Customer Reviews

Brink

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I had the fortune of never paying attention to--or really noticing, for the most part--Brink as it was under development. Sure, I read one or two summaries, but I never had some high and mighty expectations for the game. So, come its release, I was neither bummed nor overjoyed at its less than stellar response by many people. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by its elements, and I found it somewhat alluring, in a way.

I had, years ago, played the game Shadowrun, which is basically the same old song and dance: class-based multiplayer game focused on objectives that didn't have enough bang for the buck. Maybe it was the fact that I never paid $60 for the game, instead opting to rent it, but I found Shadowrun to be an absolute blast to play--and I did so many times over. As for the popular game Team Fortress 2, I never really did get into it. I don't know if it was the far-too hectic combat, or the complete lack of skill that I had upon my first few playthroughs, but I found it very hard to jump in without frustration and annoyance. As for the game Call of Duty, I thoroughly enjoyed the first Modern Warfare, was severely disappointed by the stagnation of the second, and realized the series had reached ennui by Black Ops; still, though, the gameplay was worth of being applauded.

So a week after Brink's release, I had found myself still very interested in its concept. I have always loved customization in games. I feel much more connected to my character, and feel as though I am creating something of my own personal hero that can be anything I want him to be. Brink, having something of a combination between all of these good games with other good extras thrown in, was quickly gaining height on my wish list. Yes, I have heard the issues with the game, and yes, I have heard there's not much incentive to keep playing--but all of these, I can only assumed, can be addressed by updates and DLC--DLC that will all be free, mind you.

So, I finally decided to give the game a try before I took the plunge to buy the game. I am a PC gamer, and I know the game runs much better on a PC, but seeing as how the only legal way to play without buying it is to rent it, I opted for that scenario. After renting it and trying a few different classes and abilities out, my mind still wasn't made up. And it won't be made up for a little while longer; here's why: the game is actually very, very fun. The customization options, while somewhat scant for its promises of many abilities, were still very numerous, and enough to make me giggle with delight in all the different ways I could make the character truly mine. The story, though interesting, is a bit of a flop. You are thrown into what is seemingly a multiplayer match right off the bat, and only after it is over do you realize that you completed part of the campaign. The gameplay, however, is what really shines. The SMART system works wonderfully, making the combat more fast-paced and hectic, while still giving you enough slowdown to keep your focus clear. The variety of different class options and things to do is a fresh breath of air in a genre that is quickly deteriorating into Call of Duty clones. Sure, the AI is iffy, but that's nothing that should keep a person from wanting to play the game--especially a game such as this that is meant to be online.

A true gripe I had was the complete lack of a tutorial. I realize they show videos, and maybe I accidentally skipped some, if that's the explanation, but I was just sort of thrown into the action without one word of advice other than pop-ups on the screen--all during a game that literally cannot be paused mid-action to read them. There are objectives that you can't quite follow, even when they point them out to you. Still, it takes a few plays to really get a hang of what's going on, and for a dedicated gamer, this difficulty curve shouldn't be a problem in getting into the game.

So why am I still withholding my purchase? Two reasons: for one, I want to see a community develop. The problem with Shadowrun was that, while it was a fun game, it quickly lost its shine and fell into a gamer-less abyss quite quickly. I wouldn't want my purchase to be rendered meaningless. The other reason is that, to put it simply, it's true that this game has substantially little to offer. It has the formula right, and there is definitely possibilities for the game that could be seen to in new DLC, but for now, I can't risk the possibility that it will lose the developer's attention.

All in all, I understand how people feel about the game, and I completely understand the reviews it is getting. In all fairness, 6's aren't bad scores. It's the terrible rating system we have set up for games that makes this one look so terrible. Being stuck in the clouds with 8's and 9's really ruins the entire reviewing system when almost every game is given a score in said range. However, people have their reasons for feeling let down. The Fable series was a letdown. Dragon Age II was a letdown. To follow a game that promises a new experience and have it be a disappointment in comparison is not a pretty thing--especially when you pay $50-$60 for it.

So let that be a warning to anyone hoping to buy this game: rent it, first. Make sure it's a game for you, because it's certainly not for everybody. If it is to your liking, then still make sure to hold off until you're absolutely sure you want to make the plunge. An objective-based game such as this can only stay fresh so long as more maps are made. Without strong maps meant only for deathmatches, the game could possibly wear out sooner. Always be sure of what you're getting into beforehand.

My first issue with the game, was before it was released. There were multiple DLC's for preorder that were exclusive to certain retailers and you got a different one depending where you preordered from. If it was something cosmetic, like the skins, then that would be fine. But some DLC's also had weapons, which affect gameplay. I don't like this new trend in the gaming industry, but it's not like any of the publishers will listen to I guess I'll have to live with it.

