Okay, so let's get this out of the way: the single-player is not terrific. In fact, it's really just a handful of multi-player levels populated by bots and strung together with elaborate (albeit brief) cut-scenes that do little to conceal the campaign's ragtag nature. Of course, the plot, too, is undercooked: basically, there's an Ark (it is capitalized, you cannot get away from it). Some people--rebels, who don sweatshirts, camo, and various facial masks--want to escape it. Others--in this case, the police--want to contain those who'd wish to escape. Did I mention that the reason is because of overpopulation? These details don't really matter: artistically, Brink isn't much--just an amalgam of the Mad Max stylings made popular by recent shooters and the vague macho futurism that's been the genre's lifeblood since time immemorial.
What the game lacks in art design--as well as conceptual depth--it hardly makes up for in sheer graphical splendor. The id tech 4 engine, in this case, looks strangely dated; a strain not reduced by the weird tendency of textures to blur and recalibrate as you alternate between crouching and standing behind cover. Had this been released in 2005--say, as an Xbox 360 launch title--I can imagine everyone would've falling over themselves to acclaim it as the second coming of Christ (or Doom 3). It wasn't.
The gameplay is workmanlike--and that sounds worse than it is. Essentially, you choose a class--you can be an engineer, an operative, a medic, or a soldier. Soldiers are the bread and butter of the game, if you'll pardon the cliché--as far as I can tell (and I did not play this that much) their primary advantage is the ability to provide ammo to other teammates. Medics can provide health, as well as--crucially--reviving fallen allies by pitching them a syringe, and their accuracy in this respect suggests a profound athleticism manifest in the underhanded pass. Operatives can attire themselves in the clothes of dead enemies; an ability that lends itself well to completion of objectives (and might explain the curious absence of females here, lest cross-dressing in Brink become the next 4chan meme). Engineers. . . I didn't play as one, though it's safe to guess they might have a propensity for, say, decoding safes at a faster rate than their compatriots, or something equally absurd.
The experience of playing the game, in some ways, actually reminds me of Unreal Tournament's Domination maps--these are larger levels, of course, made to accommodate the lacing of multiple objectives--but the basic idea is not dissimilar: you travel with a small army, dispatching enemies and wresting key sites from enemy control. The main difference here is that the objectives vary: in one instance, you might have to capture or protect a monorail system (don't get too excited: this just consists of standing beside the eponymous rail). In another, as I found myself, you might have to place a detonator on a tree (to be fair to the game's narrative hijinks, supposedly a sustaining pillar) and allow for time to elapse before it implodes, bring down with it a heap of rubble. The maps, for their part, aren't bad, though one never quite shakes the feeling of playing in obvious UT-style prefab multi-player maps in spite of ostensibly being in, say, a shopping mall (this is the future, though, so I guess the player is supposed to assume that architectural eccentricities like turrets wedged in mall railings are just suggestive of the period's design quirks).
Lots of people will be asking about the game's parkour, but at this point I don't quite know what to say about it. . . like, am I missing something? "Parkour", in this case, seems to refer to the ability of our steroid-infused protagonist (or whomever) to slide, as well as launch himself over crates and the railings of upper floors, but I hardly see this as particularly revolutionary. One shouldn't think the game is lacking in terms of mobility--on the contrary, I thought I glimpsed a wall jump--but this feature is the kind of thing that might seem praiseworthy were the player allowed to discover it on their own terms, casually noting at some point that there's a relatively high level of flexibility in Brink when it comes to movement. Unfortunately, the hyping of this feature is likely to leave a lot of players feeling slightly gypped when they find themselves strafing in circles or ducking behind cover, for better or for worse exactly the same way we LAN partied in 1999. Don't get me wrong, here: the gameplay is okay; good, even, and a logical continuation of Return to Castle Wolfenstein's belated class-based multi-player and the similar territory charted by Splash Damage with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars'. Just don't go in expecting id's response to TF2 (an acronym that ought to be ubiquitous by now): trust me, you'll be disappointed.
