siblings are fighting on opposite sides. The complaint is with delivery. You have to choose whether you want to save The Ark or destroy it. Either way, Brink plays much the same in both campaigns. The story is used to link missions; presenting you with a short cut-scene, boring characters and insufficient motivation to believe that you’re fighting for a good cause. Brink skims over its own history and before we even begin discussing the gameplay, it has already failed to deliver an enjoyable solo experience.
How about I just stand here and look good, while you guys do all the work?
The opening missions will tell you that Brink is a pure multiplayer game and nothing else. Levels are badly designed around objectives that you must attack or defend, mostly located in narrow spots which become bombarded with foes and don’t allow for the same tactical approach that you can find in Battlefield. Your best bet is to flank, throw a couple of weak grenades (seriously, there’s hardly a bang in sight) and hope that you can complete the objective before another wave of enemies spawn. Playing on your own is problematic not so much because of the rules, it’s because of some unbelievably poor AI. If you get knocked down and need to be revived, medics will often take too long to arrive or just not bother. Death returns you to a capture point and then you'll have to move back up to where the rest of your squad is. Your team will only push forward on the objective if they’re in a good mood, but they’ll usually ignore it and leave you to do nearly all of the work. Enemies fare just as badly, but the most frustrating thing of all is that your team doesn’t finish the job properly. Shooting enemies will cause them to drop, but they won’t be dead. Instead of killing them off, your team will walk away. In turn, this gives opposition medics a chance to get those soldiers back up. Clearing waves of enemies is repetitive enough without that sort of inefficiency.
It’s nice to see the objectives changing, and Brink is genuinely varied in that respect, but the gameplay really doesn’t support the concept when you’re playing with bots. However, play with a few friends and you get something entirely different... lag; lots and lots of lag. Brink is supposed to be able to handle servers of sixteen players, but it can’t. We’re not talking about bullet lag here, we’re talking about unplayable lag. Your character will teleport all over the place, you’ll become disorientated and you’ll end up quitting. Local connections are ok, if you can find them, but you may as well forget about playing with anyone outside of Oceania. Technology is at a stage where the internet has become so advanced, and speeds have become so fast, that lag on this scale shouldn’t happen. It’s not a fault with Telstra, it’s a fault with Brink and Brink alone. The game is failing itself. Bringing up Battlefield again will seem biased, but if DICE can get twenty-four players from every corner of the globe playing smoothly, then Splash Damage has no excuse. It’s another example of bad testing, and it's pathetic when you release a primarily online game in this kind of state.
Just spray and shoot, he can't keep lagging forever.
Assuming that you can join a lag-free game, or stick with the diabolical bots, Brink’s structure is pretty decent. You can pick between four classes: soldier, medic, engineer, and operative. Each is unique and allows you to activate special abilities. For example; soldiers dish out ammo, medics throw out revive syringes, engineers increase weapon damage, and operatives disguise themselves as enemies. That sort of thing. So yeah, it’s Team Fortress 2 all over again. That’s not a complaint, more of a remark commenting on Brink’s lack of mechanical originality. But when the AI refuses to help, you'll have to go back and change your class depending on the objective, which breaks any sense of teamwork. Playing with friends is fun, but if you don’t have any, forget about Brink and play something else. It certainly has positives, although they are massively outweighed by negatives and general disappointments – the parkour being one of many.
An eye-catching element of Brink’s gameplay is the ability to dash, leap, and slide through the environment. To distinguish itself from alternative tactical shooters, Brink incorporates parkour movement alongside solid shooting. The latter works well, borrowing much of its control from superior products, but it’s still above average. The former, i.e. the supposedly original bit, is another area of poor execution. Holding down ‘A’ means that your character will automatically move along surfaces with speed. It sounds cool in theory, not so much in practice. Certain objects can’t be interacted with, and to be perfectly honest, it’s just a waste of time. You can easily succeed without parkour which is a relief. Sure, you can slide (very slowly) along the ground and pull off a stylish kill, but why bother unless you’re trying to complete challenges? Brink plays better without trying to be Mirror’s Edge, and Splash Damage really should have concentrated on the basics before trying something new.
Run away...or be a man and return fire.
In fear of sounding too harsh, Brink does a couple of things right, particularly with character progression. Experience is gained by playing objectively, it’s encouraged and rightly so. Play the game properly and you’ll reap the rewards, easy. The highlight of Brink is customisation, it’s something that it pushes to the max and players can create a truly unique model. The art style as a whole is beautiful, but the characters are the main visual treat. You can edit so many different aspects of your virtual self, and nine times out of ten, you’re going to look extremely cool and brutally bad-ass. The custom fun also stretches beyond attire and lets you manipulate weapons, so the combinations are almost endless. As expected, you’ll unlock more with commitment so the dedicated will look increasingly impressive. This is good artistic design, in terms of the human anatomy at least, because the visuals are forgettable when you’re inside The Ark. Textures are muddy beyond belief; nothing is crisp especially when you’ve just left a sleek, minimalistic menu system. Brink is also quite dull in places, Splash Damage must have an obsession with blue and grey.
Compensating for graphical bleakness was always going to be a struggle, so thankfully Brink sounds good. Weapons have a nice kick to them and when you’re playing with headphones, the sound of bullets and madness echo just as loudly as its competitors. You mightn’t be able to appreciate the quality because of the aforementioned distractions and whatnot, but it’s there and it’s important. The voice actors are weary, which doesn’t matter in the slightest because if you have any common sense you’ll be doing something else during the story cut-scenes. Screams on the battlefield are varied to the point of incomprehensibility at times, but we’re willing to let that slide as a result of Brink actually getting something right for a change.
Fare thee well, you won't be missed.
Longevity is going to be a concern or a relief, depending on how the gameplay tickles you. Brink is very short on content with only a dozen or so core missions to complete. Each campaign will only take a few hours to finish off, so then you’re left with challenges and custom matches where you can replay missions with different rules. If you’re not enjoying Brink, then its brevity will be greatly appreciated. If you somehow find Brink to be the best shooter you’ve ever played, the lack of depth will be a big issue. New downloadable content is coming, but how many people will stay for it? Probably not a lot. Brink is quite bizarre and we haven't been able to talk about the matchmaking system, or lack thereof. You can't even set up lobbies so the whole process of playing with friends, the only semi-fun way to play Brink, is a shambles. It's like taking half of a step in the right direction, followed by a double back-flip and tripping over on your shoelaces.
Brink is brimming with great ideas, most of which have been implemented terribly, making it a difficult game to score. On the one hand, you have creativity; on the other, you have the broken debris of a game that could, and should have been significantly better. Think logically - you have a multiplayer game squeezed into a bland solo experience, therefore Brink is not a success story. That disappointment turns into irreconcilable sadness when you realise that Brink is frequently unplayable online, leaving you with nothing. Even if all of the above was fixed, the gameplay would still be repetitive so stick with what you have unless you're desperate for a new shooter. Our experience with Brink left us feeling unsatisfied, frustrated, shocked at the basic fundamental errors, pondering about the wasted potential, and lagging through the Atlantic. Sadly, it’s a flop of immense proportions and will be remembered as a failed experiment.
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