Brink is such an odd game. At times is feels great, when you in a good team of human and Ai players, everyone knows their roles and it can be quite the experience. Other and more frequent times you’re stuck with slow thinking Ai who are more concerned with pointless missions than the main one. Brink is a decent package but also a disappointing one so without further due this is my personal Top 10 disappointments/annoyances about Brink.
- It blurs the lines between Single player and Multiplayer…… Badly!
Leading up to the games release this sounded really clever and intuitive of the developers. The developers spent a lot of time talking about the story and the games world. This gave us all confidence, looked like a great story with a definite chance of great team based multiplayer. In reality it’s a twenty second cutscene at the start of a multiplayer match. Perhaps it could have worked in another way but for me it proves that a good old fashioned single player is the way to go, or maybe Co-op. But this is just bad. The characters are nameless and we don’t care for them. There are audio diaries that can be found in the main menu but that’s just seems like a copout. The idea was good with there being no true bad guys in the story with both sides having legitimate dilemmas but it failed in execution. Why not let us see the struggle of the guests or let us freely explore the ark.
- Choosing a faction in the war is pointless
One main reason being the story is very weak. But the reason that annoyed and baffled me was after choosing a side you are then taken to a menu screen that displays both the resistance and security missions meaning you can simply play any mission at any time in any order. That’s….. Just….. Stupid.
- Lack of Maps and game modes
The game was released with 8 maps. And 4 challenge rooms. Yep that’s what £40 is worth now a days apparently. Even if the gameplay is solid it’s not worth that much. It feels like a £20 downloadable title, which it is more suitably priced as now.
- Guns
At first it sounds like a great and fair idea. Don’t you just hate when you are killed unfairly by someone because they are using a powerful weapon? Up to Brink’s release it seemed like the game was going to be incredibly fair to all players. One of these touches was that there would be no amazing gun everyone would spam with. Also SD has the power to change any guns stats at any time without need of a software update. However since all guns are similar none really stand out and you end up either sticking with a set you like or simply changing your load out for variation sake. Why not allow us to unlock powerful weapons. There is a good filter so high level players only ever play other high level players so why not give them cool powerful guns. The lower players would not be affected by this.
- Ai is stupid and incompetent
“I’m going for the Health Command Post!” No! Help me with the main objective you fool! This happens a lot when playing with the Ai. What’s more annoying is that the Ai at times can be rather good and help you but sometimes they are simply incompetent fools. I struggle to see how a game which is about teamwork doesn’t have impeccable team players Ai. At times you may have to tackle main objectives all by yourself. Enemy Ai is rather decent as they seem to know exactly what to do and when to do it. This makes for a frustrating “Single player,” Although team Ai seems improved than to what it was in the games launch weeks so with a few real players on your team the Ai’s blunders can be kept at bay but if playing by yourself don’t bother.
- No lobby system or good matchmaking
The game only supports drop in drop out form of game connectivity. This fine if you’re playing alone or have you match opened up for co-op cause then your friends can join you. But searching for competitive matches can be annoying. The best way is to open you search as much as you can in hope to find someone. A majority of the time you will join match with a decent number of people but other times the game throws you into a match by yourself in hope you stay so others will join you. Why not have a “Quick match” button or a lobby system? That way matches could be more populated. I’ve only ever played one match when everyone was human. LAG isn’t an issue anymore and is very rare so that’s a plus.
- Stupid tutorial/ challenge mode
This is simply stupid. There are 4 challenge rooms which serve as tutorials. Great but they aren’t just that. You have to play them in order to unlock all weapons and attachments. Why didn’t just connect all the attachments with your characters levels? It’s like the developers knew the game was light on content so they did this to pad out the games length time. It’s cheeky and frustrating as the challenge increase in difficulty as you level up so you have to do all 3 levels of each 4 challenge rooms first before even playing the real game in order to have everything.
- Lack of game modes
Basically one mode which is the objective based gameplay and there is a stopwatch mode which puts a timer on the one exciting mode. Teams will either attack or defend an area. This for £40 is a complete rip off. You can burn through the content in a week. Even with the DLC the game is still light on content. The game needs more modes. Maybe neutral ground maps where teams have to attack and defend.
- SMART isn’t implemented well
SMART was a great idea and half the time works in the game. The other half you’re running into walls and things you never intended to climb or mantel intentionally. Also apart from one or two maps SMART is nothing more than a run button. The game isn’t very clear on where SMART can used and the maps layout and setting don’t lend themselves well to it.
- Being on defence is dull
When on the offense in a game it can be a really enjoyable experience, everyone uses their abilities and all classes are used well. On defence all you have to do is wait for the attacking side to come in and try to defend. So you’re basically holding a choke point. This makes the operative class useless as it is no good for defence. It can become repetitive as it just devolves down to simply killing.
Slight Rant
The game can feel like teamwork for dummies at times as the objective wheel tells you exactly what to do. Also you are rewarded XP for everything but less for simply killing which is great but at the same time its only there so the dumb XP hording type help the team. The game was marketed to too many people and was promising the heavens which made it seem like a major failure and disappointing. Also what annoys me is the fact it was delayed a year anyway which made us all feel that they were simply tweaking the final product.
Closing thoughts
Overall however Brink has improved in quality since its launch as SD have supported it, maybe in a years’ time it will have much more content and will be a great game. As of now however it’s a decent game that is on the up.
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