Review: Brink

(Pictures are not mine)

Sorry for being late.

Anyway, I didn't know anything about Brink until April and when I first saw it I had only one thought in my head...this game isn't going to do good. And behold I was right! Brink got a lot of hype when people started calling it "The next Team Fortress 2" as well as the large amounts of customization you would be able to do.

But honestly? For some strange reason I had a feeling that the game was offering a bit too much then it could provide and in such a short time and it would end up as feeling an incomplete game, which it did. There are tons of glitches, errors, and problems with the game that it feels like it only just game out of the Alpha stage of the production and skipped Gold Master.

When I played the game, my skepticism was no disappointment as I found many frustration moments with the games controls, mechanics, and even it's damn sound.

But let's see what they did with everything first before I give out my final verdict.

1. Graphics

-I don't care what some people say, I hate the graphics. I don't like the look of the game and often times it looks blurry from a distance. None of the maps are really that interesting and because there are so few of them you'll get sick of looking at them over and over again. The art of the battleground only tell you briefly what the two sides lifestyles are like, but there's not enough details to really give you an overall sense of the society of the ark other then one is the slums and one is richville. But the worst of it is the characters. They looks so muggy and chopped up that I just want to try and slam one in the face to see if I can clear it up.

The worst insult however is that they tried to make the characters look as close to the TF2 style without totally ripping it off. No seriously, take a look at some of the faces they give you as an option for your character and then look at the faces of the TF2's and you'll see a lot of similarities. It's like they took the TF2 faces and mugged them up so they weren't recognizable. Plus the body shapes of these characters just looks off, is that even what a body is suppose to look like? Ugh.

Graphics really went low key which is a shame because the game uses the id Tech 4 graphics engine which has worked for great games like Doom 3 and Quake 4. But when you look at those games and then look at Brink you have to ask what went wrong?




2. Controls

-Controls are just as messed up as the graphics. It feel so clunky when your aiming that it's like trying to hold a giant RPG for a pistol. I had to set the control system up differently multiple times before I finally got it to a setting I liked. Most people say that the controls on the PC's are alright, but I played this on XBOX so it's kind of differnet for me to say. Once I had the controls all fixed up, I had a better time playing. Still, the parkore style they were going for with the free running on walls and jumping that was praised so much, makes Mario jumping look like Altier's dives off the church of Jerusalem.

Parkore is awesome to watch, but unlike Mirror's Edge which got it right, Brink fails to deliver the same excitement or actual movement of what Parkore really is. Also, the shoulder button which activates the ability to do the parkcore needs to activate at really percice moments or else you going to mess up a lot. Trial and error in FPS's is something that you don't want to experience over and over again for any gamer because it's just frustrating. They should have tested the controls more and made sure that the sensitivity down right.

3. Gameplay
-There are only eight maps......the hell? Only eight maps I can play this game on? That's it? I really hate games that don't have at least ten to twelve maps when they first come up because I feel a sense of repetition on these maps that don't really fit well. And it's not like any of them are challenging, I mean I memorized each map easily as well as the other players and it felt like there was no real sense of planning or strategy when dealing with these maps.

Now let's talk about the game modes. First player is just sad. All you do is just destroy stuff, escort people, and hack computers over and over again. There is no real mission experience and it just seems like pointless tasks on a small map that you have to do later on another map. Plus the AI is so easy to outwit in those mission while my teams AI was just plain dumb. I had to do every task on my own while they kept going after command posts over and over again and not focus on the main objectives. I might as well been a one man resistance/security army.

Class are the same as you would expect, medic, demo, engineer, solidger like guy. Simple stuff and nothing to special.

And Multiplayer? Lag lag lag. That's all I got most of the time so good luck on that.

But there is some good.

The customization is one of the best I have seen. Weapon customization is a joy to mess around with, but I think they focused too much on this and instead missed out on their main gameplay mechanics which are one of the first if not most important things you must work on first.

4. Story
-The story sounds the same you hear everyday. World is in disaster, great utopia city made, however there is  side that has to live poor and now both sides are fighting each other for various reasons. For the Security your job is to defend the Ark at all means while the Resistance is trying to escape the Ark to find a new home. Yet there isn't much left to other then that. We don't get much of idea on how life looks on both sides and there are no characters to really focus on. It's a shame because something like this could have been an interesting story from two view points.

5. Characters

-Character customization is really cool and you'll have fun messing with it just like you do with weapons. But your character doesn't appear in cut scenes and the ones that do are more forgettable then remembering every element in the periodic table (Unless your a science lover). No focus on any characters so that means no character development,

6. Sound
-Boring, uninteresting, and the voices really sound way to stereotypical.

OVERALL: 1.5 out of 5

The game is incomplete, has glitches, no story structure, poor multiplayer lag that prevents you from playing, and not enough content to keep your attention.

This game didn't even come close to being the "next TF2" Brink falls of the edge of the knife and into the darkness.

We are Gamers and we are Legion.

Later