A few quibbles--the character customization sucks. Starting out, you choose one of a variety of muscular leads who all look the same (and I have nothing against muscles, just monotony), alter them a little bit by adding green dreadlocks or a facial tattoo, and then send them off, with the promise, I guess, of getting a tophat (or whatever) to wear if you complete the single-player (which is ten levels, by the way--some consisting of a few separate parts; but none breaking the multi-player mold, and I finished two-fifths of the Resistance's campaign in an hour or two). The experience system is a tad facile, too: beyond the tophat (or whatever) you'll also unlike access to new weapons and audio logs à la BioShock (in case you cared about the plot), though unfortunately all the weapons are visually indistinguishable in the menu.
All of this, of course, is fairly overwrought, and the game doesn't do a good job introducing you to its mechanics: instead, you get ten or so long-winded videos; a lazy gesture that all developers should dispense with in the future, particularly when their target demographic is the criminally inattentive. Worst, still, is that the single-player campaign is so arbitrarily conceived that it actually reprises some of what are bound to be the multi-player's most cumbersome (if inevitable) moments: I mean, since when was lying on the ground with an angular camera angle waiting to be revived or respawn fun?
I can't claim to understand the grenades, either--like the class system itself, they're strangely understated, and seem to be deliberately handicapped so as to not interrupt the Quake/UT-style fragging that drowns out almost every other aspect of Brink's laundry list of features. There's a possibility I'm just semantically retarded, but what good is the class system when I'm able to complete the single-player at a normal difficulty whilst rarely (if ever) using my class abilities (I actually got an achievement for restocking my teammates' ammo a few times, something that always makes me feel like I'm Schliemann discovering Troy but may be unwarranted).
Lastly, I should say I'm hugely displeased with the absence of a split-screen mode in Brink--frankly, no console game that shirks this bad on its single-player commitments should be without one, especially when it's got antiquated graphics and is debuting in a month that PSN is down. Then again, what other than a reasonably well-designed online multi-player mechanic has Brink actually done right? The character customization, "Parkour", single-player campaign, and art design have all been built up to something larger than they are--a stroke of pre-release grandeur that may be Brink's undoing. Of course, the Salvation Army may still find salvation--particular fans of Splash Damage's earlier offerings, or old-school Quake/UT aficionados looking to rekindle the past without forfeiting all of COD's incremental innovations. But for a release this hyped up, it's a shame there's so little to say.
Just a first impression--history may not absolve me. . .
6/10
P.S. Anyone else think the dearth of females in Brink might explain the constant state of warfare the characters that inhabit it seem to be in?
What the game lacks in art design--as well as conceptual depth--it hardly makes up for in sheer graphical splendor. The id tech 4 engine, in this case, looks strangely dated; a strain not reduced by the weird tendency of textures to blur and recalibrate as you alternate between crouching and standing behind cover. Had this been released in 2005--say, as an Xbox 360 launch title--I can imagine everyone would've falling over themselves to acclaim it as the second coming of Christ (or Doom 3). It wasn't.
The gameplay is workmanlike--and that sounds worse than it is. Essentially, you choose a class--you can be an engineer, an operative, a medic, or a soldier. Soldiers are the bread and butter of the game, if you'll pardon the cliché--as far as I can tell (and I did not play this that much) their primary advantage is the ability to provide ammo to other teammates. Medics can provide health, as well as--crucially--reviving fallen allies by pitching them a syringe, and their accuracy in this respect suggests a profound athleticism manifest in the underhanded pass. Operatives can attire themselves in the clothes of dead enemies; an ability that lends itself well to completion of objectives (and might explain the curious absence of females here, lest cross-dressing in Brink become the next 4chan meme). Engineers. . . I didn't play as one, though it's safe to guess they might have a propensity for, say, decoding safes at a faster rate than their compatriots, or something equally absurd.
