Why I Hated... Brink

I rent alot of games, some good, some bad. When I rent a game I can't bring myself to finish I'll let you guys know why. Learn from my mistakes!

I rented Brink honestly not expecting much. I had heard it was a class-based multiplayer shooter made by Bethesda (of Fallout fame) but knew little else going into it. The very first thing the game does is give you a choice of "Save The Ark" or "Escape the Ark". Immediately I was confused. These options aren't at odds with one another! In fact, out of those 2 options it would be beneficial to both parties if the ones who wanted to leave just left! It's a decision you're asked to make with no context at all, but even with context it's confusing. It's like asking "Stroke the puppy OR Play fetch with it", the only reason you would fight about it would be if you were a massive douche.

After this baffling choice I had pretty much already made my mind up about Brink (thankfully it kept piling on the terribleness and proved me right). I knew just enough about the game to know that it's story mode was simply muliplayer mode with bots, so I skipped the opening cutscene. After customising your character and weapons and stuff, you get thrown into games of Capture the Flag, King Of The Hill and Protect the Target dressed up as crack the safe, be the general's bodyguard etc. If you've played a multiplayer FPS before you've played these modes. there's nothing new for you here, and there was nothing new for me either.

Brink considers this an "action" shot... DULL

So, you've set up your weapons, you know how to play King of the Hill. You make your way towards the objective and you see an enemy. Great! You aim and shoot and OH GOD. WHY DOES IT FEEL LIKE MY GUN IS FIRING AIR BULLETS?!? The weapons across the board feel terrible. In a game like Battlefield when you fire a gun the sound is meaty, the gun kicks back and you struggle to keep your aim true because of the sheer power of the weapon and when bullets connect you feel like it's an actual achievement. When you fire a gun in Brink you feel like you're playing laser tag (at best). The guns have no weight to them, no power and barely any sound. It feels like the kind of wussy shooting game you might give to an 8 year-old looking for "My First First-Person Shooter".

The aiming too feels terrible. I played it on 360 and not once did I feel like I could keep anyone in my sights. I played the game for about 5 hours and almost every kill I got was from firing from the hip and spraying the area with bullets, this being my only real option. This is especially annoying because the bots are pretty good shots... although luckily when they see you they stand in front of you for a few seconds, allowing you to shoot them in the face a couple of times. The AI in the game is fucking awful. If your teammates aren't running directly into fire they're on the other side of the map doing fuck all. Granted they'll revive you if you die but ultimately the game would be more fun if it was just your player running around the map with no allies or enemies just doing the various tasks with no bullets having to be fired.

"Quick! Place a bomb on this already-open door! Because, well, we need to give you some kind of objective..."Of course the game has online multiplayer, but that was even less fun than playing on my own. Each and every objective has 1 and only 1 thing you an do at any one time. It's not like a regular King of the Hill where there are multiple places the "hill" can be, in Brink the hill will always be the same, the thing you have to protect will always be in the same place and the thing you have to deliver will always be delivered to, you guessed it, the exact same place. This means that the other team always just all have to be protecting the exact same area to win, which is incredibly easy! If you have 8 guys guarding the same area every time then there's nothing getting past that. The game also mixes bots and humans in multiplayer which means that if you're trying to coordinate an attack against the guarded area the bots will just run in there anyway and get gunned down in milliseconds. It's like the game was made by somebody who's definition of 'strategy' is the same definition of "strategy" Noel Edmunds uses in Deal Or No Deal to describe a middle-aged housewife's decision to pick an even numbered box over an odd numbered one.

The classes in the game are standard: Medic, Engineer, Soldier and Spy. They each have a set skill or 2 and you can probably imagine exactly what they are... because they're the standard thing every medic/soldier/engineer/spy can do in every game medics/soldier/engineers/spies are in. If you're even toying with the idea of Brink I would say just buy Battlefield Bad: Company 2 instead and wait for Battlefield 3. They're superior games where changing class ACTUALLY provides tactical advantages and where tactics actually do matter.

Tell you what is an underutilised (for a reason) reticle in shooting games: A massive circle. Thank you Brink, for making shooting games no longer about accuracy or having any funIf you're desperate to play Brink though just rent the fucker. Hopefully you'll see it's not worth your money, and if you disagree, feel free to chastise me in the comments... although I highly doubt you'll be anything but disappointed by it.

[Tiny dislaimer, I did not complete Brink. My views are reflective of the hours I played the game before I couldn't tolerate it any longer.]

Comments

[Florian]

Rage Quit agrees with you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPgIiZt7v0