Brink is actually a multiplayer game with co op. The fact that the game has co op might suggest that there is a singleplayer campaign. There is, sort of. It's not a scripted story based campaign, it's just you versus bots. This isn't too bad as the cool thing is, you can open the game up to the public, or to friends, and people can join to replace the bots on your team. This is really nice, in fact I'd say it's the preferred method of going through the campaign. The AI in Brink is absolutely awful! It's pretty much all up to you to do the objectives and, depending on what point you are on the level, the enemy AI can either be too easy or too hard.

This is a game that must be played with other people and thankfully, you can have human players on both sides, thanks to the free play mode. Free play lets you create or join a custom match. The levels are the same ones in the campaign, except there are humans, instead of bots on either side. The bots can fill in for humans until the server fills up. In free play, you can also set custom match settings, in case you want to mix things up a little.

Another reason to play with humans is the team play aspect of the game. Whilst you can easily head to a command post, change to the required class (more on classes later) to complete the main objective, you can't do it on your own, especially not with a team of bots. Usually only one class is needed to complete the main objective, but without a medic, you'd be dying all the time, or without a solider you'll run out of ammo a lot. There isn't much room for tactics, though, it mostly just involves grouping up and storming an area together. Whilst this may seem dull, there is plenty of action going on and no one is ever bored, not even medics as there's always something to do. The game lets you set objectives for yourself via an objective wheel, it's a really slick and smooth interface that's done really well. My only gripe with this, is that the objectives aren't always clear. For example, the objective might say "guard the door", but what it really should say is "plant explosives on the door" or "guard the soldier who plants explosives on the door". Fixing that, would make it perfect.

The classes. There are four of them; Soldier - refills ammo for themselves and team mates, can also plant explosives on objectives. Medic - pretty obvious, this guy buffs themselves and team mates health. The medic can also heal and revive team mates and do the same for the VIP in "Escort" missions. The Covert Ops can disguise as enemies, just like the spy in Team Fortress 2. The covert ops guy places "hack boxes" on objectives and must be protected whilst he hacks the objective. Finally, there is the Engineer. This guy can plant mines and turrets and buffs weapon damage for themselves and team mates. For objectives, the Engineer can disarm explosives planted by enemy soldiers, and disarm enemy mines spotted by Covert Ops. Only Covert Ops can see enemy mines. The Engineer also heals vehicles (non-drivable) in Escort missions. When you start the game, you make a character (that can play all of these classes) to level up and customize.

Customization seems limitless. There are countless ways to configure your appearance, weapons and abilities. There are 20 levels in the game and each one grants you one point to spend on your abilities. Abilities can upgrade the skills of each class as well as skills for all classes. Your appearance can also be customized with different clothing and the game, cleverly uses the players' character models in the cutscenes, which I thought was pretty cool. Weapon attachments can be unlocked from the challenge mode. Challenge mode doesn't take long however, so you'll end up having all of the weapon attachments in no time. I have no issue with that either, but you end up finding attachments you like and putting almost the same ones on all your guns. All the guns in the game can be customized and you select a default one (one that you will spawn with) for a primary and secondary weapon. You can change your weapons at any time from a command post. There are also three different body types that determine what weapons you can use and how you move. The fast body type has low health and can only carry light weapons, but moves and climbs really quickly. The medium, my personal favorite, has medium health, can move almost anywhere and can carry light and medium weapons. The heavy body is the opposite of the light. Lots of health, but fat and slow, however, he can carry heavy weapons.

Back to the movement - something I'm sort of impressed with, but not. I'm impressed with the way it works, it's so smooth and it feels natural when vaulting over a something or climbing up onto things... But I'm disappointed that they did not make good use of it in the game. The three things that make Brink stand out from the crowd are; myriad of customizations for your character and weapons, team play and the movement system. The movement system is nice, but I was a bit let down, that most of the maps play almost like any other shooter. I was hoping the movement system would spice it up a little.

The presentation of Brink is good too. The menu system is clean and crisp and very simple and easy to use. The in game objective wheel is also incredibly simple. The story in Brink, is that the city, "The Ark" is getting overcrowded and there is a plague spreading throughout the city. Or something like that. Truth it, not only is the story unimportant in this game, when you play the levels, especially the one with the shopping mall, it doesn't seem like such a bad place! Still though the graphics look decent, a cross between the colorfulness of Team Fortress 2, mixed with the grim reality of a war. Not that you'd notice, the pace of the game can be pretty quick some times, but this is generally the case with most shooters.

