Title     Brink Developer    Splash Damage Publisher    Bethesda Platform    PC, PS3, Xbox360 Genre    FPS Release Date    20th May, 2011

It’s fair to say that out of all the different genres of game currently available on consoles, first person shooters are among the most common. The likes of Call of Duty, Halo, Left 4 Dead and their numerous imitations fill the shelves, but it’s very rare that a shooter comes along and brings something radically different to the table. Back in 2010 I had the opportunity to speak to Paul Wedgwood, CEO of Splash Damage about Brink – a game that seemed set to bring some freshness back to the FPS genre. But has it succeeded?

When starting the game for the first time, you’ll be greeted by a patch to fix various problems with the online play, which may be an indication as to its quality, but we’ll get to that later. After downloading the patch and starting the game proper, you are presented with a stop motion style video showing ‘The Ark’, Brink’s battleground/parkour enthusiast’s playground, being built up on a map. You are also introduced to the leaders of the two factions – The Resistance and The Security – and the motives behind each one. This introductory video, along with a collection of audio logs – unlocked by playing through the game – and some very short cutscenes which bookend each of the game’s missions, makes up the bulk of Brink’s story, which is a shame, considering that the game’s lead writer, Ed Stern, had created an entire forty year backstory for Brink and the creation of The Ark.

Once the video is over you are asked to pick which faction you wish to fight for, and are then taken to the character customisation screen.  One of Brink’s biggest selling points for me was the customisation of your character. The idea of a persistent character that you could upgrade and continue to tailor as you levelled up sounded fantastic. The amount of customisation options that Brink supposedly boasted sounded almost too good to be true, and you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true – they usually are. While there are still a fair amount of customisation options in Brink, there are nowhere near as many as other games that claim to feature extensive character tailoring. Even the early Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games provided more character options than Brink.

The main disappointment was the lack of different faces available.  You are only provided with a handful of pre-built facial feature sets to choose from, all male, and none of which have any additional scaling options for individual features, which means that you quite regularly see the same faces in battle, just with slightly different facial hair or maybe a spot of paint. The next flaw with the character building is rather an odd one and something that I can’t quite work out: there are individual options for headgear, masks, shirts, jackets and pants (despite the game being developed in Europe they still couldn’t say trousers), but there is no option for shoes. Seriously. The shoes your character wears come in a set with the trousers you chose.

Now, I know it seems petty, but it just seems odd that they didn’t include customisable shoes.  However, before you think I’m hating on the character customisation, I will say this: the clothing provided does look good and each side has a definite style to it. The Security styles range from the ‘good cop’ police shirt, to the much more unusual choices such as the ‘bug’ – a mask which looks like some sort of futuristic spec-ops helmet; the Resistance’s outfits, in contrast, are a range of tattered clothes and gas masks. The two sides also have very distinct colour palettes which is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, the characters will always look good, with the colour patterns being tailor-made to suit each faction, but on the other hand, there aren’t a great deal of colour options to choose from, which lessens any feel of the “near infinite customisation options” that Brink promised. I can see why there are set colour schemes though because Brink is a team game, so it makes sense to colour code both sides for easy reference in a hectic fire-fight.  As previously mentioned, the colours do work well, with Security being a mix of military blues, greens and camo patterns, while the Resistance feature a lot of reds and oranges with plenty of bright greens and yellows thrown in, giving them a strong Caribbean or South African feel. In fact, there is a very strong pan-global feel to the game, from the factions’ standard colours, to the voice acting and even the music.

One of the interesting things with Brink is that, depending on which faction you chose to play as, you will have a different version of the menu music; the Security’s version features a full orchestra and a much more regimental feel to it, whereas the Resistance offering has a softer, oriental theme, which further accents the game’s international feel. Other than the menus, however, Brink features very little music, relying more on the gritty sounds of gun battles and radio chatter, with just the occasional light motif to accent key moments – something that works well. The guns all sound suitably loud, and the occasional chatter from team mates detailing mission objectives make the game feel far more realistic than if there had been an epic score that kicks in every time an objective is met. As the old saying goes, less is more and this is definitely the case with Brink’s score.

The voice acting, on the other hand, does leave a little to be desired. Mid-battle, dialogue is limited to the odd “capturing command post” or “MEDIC!”, but, during the short cutscenes and audio logs it is extremely hard to become enthused. The voice acting isn’t terrible, it just lacks any emotion or depth, meaning that the little amount of story that was actually put into the finished game never really seems to have any feeling, or inspire emotion.

One of the most important things in any shooter is the guns. If the guns don’t feel right then no amount of gimmicks can save the game, so it’s a good thing that the majority of the Brink’s weapons handle very well. There is also a relatively large array of weapons featured in Brink, however there’s not really anything unusual, just the typical shotguns, pistols, grenade launchers, rifles and machine guns that you’d expect in any FPS. There are, however, several downsides that, while not game breaking, do seem quite odd, the first one being that there are about five or six different types of automatic rifle (likewise with pistols and machine pistols), but none of them seem to handle that differently from the next, despite the different stats given for each. The only real difference is that some guns can’t use certain add-ons, which raises the question of why Brink included so many different weapons in the first place. Why not include just one of each type that could then make use of all of the various upgrades?

