Firstly, what is Brink and why should you care? It’s pretty simple, but it has a lot of fun features. The most notable thing is the freedom of movement throughout the game. If you’ve played Mirror’s Edge, this will be quite familiar. Your character can vault over walls and climb up things with ease. You’re not as bound by annoying barriers as you are in most games. The other notable aspects of the game are its customization and team play. Character customization is nice, but adjust features other than clothes is pretty lacking. Gun customization is pretty nice as you can mix and match scopes and sights with grips, under-slung grenade launchers, bigger magazines, silencers, etc. Cod Games are like this, but Brink’s options make a bit more sense.  Each attachment is specific to a place on the gun and all that. I think the first Crysis game had a similar weapon adjustment system. Now about the team play, there are four classes and they all contribute something to the game. It’s not like Battlefield where each can do its own thing but you can live without them. The modes are objective based, similar to Killzone’s Operations mode, and each class can do something that is needed for each type of objective.  A basic mathematical formula for the game would be Mirror’s Edge (movement) + CoD (weapons) + Borderlands (styling) + Team Fortress (class based) = Brink. This game is all of those things, yet none of them at the same time.

Characters and customization, this time I’ll go into a bit more depth. A few things you can change about your character like facial features and such when you first create one. Things like what he looks like such as skin color, shape, tattoos, scars, etc are all permanent. You cannot change these later, so make up your mind and stick with it. Things like face paint, hair, and other gear are changeable at any time. You have a fairly large number of clothing and gear options as well as color and pattern options for each piece. These are all aesthetic and don’t actually affect gameplay. However, there’s also the option for body type. After you rank up a few times, you’ll have the “light” and “heavy” body types added as options alongside the default “ medium.” Medium body types can wield most weapons and move over most obstacles. This is the base type and doesn’t do anything special apart from not having any real downsides. Heavy body types are obviously bigger (fat) so they move slower and can only climber over things that are about waist high. The upside is that they have more health and they can carry any weapon. This includes some massive weapons like a minigun and such that other classes can’t even see. There’s also the light body type which has very limited weapons and has less health. They die rather quickly and can only wield things like SMGs or pistols. However they move much faster and can jump off walls. They’ can climb up and over anything that’s climbable and this allows them to take paths that other classes can’t. Weapon customization is a nice feature as well. Rifles are without scopes by default so if you want to snipe, add a scope of your own. Standard grenades are on a cooldown timer, but are unlimited. So and underslung grenade launcher is still on a cooldown but the grenade will explode on contact. It’s not super groundbreaking, but it’s very nice.

Now about the team play. Not only are all the classes required, they’re actually useful outside of their roles.  As with most games, the medic can revive downed players. With an upgrade unlocked at later levels, you can also revive yourself (‘cause Kz3 certainly never did this before).  They can also buff the health of allies and themselves, this gives the affected players, more maximum health.  They’re mainly used for escort missions as they need to keep the target alive until they reach the destination.  Soldiers are the gunners. A good, all-around class if you don’t feel like playing the objective and would rather just kill people. They can refill they’re ammo at will (on a cooldown) and can give ammo to other players. They also have more types of grenades and various explosives. They’re used for demolition objectives. Engineers are similar to the similarly-named class in almost every other game. They’re for all the repair objectives and can also construct things on the battlefield. Find a broken mounted gun? An engineer can fix it up. Engineers can also place auto-turrets and mines. Great class for static defense. Lastly, there’s the operative. This is the tricky, more stealth and tech based class. Their main ability is copying a dead enemy and acting under a disguise. Unfortunately they can’t shoot or their cover will be blown, for this reason, this ends up being rather useless. They have bombs that can stick to people and will explode later unless removed. They’re also the only class that can even see an enemy mine or spot and enemy disguise. Unfortunately, the hacking objectives they’re used for are annoying, this is my least favorite class.

Now about the gameplay and other such stuff. Running and jumping is all fine and dandy, but there’s more to it. The most notable thing is that it takes longer to kill people on this game. No instant kills or mowing down a dozen enemies with a single mag. This I like, as with Halo, it results in battles being more of a fight rather than a contest of “Who shoot’s first” or “Who has the fastest connection.” Melee is also not an instant kill. Instead, all melees except when wielding a single-handed weapon will knock an enemy down. They can shoot while downed so it’s not a guaranteed kill. As mentioned before, there is no straight-up deathmatch. This is rather disappointing. It’s all objective based and I think it kinda hurts for it. The good side is that all classes are useful and no one get’s left out.

