Brink

[Zhukov]

Had a good go at it.

Stuck to single player so far. (I prefer to know what I'm doing before I hit the online so I don't end up being a burden to the team.)

All seems satisfactory so far. Only beef is that, while you can swap classes as will, you can't change body types mid-game. So if you decide to switch from heavy gunner to sneaky spy, you're still going to be stuck with a big lumbering thunder-thighs spy.

Also, the target-acquisition for turrets is a bit dopey.

[Grayswandir]

So I bought Brink used. Which means I have 6 days to decide if I actually like Brink before losing out on $50 bucks. After playing it for a few hours tonight, I can say, with certain certainty, that I'm not entirely sure what I think of Brink. I was forced to choose a side for the campaign and from what I can tell, to play the other campaign you have to make a new character and level them up again. I found options to change the clothes you edit for each side for one character, but nothing to switch between the campaigns. As for the campaign itself, I chose...Rebels or something. I'm not sure what my objective was, the lack of subtitles and the seemingly nonsensical conversations and plot going on made me just skip all the cut scenes I ran into. None of it seemed that important anyway. Each level in the "campaign" is basically just a glorified round of a multiplayer match against AI bots. Not that this is entirely a bad thing, it teaches you the ropes before you go jump online with other people, but it gives it a disjointed feel and really isn't much of a story based campaign. I treated it like the Unreal Tournament solo campaign and stopped caring about the narrative. Your AI teammates spout off lines and call out objectives directly into your headset if you have it on (you can turn this off if it annoys you) and your glorious faction leader counts off the time left and calls out objective changes and so on and so forth, also directly into your headset. I kinda like that feature, it makes it feel like you're actually in a game of Brink...or some such. I only played three levels of the campaign before I let myself get pulled online by my buddies.
Now I know some reviews have complained about the dumb AI, and I have to partially agree. The AI on normal difficulty during the campaign can be pretty fucking dumb. Your teammates will ignore you if you're lying on the ground incapacitated, they walk in front of you while you're firing, they stand in place, clumped together, shooting the enemy. At the same time, they can capture/destroy objectives and defend them (although they are fighting other AI), they will pass you ammo, buffs, and healing, and they generally know the layout of the map. I have yet to try the versus modes with other people (apparently you can fight AI there as well), but I did get a group of 4 together to play some of the Challenge modes. In Challenge mode the player team has a set objective, like capturing a point and holding it, completing a list of objectives in a set amount of time, or running from checkpoint to checkpoint as fast as possible, etc. I found the enemy AI to be pretty good. They weren't human smart, but they regularly ambushed us and would flank and back attack every chance they got while using their class abilities. I would watch them revive each other and heal and restock each other's ammo. They worked pretty good as a team together. Of course, this was a 3-star ranked level (which means something apparently, although I noticed the AI constantly making me a new butt hole in my forehead), so the AI difficulty will probably fluctuate at lower difficulties, but I didn't notice the previously mentioned stupids as often when playing against the AI than when playing with the AI.

More thoughts on Brink later when I play it more.

[Zhukov]

I was forced to choose a side for the campaign and from what I can tell, to play the other campaign you have to make a new character and level them up again.

What?

Just click on "campaign" from the main menu. It shows you all the levels for both sides right from the start.

[Grayswandir]

Really? I'll take another look.

[Healey]

Splash Damage's Brink is a terrific concept that was executed very poorly. The idea of a fast paced team and objective based game sounded fantastic to all of those waiting for Battlefield 3, and hey - parkour doesn't hurt either. The fact is that the game's inconsistent framerate, poor controls, and lack of heplful AI turn out to make the game hardly enjoyable in more than 10 minute bursts.
Don't get me wrong - it's a fun game. Receiving XP every 6-7 seconds and working together with your team to accomplish a difficult objective can be extremely rewarding. However, $60 is a steep price, and consumers in the 21st century expect for today's AAA releases to have either a ton of content (Oblivion), or a game high in graphical and gameplay quality (Portal 2). Unfortunately, Brink delivers on neither. With only 10 multiplayer maps, which happen to be the exact same as those used in the campaign, variety is lacking. When Splash Damage was bragging about "blurring the lines between singleplayer and multiplayer", it seems that this approach was more of a shortcut than a cool new feature.
The SMART movement system is genius at times, and a complete headache at others. Often you will be trying to from one platform to a higher one, and while you clearly know that you can grab onto it, your character slams his chest into the side of it and falls, even though you could clearly see above it. The lack of smooth and consistent first-person animation also makes the system much less appealing.

So far, Brink gets 3 of 5 stars from me. Unless the multiplayer is a miracle, I completely regret the purchase.

[Grayswandir]

So far, Brink gets 3 of 5 stars from me. Unless the multiplayer is a miracle, I completely regret the purchase.

This is why I bought it used. I wasn't sure about it.
I returned it earlier today and bought Mortal Kombat. As much as I wanted to like Brink, I really couldn't keep myself interested in it.

