Brink Review

I've been looking forward to Brink for ages now. As soon as I saw the first video for it I was excited. It looked fun, innovative, exciting and best of all, for the patriotic, tea-drinking, empire-building, war-winning Englishman in me, was British. I was ready for it's release, stayed up for it, preloaded it, booted it up when it was ready. Unfortunately, Brink wasn't ready...

I booted it up, it ran beautifully on the menus, showing off my character model and the various weapons in beautiful detail, I was excited, it was all so pretty. I booted up a game, keen to get into the action.

Then my face melted off.

Never before have I played a game at release that has been so utterly unplayable, in almost every aspect. Brink decided that ATI cards were spawns of the devil and wanted nothing to do with them. The game looked terrible at any graphical setting. Everything had hideous grids on it. This was irrelevant however, because the game was unplayable no matter how it was set up. Frame rate was stuck at around 7 fps, which for a multiplayer FPS (which it is, it is in no way a singleplayer FPS, but I'll get to that later) is really no use at all. It took me 2 days to get it vaguely playable, and it's still running pretty awfully.

In order to get it to work I had to do the following:

Uninstall my up-to-date graphic drivers
Reinstall an old graphic driver (yes that's right, an out of date one)
Install a 3rd party programme that allowed me to change the actual fucking settings of the game
Turn off everything from shadows to motion blur and everything in between.
Force the game to actually use my fucking multi-cores.
Put the texture graphics up to full (That's right, it runs worse on lower textures)

It's still only running between 12-28 fps. Considering I've been running Crysis 2 on high settings with 60~ fps, this is unbelievable.

But this isn't the end of the poor release. Let's go through them all.

The Parkour:

This was one of the main gimmicks that Brink is based on. The ability to seamlessly manoeuvre through your environment with parkour, hopping over ledges, jumping off walls grabbing different ledges, and other ledge based nonsense. It is however awfully implemented. It feels awkward and is generally useless. It's been compared to the Assassin Creed movement, with one glaring difference. The Assassin Creed movement works. It's fun, it's useful, it's a fundamental part of the game. Whilst conversing with a friend of mine who also has brink he said "The Parkour either needs to be polished up, or just removed completely." For a major aspect of the game that the developers have been bragging about for months to be dismissed in such a way is not good.

The AI:

My housemates are starting to get worried/scared of me (well I say starting, it's merely just gotten worse). The AI in this game is so infuriating that I have had to turn off the game and leave the room on more than one occasion to stop myself from throwing my various peripherals across the room. It's frustrating for two reasons. The friendly AI is a team of inbred morons who seemingly spend all day attempting to eat their own elbows, they don't do any of the objectives, they stand around in the open getting killed, they are easily confused. This is except for medics, in a brief window of every game. Whenever you're incapacitated every medic on the map decides that you are a combination of the Queen, the Dalai Lama and a reincarnated Michael Jackson. They must keep you alive, no matter what, you are all that is important in the world. Screw the objectives, screw their own lives. They. Must. Save. You. It's not like there's a respawn sy... oh wait.

The medics immediately run directly towards you. Ignoring enemies. I sat, watching in disbelief for about 5 minutes yesterday, watching medic after medic run out into the open in front of the entire opposing team trying to revive me. I counted 37 medic deaths before I choose to respawn.

This is made worse by the fact that the opposing AI plays like the SAS. They work together, they use cover, they get objectives effectively. They're an unstoppable force of nature. Whilst you're dragging along the lobotomised children of Kerry Katona and the wank rag samples of Karl Pilkington. This makes the "singleplayer" missions disgustingly frustrating. Oh well, that doesn't matter, it's a multiplayer game and the singleplayer option is just the multiplayer campaign with bots. I'll just play multip...

OH NO WAIT TWIST: Multiplayer Lag:

Multiplayer is essentially unplayable as the lag is absolutely terrible. You elastic band all over the place, weapons take ages to respond to you actually shooting (at which point your target has elastic banded round a corner) objectives don't respond to your repeated attempts to capture/build/pick them up. You could just say that this is just a small detail of a release, that every game has lag at the beginning, but this is worse than any other release I've played in. Which is a lot, I don't have much to do in my life.

There's also no server browser, you just have to join random servers, which is another irritating console development.

Campaign:

The campaign is short and uninspiring. A lot of escort this bot here. Open this door there. Escort that NPC over there. Rinse repeat. I felt no connection to the storyline. I didn't feel like I was "saving the Ark". There's two versions of the campaign, representing the Security Forces and the Rebels struggles, but it's just the same maps in a different direction. It's a multiplayer FPS, you don't need to tack on a bad storyline and campaign just to make it reputable. You failed to anyway.

Gameplay:

Where to start. The actual combat is dull. People have a lot of health and it feels more like a point and click adventure as you whittle it down. The majority of the weapons are useless, with everyone opting for SMGs. The game tries to make it feel like you have to adapt to each occasion by changing class, but then contradicts itself by making you spend points in specialising in a certain class, so half the time you're running around with sub par abilities. The challenges are frustrating and feel more that a chore that you have to do to access all of your weaponry, not a fun challenge.

Vague Conclusion:

I realise this hasn't been much of a review, more of a series complaints, but that's all that Brink makes me feel. I was so excited about this game that I've wanted it to be good. The past few days I've been making excuses for it, trying to believe it's a good game, but when it comes down to it. It just isn't. The game is unfinished. At the current quality the game should be in Alpha testing, not released. It feels like they didn't test it at all.

This reminds me of a literary saying (I'm a writer don't you know) called "Murdering your darlings." It's a saying, coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, that means anything that you think is amazing, that you think is the greatest thing you've ever written, should be edited out, as it's most likely self-indulgent prattle. Writers start off thinking that everything they've written is the most profound thing in the universe, 99% of the time it's not, it's rubbish, it's very Mary-Sue-ish. (Apart from me of course, everything I write is gold). Brink smacks of a lack of this. They came up with an idea and ran with it. They kept adding things they thought were amazing, then thought "That's it, it's done, don't touch it".

Which once against proves that games developers need to be snobs like me who spend their time learning about literary sayings.