(First, I'd like to think Shane for allowing me to post here. It's my pleasure and a good start in blogging for games with him and the readers of this blog.)
Brink. The game itself, first and foremost is a well-planned idea. As global warming continues to take the planet with rising sea levels – the Founders, or the people who started the “Ark” project, developed a self-sustaining city of the future all synthetically, on a metal island. The reckless and rapidly degenerating life of the remaining land seeks to capture all of the resources of the Ark. The Founders combatted this problem by dragging the entire man-made contraption out into the middle of the risen waters. Though, thousands of
refugees who escaped the world outside the Ark continued to pile in through boats.
The Founders finally accepted this fate and divided the Ark into two separate districts, one being controlled by Ark Security – the prime police force of the city, and the other – parts of the city built by the “guests” or all of the refugees and was ruled by them. As the Ark grew, the refugees formed the Resistance, or a counter-force to Ark Security as their plight became worse within their boundaries of the now-defunct futuristic city. In order to return equality to all, as the Resistance Leader Chen believes, they’d have to take an all-out assault through Security-owned portions of the Ark.
The game itself based on its plot concept sounds like a lot of fun and a generally great game to play, right? Well, only to a point. And it is said point that this article is developed on.
PLOT: The opening paragraph is much of the plot in BRINK, yet I cannot capture just how cool and somewhat original the story just is – something you’d definitely have to experience and let your imagination take the reins. The matter of the fact is, for a somewhat well-developed plotline – the game itself pales in comparison, sadly enough.
GRAPHICS: The graphics system is ordinary. With modern optimizations like AA and texture filtering, there’s nothing out of the usual woodwork that makes the game exceptionally beautiful. Utilizing the Unreal Engine (as much as I don’t personally care for Epic Games, they do have a very nice base engine), the game looks pretty, and can perform better under system duress than a typical engine.
GAMEPLAY (/MECHANICS): I read in a different review that all of the weapons in Brink were the same, just retextured. This is (satire, but still somewhat) true – for a Light-build character. Try out the Heavy-build and you have several different weapons to choose from. The weapon choice in the game isn’t quite what you’d expect, but they get the job done.
The campaigns are a joke. I soloed the Security campaign in about three hours, redoing a level where time ran out (15+ minutes) and co-op’d it with a buddy in about two. In a free weekend (read several hours of gameplay Saturday night) of gameplay, a friend and I completed everything the game had to offer in terms of campaign or story, sans the challenges.
The actual per-level gameplay can be repetitive, but one thing about BRINK I do really like is how the levels are broken down. With the dismal AI performance, it’s less apparent in a co-op or solo game – but in a full multiplayer game, BRINK rewards you for any real play-style you adapt. Lone wolf? Sneak and parkour around the map and take capture points to help your team out – assassinate other stragglers. Team player? Help other members of your team take on the main objective and win the match as quickly and efficiently as possible. Every play-style has their own set of bonuses and cons.
Getting your gear and levels can be painstaking as the score you earn in a match translates directly to XP (a somewhat interesting design choice), which means the “leveling” of a character can take a ridiculously long time. The rewards themselves are well tailored, but not too many of them are new or original; a lot are adaptations of gear or skills rewarded in other content-unlock games. Something I like about it is that you will never have enough points to have everything which emphasizes multiple character creation. You can fully trick out your favorite class (mine being Engineer) and have a few spares – but that’s it.
Somewhat brushed upon earlier, the AI in Brink is somewhat bad. The effort put into optimal gameplay by bots is simply not there. They work… barely, but they work; however the AI itself is a general representation of the entire game, which could have used a lot more care and love. They’ll complete objectives, and even frustratingly enough capture the side objectives but they favor swarm tactics and have slow response times. Given enough time to respond though, their laser sight and focus will kill you quite rapidly and mercilessly especially if you’re a Light-build like I was.
The Medic is interesting, especially when in combination with the revival system. When you get knocked down you can choose to respawn in the next wave (ala TF2 style) or stay on the ground, incapacitated until a medic can throw you their Revival Syringe, in which you medicate yourself and stand back up – ready to fight once again. This system is both pretty cool and pretty irritating. AI medics will consistently disappoint and while you drop enemies, a swarm of good medics with lots of supply bonuses will mean you will eventually run out of ammo.
MUSIC (/SOUND): The ambiance created by the game’s music is probably my favorite part. The soothing music used to introduce one to the game captured me the second I loaded it up. The tones of the menu, the different songs that played at different screens and in different levels, and the ambiance of the game in general made me want to keep playing. Both main themes (one for Sec and the other for the Resistance) are distinct but keep a common tone and really play into their respective causes.
CLOSING THOUGHTS: Honestly, I think this is a research project performed by Bethesda. They have put a lot of thought and effort into Brink and the franchise, as unapparent it may be by this first game. I think in kin to Portal and Mirror’s Edge, the game was given a baseline, minimal production time and a tight deadline to release the concept to the market without taking significant losses should it fail. This is a risky move on any developer’s behalf and sometimes pays off (ala Valve and Portal/Portal 2) and sometimes doesn’t (Obsidian’s Global Agenda [which was well-designed in my opinion, but that’s unrelated to anything except this part]). Whether or not this will pay off for them, I am unsure but I do know that I personally would like to see a lot more full-scale attention given to Brink. It has the potential to be amazing.
