When I first put Brink into my disk drive and closed the door, I got an overwhelming sense of excitement for what I was about to play. I’ve been hyping Brink to hundreds of customers and friends. I spent hours watching every video, reading every developer blog, and listening to every bit of information I could find.
I’m glad to say that Splash Damage did an excellent job. I love Brink, and even if it stayed the way it is today i’d still keep it and play it for quite some time. I love the classes, objectives, and how they all fit into gameplay. Zero complaints there. And who could complain about the customization? My favorite weapon customs to date, and the character creation is brilliant. I love that the scars and tats you select are permanent (mine are as well, go figure). The different body types are great and add a great deal of variety to combat. I surpised myself with my favorite body type, Medium. It’s also great fun to wade into combat as a heavy, slinging bullets everywhere and blasting through enemy lines. And who doesn’t like the light body type? It’s your Marathon/Lightweight/Commando only much more fun. I’d complain about SMG’s only except my CARB-9 is excellent in every way (and its my secondary with medium body).
I really don’t have many complaints about gameplay. All the reviews that slayed down Brinks graphics are nuts in my opinion. I love the visual style and how it interprets into the actual game world.
Brinks sound team also gets my award for the best sound design of all time. The sheer joy that spreads across my face as I squeeze the trigger of my Assault Rifle, and the resulting symphony of gunfire as I blast my target.
SMART works great in my opinion. I’ve encountered none of the snags that the reviews speak of, I just use common sense when plotting my parkour routes and everything works out every time. I can’t tell you how many obscenities i’ve screamed because my character was stuck on an ankle high piece of terrain in COD MW2. The movement system in this game is excellent.
I only have a few suggestions that in my opinion, would turn this game into my favorite FPS of all time that I would continually recruit a cult following to play for the rest of time.
Obviously your community screams for lobbies. I think if you ignored this issue you can kiss your playerbase and word of mouth goodbye. That combined with lag should probably be your biggest target.
My personal changes that i’d like. I’d really like to see my stats, in game. I know this game is in no way about K/D or W/L, but I still really want to see those things. Without them what are you ultimately working for? I’d love to say a huge part of the FPS playerbase sticks to a certain game simply because its fun, but I don’t think thats the whole pie. People want to track how they perform. We know you cannot win a Brink match without objectives. Killing will do nothing for you unless its combined with tactic and teamwork. Please Splash Damage, I wish to see my stats. I want to know at the end of a match how many kills I had and how many times I died. I want to know how many missions i’ve won and failed. Gears 3 even made it easy for us by auto-calculating our K/D and W/L. I’d also like to see an XP breakdown in the post-game report. Brink is brilliant in the way it calculates XP (from every point of damage you do to every second of an objective you complete). I love that aspect, but just one big blob of a number at the end doesn’t really show me or my team/opponents what i’ve done.
My final suggestion is rather generic. But I feel that Brink would benefit from some more generic game modes. Oddly enough as bland as they are, modes like Team Deathmatch, CTF, and King of the Hill add infinite replayability and allow players to showcase these characters they’ve raised from infancy into the honed battle machines they perfected. The campaign and what-if missions are great, but they are too structured and without another element to break up the gameplay people will grow weary of repeating the missions.
I can’t stress how much I love this game. It is definitely my favorite set of weapons and options to customize them. And I wouldn’t change a thing about the gameplay, I absolutely love it. I do feel that if you addressed the above issues along with the never ending battle to solve lag, Brink would become not only my favorite FPS of all time, but the favorite of so many other gamers.