Okay Geek Farm
PS3 - Brink Review
Alex Tretrop
Brink is a very ambitious game; crafted by the developers of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and published by Bethesda, Brink attempts to blur the line between the singleplayer and multiplayer experiences offered by other shooters with varied results. The concept is cool, the aesthetics are stylish yet it still falls flat due to a lack of actual content, a story that feels a little baren, and some of the worst bots I’ve ever seen. This leads into a game that’s “just okay”, but with a few balance changes here and there, it’s very easy to see how the game could justify the high price point down the road.
Story
Brink’s central story revolves around The Ark, a self sustaining and “perfect” city that could sustain itself on a population of a couple thousands. The only problem is that the water levels have risen, forcing many of the survivors to relocate to the island in hopes of it saving them. With a population in the millions, The Ark is slowly running dry, forcing sides to be drawn between the Ressistance, who want to escape the ark and Security, who want to save the ark themselves. It’s an interesting idea, the only problem is that it isn’t expanded on.
The fact that all the levels in this game double as multiplayer maps, the developers opted to make short and quick cinematics to keep the flow of the game moving. That’s all well and good but it runs into many fundamental problems. For starters, there isn’t a protagonist or a group of protagonists of any sort to keep the story interesting, it’s just a bunch of random characters for each mission quickly giving you some context for the map. I really like this idea in theory, you add a point to all these battles between the two factions vying for control of the Ark. However, they’re always the exact same pre canned video, which means you’ll be skipping them each time after you watch them once. With no one for you to latch onto in these missions and them all having the same sturcture of points each time, you’ll get bored of them fast anyway.
For all intents and purposes there isn’t much of a story. The game just gives you an interesting premise that isn’t ever touched upon again at all. The story the developers are trying to tell sounds really interesting, it takes the apocalypse and puts a cool spin to it but with a distinct lack of character development or length, you really won’t see the point to investing in this storyline.
Gameplay
Alright, let’s talk about the meaty core of this particular title. While there are many weak points to Brink, the gameplay for the most part isn’t one of them. The game takes an interesting route with its shooting that makes it feel really unique, fresh and a ton of fun to play. Brink has a very large focus on team based combat with a nice variety of classes and a bit of Mirror’s Edge’s parkour mixed in. Everything in the game seems to revolve around that idea, the enemies take a ton of bullets to take down encouraging you to travel in packs, the game’s objectives take all sorts of different classes into account and the running feels smooth and fluid. It rewards everyone on the battlefield that’s playing as a team extremely well and most of the time you feel like your contributing to an overall battle effort.
But there are many problems that seem to stick around no matter what you do. Sometimes you get into situations where no one is playing the class you need to continue. While you can switch on the fly at any time, the game encourages you to unlock things down one class path before going down another, which discourages everyone to switch classes as often as someone playing a game in TF2. The other downside is that some of the classes, the operative in particular, feel a little underpowered compared to others and there are many situations that you encounter throughout the missions where you can’t progress because your missing one of these classes.
However, the largest problem that every player is guarenteed to encounter are the bots. I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI this bad in a long time. They willingly run straight into the enemy’s line of fire, focus on secondary objectives rather than the game changing ones and the classes are never distributed equally among them. And that’s just your allies.
The enemy bots are a whole other story. If you play on Normal, you’ll be mowing through them with relative ease but then something irritating happens. Let’s say that you have 10 mins for your team to defend an objective from explosives planted by the other team. Your mowing them down, your on fire, your team mates aren’t helping but who cares. You’re going to win. But then you don’t. Right as the clock nears the last sixty seconds, the enemy bots all suddenly and simultaniously decide to become much, much, better at the game. They kill you over and over again and complete the objective, prolonging the game by another ten to twenty minutes. Then they realize: “Oh goodness, we’re we just trying too hard? Maybe we should go back to being cross eyed idiots!” and then proceed to run into a line of enemy turrets, with a pistol.
It’s times like these where Brink can really put you off playing it. When the game increases the time by a large amount when you’ve practically won a game just because you and your bots die when they hear so much as a leaf move on the floor, many people will probably throw up their arms in defeat. That being said, Brink is at it’s best when you keep the hell away from the terrible bots in the singleplayer and head into a game with a bunch of human players that you can rely on. With many of the games mechanics encouraging longer periods of times in the individual maps themselves, the game can turn into a tense and super rewarding experience.
And Lest us not forget about the abdsurd amount of customization allowed in Brink. Everything from abilities, armor, weapon, attachments, and even body scars are all a part of making your original character suited specifically for your entertainment and gaming dominance. There’s no shortage of choices, and if you’re not the kind to spend an hour picking and choosing every detail of your non-existent gun-totting soldier, then there are more than enough predefined load outs for you to conserve valuable time.
Visuals/Audio
The other distinct feature of Brink is its visual style. With a distinct use of primary colours and cartoonish avatars, Brink’s aesthetics are tip, top notch. The Ark feels like one of those eerily clean and perfect utopias, while many of the locales you fight in have a really excellent and distinct visual style. The security themed maps look crisp and clean as opposed to the Ressisstance, who’s Container City level shows you the slums and shacks that they live in.
Brink’s levels are also relatively ordinary looking, which actually goes a long way in conveying the story they want to tell. This revolution is just starting on the Ark and it shows you as your rushing through Airports or Aquariums that seem to have just been abandoned. It’s great to see something so distinctly creative in its visual style. It does have some issues: there’s a bunch of texture pop-in and some of the texture work is particularly low-res but it still looks great.
I’m also genuinely surprised by the audio work here as well. While the game lacks a good soundtrack, the idea of the Ark being inhabited by the entire world is conveyed extremely well. You see a large variety of accents from English, German and Chinese to many others throughout the short cutscenes, which goes a long way in pushing the believability of this failed utopia.
Everything else is a bit of a hit or miss. Most of the guns and grenades sound alright, baring a few exceptions. The announcers are annoying as all hell: their annoying voices just seem to keep coming up. Your squad mates also have a tendancy of yelling way too often and like to inform you of every little thing you seem to do, something that gets really annoying really fast.
Overall
Brink is one very flawed game. It shines when you get out of the abysmal singleplayer modes and jump online with a bunch of friends to battle it out against others. I love it’s visual style, the ideas it’s presenting and how different the gameplay feels but with some major problems like horrifyingly terrible AI, a lack of maps and a story that feels underdeveloped and boring, there isn’t a ton going for this game if your just looking for a singleplayer experience. With it being a full-price release, I can’t recomend it on the basis that you might get a good experience. And with all the shenanigans involving PSN, it would seem like the PC or 360 version would be the way to go at this time.
Pro’s
- Very Stylish and Aesthetically Pleasing Game
- Audio is well realized
- Great, Cooperative Gameplay…
Con’s
- … as long as you keep far away from the bots
- Terrible story that feels like it could have been so much more
- Lack of maps and content to keep you coming back to this multiplayer experience
You know what though? It’s nice to see something so original, even if it falls a little short of the mark. A few patches or even a sequel sometime down the road and I could easily see this game becoming much better. I hope Bethesda and Splash Damage at least gives this one a chance to improve in quality, as we all know that too many original games fail catastophically and get shoved under the rug for more sequels. Good luck next time is a statement that I hope rings true, as more often then not there isn’t always a next time for these games.
