Brink – Game Analysis & Review

Brink – Game Analysis & Review

By Patrick Newman

Developer: Splash Damage

Rating: ESRB: T

Splash Damage’s Brink is wildly ambitious, thrusting the gamer into a post-apocalyptic battle-scape where the single-player, story-driven campaign paddles in the same direction as the multiplayer mode, with both campaigns complementary to each other. The various narrative threads tie together into a singular experience in which customization and leveling up plays a huge role in marching your squad of misanthropes to victory. Brink isn’t a shooter for everyone, but that is one of its great strengths – for as much in the game that doesn’t work, it breaks new ground in its form and design, and opens up the floor for further innovation in the pairing of multiplayer and single-player modes seamlessly.

The outset of Brink provides players with a choice – to fight as a citizen for the Ark, a man-made archipelago and refuge for a population of displaced innocents, or as a member of the Resistance, which wants nothing more than to tear the ArkArk down to its foundations in the pursuit of new populations and dryer land. In the game’s backstory, the was constructed initially as an experiment, but in the aftermath of an ecological meltdown that raised the planet’s water level from 70 to 90 percent; it became a bastion for human life against a world full of formidable aggressors.

The game provides players with four interdependent soldier classes, each with three body types that lend themselves to specific forms of movement and fighting, to create a variety of potential combat scenarios as well as unique methods to support your allies. Since completing objectives in each class (there are engineers, medics, soldiers and operatives) gains the player special abilities, XP and wardrobe options, there is plenty of replay value inherent in Brink’s narrative. The body types are indeed the only aspect of character creation that has any bearing on the gameplay, with heavy characters having the most health and the largest weapons, and lightweight characters packing little in the way of firepower but tackling objectives at the highest speeds.

The movement of characters within the game instantly calls to mind the parkour-influenced quasi-shooter Mirror’s Edge, in which the game’s protagonist Faith traversed the tall walls and thin railings of skyscrapers to accomplish objectives. Here, the game redefines parkour as the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system, and gives those players with the most physical dexterity an edge in combat scenarios. And unlike Mirror’s Edge, one can roam a level with the flexibility of a Cirque de Soleil acrobat without compromising firepower.

Before each match, players are submitted to extensive tutorial videos designed to bring novices up to speed on the complex rules of the Brink battlefields. The videos prove helpful to a style of gameplay that is new to so many people’s eyes, even if they don’t do much in the way of constructing an engaging story. Every map, except for the game’s four Challenge maps, takes place in one of the eight main campaign maps, in which the players, ranks, and the presence of bots can be customized. Choosing Brink’s free play mode is most conducive to connecting to a game with a healthy amount of human players – an important detail to remember in a game that has so many issues with lag and connectivity.

The game reaches its lofty potential in those moments when an arena full of human players are battling it out over a hitch-free connection, but even those with fast connections can often be the victims of extensive lag that renders the online action jerky and unplayable. These shortcomings are really a shame when one considers all that Brink has going for it. The shooter’s story takes place in a unique environment that doesn’t seem to be cribbing from other mainstream games, the customization options make getting into the experience fun and varied, and the design and graphics are new, unusual and a blast to watch unfold. When Brink’s fluid, intense gameplay trumps the multiplayer connectivity issues that tend to sink the ship, the game can be a real blast.
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