[Zhukov]

Well, I've spent a bit of time with Brink.

If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, that sentence would be: "Like playing Team Fortress 2 while eating a plate of fresh dog turds."

That is to say, it's not much good. It's buggy. It crashes. It's repetitive. It's not fun.

The single player is unadulterated garbage. It's just the MP maps populated with bots, bookended by cutscenes and strung together with an inconclusive plot. (Totally fucking called it!) Huge waste of time, money and effort for all involved.

However, the real disappointment is in the online multiplayer. It got boring in record time. In particular, the map design is terrible, always giving a huge advantage to the defending team. The core shooty gameplay is distinctly underwhelming and lacks variety. All the classes and character builds essentially play the same.

The customization is amusing to muck around with, but is ultimately useless because it has no impact on gameplay. Like I said earlier, you can't see your own character and nobody looks at each other's characters for any longer then it takes to decide whether or not to open fire.

S.M.A.R.T. is useless. It rarely does anything that a jump button couldn't do just as well. It does get a bit more interesting if you play as a light body type. So have fun jumping around for about two seconds, since that's how long the light guys last under fire.

I wanted to like this game, I really did, if only to justifiy the ridiculous inflated price I paid for it. But at the end of the day it was just too shitty.

[notsowiseSAGe]

Thanks for saving me $60.

[Count Roland]

that's the nice thing about consoles is you can just rent the game for seven dollars and not potentially waste fifty-three.

[Ragdollmaster]

Or you could lose nothing by, y'know, returning the game for a refund after buying it?

[Freshbite]

Or you could lose nothing by, y'know, returning the game for a refund after buying it?

Often it has to be something wrong with the product in order to get a full refund. The game being bad doesn't usually count.

[Zhukov]

Or you could lose nothing by, y'know, returning the game for a refund after buying it?

I would if I could. Sadly, I got it on Steam.

For $90 AUD.

Damn, my arse hurts.

And worst of all, I don't even have anyone else to blame.

[m3nace]

I'll definitely be keeping this as I'm having lots of fun doing some solid teamwork with my friends, but most of it really could've been executed better.
The smart system really isn't that useful at all and becomes more of an aesthetic touch than a gameplaywise touch (mostly), but I'm fine with that. Except for the fact that they wanted the light body type to be able to get to other places than the other classes, it doesn't really work that way. Instead you get to go places faster than the other classes - but it really falls short when the maps are so tight and closed. You wont be circling around your enemy cleverly, you'll just get shot quicker.

I would've liked it to be more like Neotokyo, where the maps had a bunch of places that were exclusive to the lightclass(body type here), and less closed levels. But that whole element of being a light class being too fast to get a glimpse of doesn't work - you don't run that fast and when you can't cloak yourself other than disguise as a dead enemy there isn't much of a ninja aspect to getting behind enemy lines. And when you're finally behind enemy lines you can't go hack that objective anyways, because it's guarded by half of the opposing team
And if you try to go for a sneaky kill, you'll most likely just get shot in the face right away.
I'd also like to be able to switch body types during gameplay too.

There is one thing though, that I think it hits almost spot on. It's that sense of being engaged in combat with bullets flying all over. You'll reach for cover and not die in the act, you'll be able to lay suppressive fire, guns don't instantaneously kill you and healers are actually helpful. That sense of engagement is something I've been looking for in a lot of games and it's great for teamwork.

[Ragdollmaster]

Or you could lose nothing by, y'know, returning the game for a refund after buying it?

Often it has to be something wrong with the product in order to get a full refund. The game being bad doesn't usually count.

That's odd. Where I am, you usually get a certain amount of time in which to decide if you want to return the product or not, typically within a span of 30 or 60 days or so, and you can get a full refund.

I would if I could. Sadly, I got it on Steam.

For $90 AUD.

Damn, my arse hurts.

And worst of all, I don't even have anyone else to blame.

Ouch. Well, it's not really a total loss. At least you didn't get raped by a bear![/reference]

[Healey]

Or you could lose nothing by, y'know, returning the game for a refund after buying it?

Often it has to be something wrong with the product in order to get a full refund. The game being bad doesn't usually count.

That's odd. Where I am, you usually get a certain amount of time in which to decide if you want to return the product or not, typically within a span of 30 or 60 days or so, and you can get a full refund.

At GameStop, if you buy a used game, you can return it within 10 days for a full refund. A friend and I once bought a used copy of Heavy Rain and played through it over a weekend, and returned it. Great game

Back to Brink - It seems when the developers were hyping this whole "combination of the singleplayer, multi-player and coop genres, it was really just a marketing trick. It seems like this "combination" was more of a way to cut corners and still sell the game to single-player enthusiasts.
Splash Damage hyped this game a lot, and now it seems like it was all talk. Developers should be more honest, y'know? They should have just said it's a multi-player focused game that can be played offline and cooperatively.