First let me preface this before I get a whole lot of people trying to pollute what I’m about to say with irrelevant and untrue knee jerk reactions.
1: I am not and never have been a COD fan. I’m generally not a fan of COD rip-offs either. I despise Gears of War’s multiplayer and Halo seems a bit overdone for my taste. I’m not saying this to anger their fans as the games themselves have their pros and cons but I want it out in the open. My criticisms to Brink stem from an interest in the advertised concept and whether or not it was executed as best as it could.
2: I watched all of the trailers and developer videos, I pre-ordered the game and have played through each challenge and campaign mission. The in game content I am supposed to experience has been experienced.
3: I’m a major fan of Bethesda and Splash Damage in general. This is 100% only to deal with Brink.
With all that out of the way here are a few things I feel Splash Damage dropped the ball with. Also: spoilers.
First: The story is terrible. The concept was fresh and innovative - an ideologically war with limited resources and no external forces to interfere or modern day allegories to taint either side. I was really thrilled when I heard was it was about but honestly both sides of this supposedly gray area just came across as completely irrelevant and extremely unidentifiable philosophies. The Security’s militant emphasis on order and tyrannical obsession with retribution and violence throughout the campaign paint them as the bad guy… during the levels they are supposed to be the protectors of the Ark. All it would have taken to make them make sense (without changing any of the levels themselves) is make their focus on protecting the citizens. “These people are violent and are risking innocent lives, we have to put them down before anyone else gets hurt.” Now all of a sudden, you are a noble protectorate of the people again rather than a bloodthirsty nativist with a badge.
The Resistance was only barely better. While it was clear they were fighting for survival, a noble cause again, their goal wasn’t to become equals, it wasn’t to get resources. Hell, it wasn’t even to seize control and try and run things their way. It was to cram a couple hundred of their 45000 population into a plane and go see if they could find anyone else. Escape the Ark? Really? They came here on boats and they are organizing so that they can get a plane and leave faster? That’s just silly. I want to reiterate, I loved the concept, and I know this was never supposed to be a focused single player game but this feels like a huge missed opportunity. Possibly remedy this with some what if mission DLC later to give a more plausible ending for the Resistance and a better explanation for the Securities brutal ideology.
Second: Character customization is pretty mediocre. I love the art style but when you only really have about 60 different possible character basics (faces times skin color), your character’s uniqueness is only really in his clothing arrangement and even that’s kind of arbitrary. Minor complaint but a few more choices would be nice.
Third: When you make the campaign the same levels as the multiplayer, you sacrifice replayability. The idea in a multiplayer shooter is to make each match something new and unexpected. When the objectives become stale and the maps become old, there isn’t that basic game mode where you can just go and play Brink. You have to pick a level. Without having a Team Deathmatch, without having a Capture-the-Flag, or a sector control or attack defend map (not saying all those fit into Brink’s mechanics, they are just some ideas) you miss out on people just playing a pick up game. I played through both campaigns and I don’t have a favorite level. I don’t really remember any particular one in terms of goals on both sides except the airport. When I go to play multiplayer, I don’t think “I want to play day 3.” Please consider just adding some very very basic game modes in a pack or something. Be creative, I’ve played Brink a lot this passed week - I know you can be.
Fourth and Finally:
FIX. YOUR. AI.
Okay, I need to apologize for that. There wasn’t really a reason to “yell,” I just got a little excited. Anyway, I’m not talking about mimic predictable stupid response view “The enemy keeps shooting me too much” or anything like that. No what I’m talking about is the fact that the way the AI is programmed right now is counter intuitive to your game concept.
That’s right. Your AI is making the way you want people to play your game not work.
I understand that its easier to program AI to defend then attack. Attacking besides blindly rushing forward is just more complex. And I’m certainly not advocating making the AI capable of winning without you but throughout the campaign, I had to do consistently 4 out of 5 objectives for the mission independently or occasionally with covering fire. Not because I wasn’t staying with my teammates but because they weren’t competent. They stand out in the open, medics can’t figure out their fight or flight instinct well enough to revive you if you need it, they rarely go after objectives and even rarer still understand that the objective only gets accomplished if the player (me) does so. In other words they aren’t tactical. They don’t work with each other and they don’t work with you.
I’ll give you an example. Be More Objective ***. For the community member who might not have played this yet. You are in a room about the size of the airplane hangar from the aforementioned Airport level, minus the airplane and plus some catwalks. Spawn timers for both teams are instantaneous and their team is twice as large as your team. Your three members are programmed (as per the scenarios rules - I want to make it clear I’m not asking them to do the objectives for the player here) not to interact with any of the objectives.
Your team stumbles around the tiny map getting tore down by the enemy team, ignoring you when you are down, and altogether being useless. You must plant and defend an HE charge, repair a generator, hack a console, and deliver an suitcase to a deploy station. The problem is you are almost always vulnerable for all of these objectives. So while having to navigate from one side of the map to the other (granted its usually no more than 60 meters but still it takes a lot of time), you have to kill roughly eight enemy players while medics are reviving them, turrets are being deployed, and the enemy team is apparently programmed to advance (as I’ve been spawn camped by the AI several times when trying new strategies). And add onto that the fact that they respawn immediately if they do happen to keel over properly and are less than five seconds away from any given objective. With a team of three people who are largely incapable of killing more than one NPC per life, how are you supposed to be expected to interact with three objectives rendering your gun useless and your peripheral vision obscured?
The point of Brink is teamwork. On the back of the manual that comes with the game there are six laws of Brink. Number two reads: Stay close to your teammates. A team of lone wolves will always lose. Yet during this particular training mission (and don’t assume this is an isolated incident. This happens nearly every mission where your team is attacking during the campaign as well, its just not as noticeable because of spawn timers, and the equality of team members), you are being taught to be a lone wolf. To assume your team will not succeed unless you run and gun your way through the debris and do it yourself. Your teammates do not stay close to you and are programmed not to advance until you have. If the objectives were easier concealed, the teams were more balanced, or the spawn timer was slowed for the enemies just a little bit more the mission would be a very good teaching mechanic of how to make difficult objectives achievable. All three of the other “Challenges” were never impossible, just hard. This mode seems designed for you to fail (and while I have no doubt that it is possible to win if you are good enough) the entire focus of the gameplay is on teamwork and the one team work based tutorial you have, the AI showcase their inability to help you. Please patch them. ASAP. Fix this.
All in all, the game was pretty solid. I like it a lot, and I’ll be playing it for a long time but little stuff like this prevented it being an incredible title or a revolutionary one. Instead it was just good.
To everyone else that is not Splash Damage: feel free to comment and critique. Agree/disagree whatever. If you have a point you don’t think I’ve considered or something that you think justifies things I’ve identified as a flaw please bring it up. I want to hear what you have to say, just be respectful and please have a point. Sarcastic attacks don’t get anyone anywhere and this post is supposed to be constructive criticism for a dev that I’ve been a long time fan of.
PS: Splash Damage, food for thought on your next game: If you’re going to make a selling point for your game that it has a new-ish control scheme, include a tutorial. Even a bad one is better than new players stumbling through trying to figure it out on their own or having to resort to the manual or the options menu to figure out how to do something the game should’ve talked about in the first five minutes.