Speaking of add-ons, to unlock things such as silencers, bigger magazines, red dot laser sights and scopes, as well as some of the more powerful guns, the player has to complete a series of separate challenges. There are four such challenges in all, each having three difficulty levels. The first two levels unlock add-ons, and the third level is only there as a leaderboard challenge to compete against your friends.  While this may not sound particularly unusual, it is quite odd that when you unlock the weapon upgrades they unlock for all arms at once, lessening the feeling of progressively improving your skill with a certain gun, and also adding to the feeling of pointlessness surrounding the inclusion of so many similar weapons. Call of Duty style weapon challenges, completed through normal play, would’ve been much more in keeping with the feeling of levelling up.

On top of character customisation and gun upgrades, Brink also provides the player with four different classes to choose between, with a host of unlockable abilities for each. These are all standard fare for a class-based shooter, offering engineer, medic, operative, and soldier options, with the usual skills available for each: demo charges for the soldier, turrets and mines for the engineer, hacking devices for the operative, and healing abilities for the medic. As well as class abilities there are also general skills that can be unlocked, from standard health upgrades to the ability to shoot grenades in mid-air. On the whole, Brink’s abilities don’t tread any new ground, but they’re solid, work well and, when on a team with different classes, really compliment each other.

As well as the ‘near infinite customisation’ hook that Brink’s developers have been touting, there is also a new movement system known as SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) which, as the name suggests, allows for easier movement around maps and adds an interesting parkour aspect to the game. The way SMART works is simple: hold down the left bumper to sprint, then simply approach a waist-height ledge to automatically climb over it. Holding down the B button while sprinting allows for a quick slide across the floor, and pressing A near higher ledges hoists you up. However, your character’s body type (which you choose between small, medium, and heavy) will affect how high you can climb, how fast you can run, and how far you can slide. Overall, the SMART system is enjoyable to use and surprisingly subtle, adding a different dynamic to often hectic gun battles. Although the animations aren’t always as smooth as they could be, SMART is a great system that will, hopefully, be worked upon and implemented in more shooters in the future.

SMART wouldn’t work anything like as well if it weren’t for the design of the maps, however. While there are only a very limited number of them, which may end up with Brink suffering the same longevity issues as the original Left 4 Dead, what maps there are have been carefully planned out with objective based gameplay and SMART in mind. Rather than the usual multiplayer format of having maps that can accommodate multiple game modes, Brink has dedicated maps for specific missions which, as mentioned, has left the game’s longevity in question, but also means that they have all been tailor-made to suit the current objectives. From defending a bomb disposal robot as it travels through a dock filled with containers, to attacking and hacking an airport safe, Brink’s missions seem quite varied at first. You realise very quickly though that they boil down to simple attack and defence, albeit with different classes being needed for the finer details of each assault, and, for the most part, it basically ends with the defending team winning.

The main reason for this is due to the number of bottlenecks found on each map; while they themselves aren’t the problem – there are plenty of shortcuts to be unlocked and, with the parkour element of SMART, there is almost always an alternative route – the problem is that someone seems to have neglected to tell the AI that these paths exist.  This means that unless you fancy trying out your ninja skills by sneaking around the enemy on your own, you’ll almost always be forced into a firefight that ends in wave upon wave of allies being killed. Speaking of the AI, it’s absolutely terrible. Granted the game is mainly aimed at multiplayer, but the AI is too sporadic. Even playing single player on easy mode is an absolute challenge because of the wildly unpredictable (and usually quite stupid) AI.

The whole idea behind the AI players is to make it feel just like you’re playing online (which might explain the idiocy). If the AI was really made to emulate that aspect of online play though, surely they would all be team killing and shouting obscenities at each other, but no.  Instead, they just blindly charge at one another and constantly change their mind about which secondary objective they want to carry out.  It actually makes you wish you were playing online with real people… but maybe on another game.

While Brink is a fun, albeit very short, single player game (in spite of it’s dodgy AI), taking Brink online is one of the most frustrating experiences ever.  Joining games takes a fucking age and there are no lobbies, so instead you are confronted with a boring “finding game” message, before being dumped into the middle of a battle that’s already in progress. While this could be a blessing for someone wanting spontaneous multiplayer with random opponents and no waiting or gathering in a lobby before a match begins, it could also mean getting into a session with a large group of friends (the game supports up to 16 players online, after all) becomes a bigger challenge than the game itself. I wish I could say that was the worst part about Brink’s multiplayer, but sadly not. Games have more rubber banding going on than an office supply room scrap, and there are constant breaks for host migration; on more than one occasion I was kicked from the game for no apparent reason at all. What makes it worse is that Splash Damage released a patch to fix the lagging problems and then cut team sizes down to eight players as standard, but neither of these things worked; online play still stutters more than Gareth Gates telling a story. It is a real shame, because in the (very) few lag-free games I managed to play, Brink was a hell of a lot of fun.

Pros

• SMART movement works very well.
• Character customisation is very varied, although maybe not as much as Splash Damage advertised.
• Music and battle sounds are top notch.
• Maps look great and are custom designed for specific objectives.

Cons

• Horrendous lag makes online games almost unplayable.
• Stupid AI.
• Weapons all feel quite samey.
• Objectives all boil down to simple ‘attack and defend’.
• Lack of maps leaves the longevity of Brink in question.

Summary

Brink is a flawed gem. A very flawed gem. The controls are superb, the pan-global feel of the visuals and music works well, the sounds in battle make you feel like you are in the middle of a guerrilla street fight, and the feeling of freedom while vaulting all over the map is empowering. However, the lack of maps and the lack of foresight to create dedicated servers has meant Brink gets dull quickly offline and hair-pullingly frustrating to play online. As much as I hope Splash Damage fix the online issues, they are already one patch and one in-game tweak down the line and connection issues are still dodgy at best, which is a real shame because the rest of the game is simply fantastic.

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