|
Brink Review II by DJHellish
Freedom is a gift one is given (or not given) to do as they please. Many games have attempted to provide freedom of choice, freedom of movement, and freedom to just mess about. Many have failed to give their players freedom, either from lack of tools, lack of thought, or even lack of effort. It is almost impossible to give players the freedom to do what they want in a game, due to constraints of available memory, scale of story, or due to driving a narrative-based form of entertainment, where lack of direction leads to boredom and a decline in the playing community.
Brink is not one of those games, where everyone will say "I played that game, I was there. I enjoyed a milestone event, where the next 10 to 15 years of games will try to emulate the experience found in this game. "Nor shall it be a game where everyone will say "Why, or why did Splash Damage make this piece of shit?!" Many will say that it is just like Shadowrun, but to be honest this is purely on the look of the game. This plays more like Enemy Territories: Quake Wars, which is funnily enough the previous game to this which Splash Damage worked on. The same system is present, with the Soldier, Engineer, Medic and Operative. The same incapacitated system is there, where when you receive too much damage you and left with the choice to wait for the medic or redeploy with in timed waves. Brink is essentially ET:QW, but instead of being set in impossibly large maps which take forever to traverse, it is set on a floating city, reinforcing short-to-midrange combat. This game is a lot more polished than Shadowrun, and to compare it with Shadowrun is like comparing Emu Export to Heineken. Both are beers and look the same, but the quality of the Heineken is of a much higher standard. Brink, as a game is not revolutionary as Splash Damage is marketing, rather evolutionary. It is a game devised from a company which is sick to death of repetition of the many fps clones out in the marketplace. Splash Damage is a company who wants to make a game which is balanced, a game where not everyone can pick up the controller and say "Wow, I am awesome. I just sat in a corner of a map with a sniper rifle, and killed like 5 people in 15 minutes with zero deaths." Brink is a game made for all the people who want to play a competitive first person shooter without submitting to all the clichés abundant in this "one shot - one kill" community of COD/Halo imitations.
Brink will be loved by few, ignored by many. This is because the game does not cater to the players egos. It does not throw petty achievements in your face every five second for how many miles you have run, or how many games you have played. This is a game which will only reward the players who play as a team, who put in the effort and who play with skill. There are sniper rifles in this game, but they are not one shot death machines where you can shoot someone in the leg and their body explodes (GOW3.) There are shot guns in this game, but you can't sit in the corner of a room/map and expect to get one-shot kills (COD/Halo.) This game rewards skill and above all else, teamwork.
Many games reward lone wolf player behaviour. Run and gun, flank the opposition grab the flag and run. Or worse still, reward players for cowardice actions such as non-participation in objective based game modes. This game is all about objectives. There is never just one objective to fought for, meaning you won’t come across many matches where the opposition is guarding a flag with power weapons meaning, unless someone quits or makes a huge party foul you can’t win. For example, I was playing the third mission for the Security team. We were getting hammered attempting to get a robot to the other side of the map, and this was the only way there. Yes, the map allows freedom of movement, but for some reason this looked from various failed attempts the only way through. One quick glance to my objectives wheel, and I found a secondary objective to rebuild a disused staircase. Reequipping as an engineer allowed my team and I to rebuild the staircase and flank the opposition so we could get the primary objective moving again. This is the kind of details which are missing in many games now. Too many fps' focus on team deathmatch and free for all modes, with an abundance of pressure on getting kills the most kills possible whilst limiting deaths. This game throws those pressures out the window and says "Go get the objective", "stop sitting in your dark corner and help you teammates", "explore your surroundings and experiment!" The players who sit on the top of the leaderboard at the end of the match is almost never the one who got the most kills. The game is scored on experience points, and experience points alone. Every action that you do, as long as it within the parameters of teamwork will get you those experience points, whether it is for protecting an escort target by simply being within a few metre vicinity, killing an opposition player, hacking an off to the side terminal, or assisting teammates by simply handing out health, ammo, or boosting their weapon power on the fly. Someone who actually thinks “How can I help my team in this situation?” will usually be on the winning side, and earn as a result the most experience points. The best thing of all about these experience points is they accumulate to increase your level, which after time will increase you rank, which lead to more unlocks.
These unlocks are not much different from your usual display of fps/rpg games. You have your smgs, assault rifles, sniper rifles, grenade launchers and an array of side arms. These weapons also have the standard upgrades expect from your modern day shooter too like silencers, scopes and magazines of various sizes. There is nothing special about this equipment, apart from how much damage they do; which is not a lot! Many people will not understand, and think a grievous error in judgement has occurred. Why is this person not dead after I have shot them in the leg twice with my sniper rifle? Many players will jump up and down and say “Why did they not die? If I was playing COD, they would be dead by now!” Well sorry to break the news to you. This is not Call of Duty. This is exactly what Splash Damage wanted to avoid. How many of you have played a game of GOW, to witness someone pick up the sniper rifle and shoot the ground so they can us the active reload to increase the damage of the next shot? This is the kind of abuse Splash Damage has tried to avoid and have done a great job of it. They have enforced the decision to eliminate cheap kills in their game and made getting kills a game of skill. Unfortunately it is not all chocolate and red wine. Brink has flaws just like any other game; some of them are quite annoying.
The biggest flaw is obvious about 5 minutes into the game. Once you play campaign alone you will understand. The AI in this game is sloppy at best. Getting stuck on architecture, not using the environment for cover, and failing for the most part to attempt to complete the objectives is a major design flaw when making an objective multiplayer only game. If you are going to make a multiplayer-only game with bots, you better make the bots really intelligent. There is nothing worse than playing a game with stupid AI, so if you forsake a real story for bot matches, it better be the smartest AI I have seen in years. Yes there is some sort of story in there, but when I want to play a multiplayer shoot, don’t spit in my eye and tell me it’s raining. I know that there is no real story to be told so let’s just get to the facts. This is multiplayer with bots, nothing more – nothing less. And there is nothing wrong with this. Being multiplayer only is fine, and many players of the leading fps’ only play multiplayer. When Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out, around 33% of players never touched the single player story. So when a company says we are making a multiplayer only game, I cannot blame them. I can only applaud Splash Damage for a courageous effort.
The level design is stunningly detailed, with an enormous array of paths to flank your opponents. The SMART system is also delicious; making what would be dead end for many games, just another way to get to the objective. Being so easy to move around though and over obstacles, it is a wonder why the game feels clunky. Aiming takes more effort to do than COD or Halo, so I can see that a lot of players will get frustrated, and move onto the next game. But to be honest, this is probably a blessing in disguise.
Many of those fickle players who don’t get their ego burst will move onto the next block buster, leaving the players who gave the game a proper go and found that Brink is a beautiful game, with plenty to give. It rewards players who work with their team to complete the objective, rewards skill with the satisfaction that not every player out there can pull of an amazing killing spree without putting some effort in, and rewards players who push though some of the irritating glitches which can easily be fixed with a title update with a deep, multifaceted multiplayer experience. Brink is one of those games where if you play it with an open-mind and no expectations, you will be blown away with just how much fun can be found outside of your normal team deathmatch experience. Brink is a diamond in the rough, and one of those games when everyone says “Do you remember playing COD 12?” you think to yourself “I remember playing something a lot less boring and generic, I remember playing Brink!”
_________________
Lord of the LAN
5 Straight LAN wins 2008/09
|