Here’s where it gets murky. The Campaign is nothing more than the eight maps played with bots. In fact, the multiplayer is the same as the campaign, complete with wafer-thin storyline. Bots will fill up the empty slots that human players don’t fill. With two factions and eight maps, that’s only sixteen scenarios. The only other thing is the measly challenges which don’t offer much replay value or fun. You can pretty much do everything in the game in a few hours. After that, it’s ranking up your character and trying to best people’s scores in the challenges. If you buy games only for the multiplayer, this might just be fine. For me, you either buy this game to play with other people, or don’t even look at it. The bots are a pain, they’re cheap and just plain annoying. They pop off headshots with ease and honestly seem to deal way more damage than you while also being able to take more before they die. They love letting you chip away at their health before whipping around and dropping you faster than you can blink. If the bots are on the defensive side of the battle, they’ll camp like you’ve never seen. Your ally bots are simply brain dead, instead of assaulting an objective, they’ll worry about capturing some useless side mission. It’s great fun to watch six of your guys stand in the same room as an enemy who’s planting a bomb and not notice him. What makes it more fun is when you get to watch this while waiting thirty seconds for one of the two medics in the group to come over and revive you. The enemy bots will always beat your allies unless you intervene. I also love defending for ten minutes only for the enemy to make an unstoppable rush in the last 30 seconds and win with half a second to spare. This has actually happened many times and I’ve only had it a couple days. Screw the bots and their artificial difficulty.

From a visual standpoint, this game is far from good. I’m not actually sure why it looks as bad as it does. There’s just no excuse for the way things look in this game. Textures are low resolution and fade-in is very noticeable. Not only that, but the actual resolution of the game will drop to keep the framerate at a decent 30 or so… What!? I literally can see pixilation like a PS2 game at times and it’s not like Brink is running 60FPS like CoD or so. Maybe it’s all the cool animations for movement? Nope. Character movement (including bots) is a jerky as FC2. People twitch about and climbing isn’t smooth like real parkour, it’s twitchy and I can’t even enjoy it’s looks. Vaulting over a fence has got to be no more than 5 – 10 frames of animation. The only redeeming quality is that the levels look rather cool. Yes, there’s the seemingly obligatory junkyards and shanty villages, but there’s also the smooth, clean, white curves that make up the rest of the Ark. I do hope the developers don’t miss this chance and overlook how appealing these locales are to be in. Half of the game looks like concept art, and the rest looks like a rust heap. But even the nice locations don’t escape the above mentioned graphical failures.

So why get it? I really don’t know. You’ve got generally ugly graphics, poor animation, generic gameplay only redeemed by freerunning. You’ve got classes and team play that’s squelched by cheap-ass bots and limited maps. The main issue is that the game lacks content in a big way. Eight maps is not enough by today’s standards. When there’s no meaningful singleplayer to make up for it, the fun of the game is really hurt. That’s not to say it isn’t fun though. When you’re with friends, trying out new weapon/class set-ups or different methods of playing the maps is a blast. The thing is that matchmaking isn’t huge on this game either. Apparently being from the PS2 era didn’t save this game from having nasty lag issues with full rooms. The best fun is having a few friends against bots. But once again, the bots ruin the fun so…

I really have no idea how to wrap this up. Evidently the developers ran into the same problem when making Brink. So, just like they did, I’ll end right here and publish it.

I never saw that trailer. Damn, I wish it was that good.

The main issues are this. The game lags pretty bad with more than 8 players. This means that the AI are required (via filling in slots or just playing by yourself or with a couple friends) and when the AI are introduced, it gets friggin' annoying. The other main issue is the lack of content. There's just not enough.

Now to clarify, I actually like the game. The weapon and class options as well as movement makes each of those few maps replayable in many different ways. No one class is over-powered and all the weapons are balanced in terms of usefulness.

The other issues like graphics aren't too big. (gameplay > graphics always) But the twitchyness is annoying. It feels smoother from your perspective but looks pretty choppy from other people's view.

The best thing is that the developers have the potential to fix these problems. They wouldn't require a complete overhaul to fix. Especially since they've promised the first DLC to be free, that gives me hope. I do want this game to be great, I've love to recommend it as the fun parts are really fun. But the bad parts are really bad. And there's a large amount of "meh" parts as well.

My thoughts exactly.
As I said, I don't know. But I do find this game quite fun to play when the issues aren't bugging me. Even when they are, the base game is quite fun. Maybe it's just something different. I like having that extra amount of moment, even if it's not what it could've been. I like being able to make my guns into what I need them for. I actually like the heavy, slow moving character in this game whereas I usually like the quick people. Mowing down an entire team with a minigun is wicked fun.

I do like it, I don't know why, but it's fun. It makes me rage like hell more often than most games, but it's still fun for some reason.

Maybe I need to get out more...