The experience of playing the game, in some ways, actually reminds me of Unreal Tournament's Domination maps--these are larger levels, of course, made to accommodate the lacing of multiple objectives--but the basic idea is not dissimilar: you travel with a small army, dispatching enemies and wresting key sites from enemy control. The main difference here is that the objectives vary: in one instance, you might have to capture or protect a monorail system (don't get too excited: this just consists of standing beside the eponymous rail). In another, as I found myself, you might have to place a detonator on a tree (to be fair to the game's narrative hijinks, supposedly a sustaining pillar) and allow for time to elapse before it implodes, bring down with it a heap of rubble. The maps, for their part, aren't bad, though one never quite shakes the feeling of playing in obvious UT-style prefab multi-player maps in spite of ostensibly being in, say, a shopping mall (this is the future, though, so I guess the player is supposed to assume that architectural eccentricities like turrets wedged in mall railings are just suggestive of the period's design quirks).
Lots of people will be asking about the game's parkour, but at this point I don't quite know what to say about it. . . like, am I missing something? "Parkour", in this case, seems to refer to the ability of our steroid-infused protagonist (or whomever) to slide, as well as launch himself over crates and the railings of upper floors, but I hardly see this as particularly revolutionary. One shouldn't think the game is lacking in terms of mobility--on the contrary, I thought I glimpsed a wall jump--but this feature is the kind of thing that might seem praiseworthy were the player allowed to discover it on their own terms, casually noting at some point that there's a relatively high level of flexibility in Brink when it comes to movement. Unfortunately, the hyping of this feature is likely to leave a lot of players feeling slightly gypped when they find themselves strafing in circles or ducking behind cover, for better or for worse exactly the same way we LAN partied in 1999. Don't get me wrong, here: the gameplay is okay; good, even, and a logical continuation of Return to Castle Wolfenstein's belated class-based multi-player and the similar territory charted by Splash Damage with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars'. Just don't go in expecting id's response to TF2 (an acronym that ought to be ubiquitous by now): trust me, you'll be disappointed.
A few quibbles--the character customization sucks. Starting out, you choose one of a variety of muscular leads who all look the same (and I have nothing against muscles, just monotony), alter them a little bit by adding green dreadlocks or a facial tattoo, and then send them off, with the promise, I guess, of getting a tophat (or whatever) to wear if you complete the single-player (which is ten levels, by the way--some consisting of a few separate parts; but none breaking the multi-player mold, and I finished two-fifths of the Resistance's campaign in an hour or two). The experience system is a tad facile, too: beyond the tophat (or whatever) you'll also unlike access to new weapons and audio logs à la BioShock (in case you cared about the plot), though unfortunately all the weapons are visually indistinguishable in the menu.
All of this, of course, is fairly overwrought, and the game doesn't do a good job introducing you to its mechanics: instead, you get ten or so long-winded videos; a lazy gesture that all developers should dispense with in the future, particularly when their target demographic is the criminally inattentive. Worst, still, is that the single-player campaign is so arbitrarily conceived that it actually reprises some of what are bound to be the multi-player's most cumbersome (if inevitable) moments: I mean, since when was lying on the ground with an angular camera angle waiting to be revived or respawn fun?
I can't claim to understand the grenades, either--like the class system itself, they're strangely understated, and seem to be deliberately handicapped so as to not interrupt the Quake/UT-style fragging that drowns out almost every other aspect of Brink's laundry list of features. There's a possibility I'm just semantically retarded, but what good is the class system when I'm able to complete the single-player at a normal difficulty whilst rarely (if ever) using my class abilities (I actually got an achievement for restocking my teammates' ammo a few times, something that always makes me feel like I'm Schliemann discovering Troy but may be unwarranted).
Lastly, I should say I'm hugely displeased with the absence of a split-screen mode in Brink--frankly, no console game that shirks this bad on its single-player commitments should be without one, especially when it's got antiquated graphics and is debuting in a month that PSN is down. Then again, what other than a reasonably well-designed online multi-player mechanic has Brink actually done right? The character customization, "Parkour", single-player campaign, and art design have all been built up to something larger than they are--a stroke of pre-release grandeur that may be Brink's undoing. Of course, the Salvation Army may still find salvation--particular fans of Splash Damage's earlier offerings, or old-school Quake/UT aficionados looking to rekindle the past without forfeiting all of COD's incremental innovations. But for a release this hyped up, it's a shame there's so little to say.
Just a first impression--history may not absolve me. . .
6/10
P.S. Anyone else think the dearth of females in Brink might explain the constant state of warfare the characters that inhabit it seem to be in?