Despite having quite a selection of guns a lot of them feel the game. All the pistols feel the same, all the SMG's feel the same etc. I wish there was a little more variety. Having said that, this is counter-balanced by the attachments that really let you make a weapon your own. I've already mentioned the customization that's possible for the guns, using them though, is just as good. They pack solid punches, even the pistols, but don't expect too much variety, despite how much you can modify each one. Also don't expect anything new here, there's no "super cool" weapon. Whilst the guns may not be based on anything real, you have your standard shooter arsenal here, save for rocket launchers.

In conclusion, after 2010, I was skeptical about preordering a shooter, since all of them seem to be console ports these days. In the end, I'm glad I bought Brink, it's well worth it. It's biggest flaw is the awful AI, but that is remedied by playing with humans. I've seen some people complain that the scoreboard does not show kills/deaths, just XP earned and some people have complained about this. I personally don't care, for once! I really feel compelled to be a team member in this game rather than trying to rack up the most kills. After all, the game is designed in such a way, that that's the only way to win. There is a section in the game for DLC, and as of the time of writing there isn't any yet, but hopefully they will add new levels. What I'm hoping for are levels designed to make better use of the movement system, if they did this, then that would be the icing on the cake. But in it's current state, and despite the AI, which doesn't really ruin the experience, the game is a lot of fun and has restored my faith in not only FPS games on PC, but PC gaming in general. Just a little. If you haven't already, buy this game!

Pretty good game overall! I know some people like to get the bad news out of the way first, so I'll start with the cons. 1.) The game did not have as much content as I expected and the single player storyline was, well, disappointing. I was hoping to have more detailed missions and perhaps some decent cutscenes, but i guess that's too much to ask for these days. 2.) I was a bit put off by the fact that even though you can customize your character, they all have the same weird shaped faces! Maybe that's just a personal gripe, but anyway... On the pro side, THERE IS CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION!! Now that I think is pretty rad. Gameplay is pretty good, the multiplayer is good, overall everything is good. Not SUPER, but good. I like the game, definitely not my favorite by any means, but I think it's worth trying out. Now go have fun you crazy kids! :D

So this game is meant to be played multiplayer WITH people. I know that, and you should keep that in mind. But since everyone else plays battlefield or COD your more often than not forced to play with AI. The kicker is the game also forces you to play with AI to unlock weapons and weapon enhancements via playing with the AI, they did a horrible horrible job. Well, let me step back a sec, you CAN play with friends/people to go through the challenges but it's just you and that other human player no other AI to help you fill you numbers, and the computer always has 2 people more then you for the "challenges". So for the 2, 3 star challenges it's you and your buddy against 6 ai.
So I love a good challenge but not when the game AI is this horrible. So what do I mean, well they almost always get headshots, they can do a quick 180 degree turn head shot, they can shoot you around corners through blocks and my personal favorite when they get knocked back with a grenade, Molotov, or you tackle them, they can shoot you the entire time. The other big problem is there AI is way "smarter" or cheats way better than the ones your get stuck with. They use torrents, rez their guys, cover each other etc. Your AI is lemmings and retarded. Even with the new patch it still sucks. The kicker to all this is you have to go through half a clip to sometimes a clip AND A half to kill one guy, and they can kill 5 guys (human or my team ai) with one clip. The other stupid part of challenges is the respawn timer is 0, and in the normal game the AI respawn timer is almost always 5seconds, and you have to wait 10-15 to get back in the game. Also when trying to complete objectives like taking over a terminal, planting a bomb etc, you get a second to a second in a half lag before it starts, it's the game not the internet. The AI has NO lag and can defuse your bomb or hackbox in 3 seconds flat practically every time. Oh and the AI that "helps" you wont do objectives, ever.
So the good stuff, well it's a pretty good rip off of team fortress in the class dynamics but they this game is a bit more fast paste and the parkour movement is fun. The biggest draw backs are the ones mentioned above. IF you are lucky enough to play with humans it can be a lot of fun and it reminds me of the old Unreal, or Quake days but if you get stuck with the AI good luck because you'll be carrying the whole team. Also remember head shots don't actually count against the AI, you can do 5 shots in the back of their head and they "seems" to die quicker but one shot to your head from the AI and your dead.

Brink is a very good game for being the the first version with only one update so far. Theres a little room for improvement but overall the game is very rounded and even. The character creation is very complex which makes every character you see in game different. The only unbalanced aspect is the hack objectives which can waist the entire map without even getting close to completing. However there will probably more balancing in the updates. The game also brings back a sense of speed fighting that was made popular in Quake online and perfected in Enemy Territory Quake Wars. So in the end its a very refreshing change from Black Ops and Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Brink is the first FPS I have ever played where every single game is different..... I have never played a boring game. I highly recommend this game to everyone!!! Make sure your computer can actually run it though (if you get if for computer) because steam has a no refund policy.

Like many people, I was very skeptical about picking this game up due to all of the negative reviews that it had been getting. I decided to take the plunge when I saw the game on Amazon's Daily Deals for $20 and I'm very glad that I did. Now that it's been a few months since it's original release, there have been several updates that have helped smooth out many of the glitches that early adopters of this game experienced.

The online gameplay is very smooth, contrary to many of the earlier reviews, because the developers have made tweaks to optimize bandwidth. If I had purchased this game at its release and experienced many of the early issues (namely the online lag and tearing), I'm sure I would have ragged on the game a bit too, but it's no longer an issue. I've read a lot of complaints about tearing during the cut scenes but I haven't seen any of this

The overall gameplay is great too. The balance between the various classes and weapons combinations help to make sure that one particular group doesn't completely trample over the others. The objectives throughout the levels help to ensure this by requiring them to be completed by each of the different classes. The ability to customize characters is also a big plus in my book. 95% of the changes are purely aesthetic, but the other 5% (namely the body type) can have drastic effects on a characters ability to carry weapons of differing sizes and their ability to navigate over various obstacles.

The maps are beautiful and offer quite a bit of variety when it comes to navigating to a specific point. There are several routes to the different objectives which allow for enemies to be flanked if they're not paying attention to the different openings.

I feel like I really lucked out with this game because it is very solid, I picked it up for $20, and I got access to the 'Agents of Change' DLC for free. I just hope that the early stigma of the early negative reviews do not tank this game completely.

NOTE - The 'Agents of Change' DLC is free from August 3 - August 17. After that, I think the price jumps up to $10, which isn't too terrible for extra maps and abilities.

This game took FPS to a whole new level, but they just couldn't deliver. I loved this game because of it's concept, and it really is a great alternative to others like it(teamwork-based shooters).
A few gripes that I had about the game:

They should have included a larger package of customization and variety for weapons(including add-ons) and characters
They should have worked on the AI a lot more for better fluidity of the game.
They also need better guns. I wasn't really blown away by any of the guns, and it pretty much boils down to one good gun and the rest of them are way unbalanced.
The Character creation and outfit management needs more choice and needs to be filled to the brim with outfit choices.

I hope they do go back to the drawing board with this as their canvas and expand upon it to make something even bigger next time. I may get back into if they include some much needed(and hopefully cheap-- if not free) DLC that will liven it up a bit along with some patches to ease the AI experience.

This was completely over hyped, so I'm going to grade it based on what the publisher told us it would be, because I think they deserve that. My review is basically going to be a bunch of loosely related comments:

It feels unfinished in almost every important way: the levels, the graphics, the animations, the objectives, the abilities, the balance, the story, even the goddamn server browser (it's pathetic how sloppy that server browser is). The weapons are all so closely related, most of them are useless stat variations of eachother that you'll use twice then you'll go back to the better ones. It's like a mix of TF2 and Call of Duty but in the worst way possible. They tried to take the teamplay from TF2 and the gunplay of Call of Duty but it came out a less fun version of Call of Duty. TF2 succeeded with its gameplay style because there are almost no "point and click and kill" weapons like in CoD. That allowed the mobility of each class to play a significant role, while keeping it balanced and keeping the skill ceiling very high. CoD is basically about being in the right place at the right times and having good aim. Brink futilely tries to mix both. It tries to let you run around like a slow scout in TF2, but when all the enemy has to do to kill you is point at you and click, there's no point in jumping around like an idiot, it just makes you more vulnerable. Even if it was useful, the maps in Brink don't offer enough opportunity to use the "SMART" movement anyway. I had high hopes for the character customization, but to be honest it's useless and I think they should have spent time on actual gameplay instead. There is no kill cam shot and your teammates/enemies both have thick blue/red outlines and shading, so you'll never get to appreciate the customization. The A.I. is really really bad too, and it's disgustingly prominent in the single player "campaign" (it's not a campaign at all, it's a series of offline matches with bots, seriously, it's sad).

I know I sound bitter but I was really disappointed in this game. It's the first non-Blizzard game I've ever preordered because it looked like it would be such a great game, but it's a total failure. If you had no expectations and you've never played TF2 or CoD, you would maybe like this game, but you would still be wasting your money. I gave this 1 star, partly because it is simply a low quality game, and partly because I think the publisher deserves the lowest possible score for selling an unfinished, rusty game at full price.

I have been looking forward to this game for awhile and it is a lot of fun. I love parkour and it's a fantastic movement concept. I see a lot of bad reviews from people who play a lot of CoD or other warfare games. This game is not meant to be played as such. This game is a first person shooter, but the playstyle is very different and if you can learn it, the game is oodles of fun... If you can get over playing the same story missions over and over. The plus side is the future free DLC. In the end, it has great potential for a competitive scene and is a definite buy if you are a FPS fan but are looking for something new and fresh this Summer.