The world of class-based multiplayer FPSes has a new contender. Brink seems, at first glance, to be a cross between Team Fortress 2 and Mirror's Edge. However, both of those games are highly polished, solid offerings. So there the similarity ends.
Brink seems almost to have been rushed out. The interface is sloppy and confusing, the much-vaunted character customisation features fall short of, say, actually allowing you to change the features of the face and instead locking you into a collection of a dozen or so pregenerated ones, and also avoids the tricky subject of gender equality by avoiding having any female frames. But OK, I can let that go. I mean, since all the changes except the size of the body (Heavy, Medium and Light) are superficial, and do nothing, surely I can at least make my character look awesome while he's fighti... oh. Everything's locked, and I have to accrue experience in order to open up new options. Fuck. OK, so I'll stick with the least shit out of the two or three choices available at the start, and get going.
The first problem rears its ugly head. In order to have a decent chance of killing anything, you first have to go through the weapons customisation screen. OK, that's not so bad, I guess. Except that clicking on a weapon doesn't select it, as you'd expect, it opens the customisation menu for that weapon. Great, I can add things on. Awesome, I got a "greeneye" scope (basically just a halfway decent crosshair) for pre-ordering the game, so I can actually DO something here. Great. OK, I'll just start playi... oh. These aren't the guns I thought I chose. Exit, back to the customisation screen. OH. You have to click that little circle at the top left to choose the damn thing, not just click on it. That circle that looks like a design choice, not part of the interface.
Hmm. So even before I've started playing, I'm not too happy. But I'm an open-minded chap, I'll give it a try. Incidentally, it prompts you to watch a mind-numbing video explaining to console gamers (I, by the way, am primarily PC) what team-based, objective driven gameplay is like before you've got to the main menu (but after you've struggled through creating your first Steve Buschemi look-alike character) for an extra 1000 XP. Like they've never done that before. I believe TF2 IS available on the two major consoles, right? No offence, Wii, but you're not quite a contender in that market, are you. Anyway, 1000 XP - I thought, sure, why not? Surely that's a lot. Not really. When an average match will garner you something in the region of 6-8000 XP, that's money to piss up the wall, really.
The video explains how to use your special abilities (such as throwing Molotov cocktails instead of grenades), for console gamers. It mentions nothing about the PC controls - I still have no idea how to do it. I think you press 3. This is an awkward maneuver at the best of times, and every time I've tried, nothing has happened. But anyway. The console method's not a lot better - am I the only person who finds it difficult and annoying to have to use the D-pad in combat? I mean, stopping moving is a GREAT way of ensuring you don't get shot, right?
OK. On to the game itself. There are four classes, being Soldier, Medic, Engineer and Operative. Soldier's about what you expect. Guns, class abilities that add armour-piercing rounds, a large amount of damage resistance. Great. I have little bad to say about the soldier class, really. It's inoffensive. Not great - it could do a lot more - but certainly not bad. Operative is a slightly different matter. The operative's main schtick is hacking and disguises. Disguises are fine, they're just the TF2 spy's disguise mechanism, with the exception of having to find a dead enemy on the floor to look like them. OK, that's a little more realistic, which is what they're going for. The hacking, however... first, you stick this "hackbox" on whatever it is you need to hack. OK, I get that part. Next, you access it with a PDA and... well, do nothing while it hacks FOR you. Why it can't do this on its own, so you can protect it (especially necessary if you're playing with AI team-mates, more on this later), I have no idea. There's no animation of you tapping away, anything like that. You're just holding it in your left hand, and a progress bar fills up. You couldn't have your secondary weapon in your right hand to ward off the filthy hoardes, no. That would be too much to ask for. So if at any point enemies do arrive, you have to switch to a weapon, kill them, and go BACK to the hackbox to restart the process. Thankfully it doesn't reset the progress unless the hackbox is destroyed.
I haven't played medic or engineer much yet - support roles of that nature tend not to be my thing, I'm a sniper at heart - but there's a dynamic between the operative and the engineer that irks me. The operative can spot enemy mines (which are apparently invisible to the naked eye of anyone else), but no-one but the engineer can do anything about them. They can disarm them. Fine, I can understand an engineer disarming mines, but a soldier can't SHOOT them to set them off? Seems a little odd to me. As for the medic, they seem to be a slightly sub-par combat class that can also buff health and throw "revive syringes", which I assume are adrenaline. Basically, when you get "killed", you're actually thrown into a L4D-esque incapacitation, where you get the choice between waiting for a medic to arrive and respawning at the start. A nice mechanic, in all fairness, but the 20-second cooldown of the respawn option is a little irking. Twenty seconds can mean everything in a game a s fast-paced as this is meant to be.
Gameplay - the main gimmick is the S.M.A.R.T. system. This is the button you hold in order to parkour your way around the scenery. Not inherently a problem - it's not geared entirely around this mechanic, like Mirror's Edge, so it's acceptable that there's a single-key solution for it, rather than the much more in-depth system of the other game. However, it doesn't work quite as well as the developer's demo video over a year back suggested it would. In that, you held the button, pointed in a direction, and you fucking went there. In the actual game, there seems to be a bit of confusion. If a wall is slightly too high to just pull yourself up, for example, you have to jump first. This isn't a problem, but the S.M.A.R.T. system should RECOGNISE that you're trying to get up this wall and jump FOR you. That's the whole point of a single-key system.
Now, back to the multiplayer. Or rather, the lack of it. I don't know if it's different on the consoles, but on the PC, I haven't been able to PLAY multiplayer yet. At all. I've not once been able to connect to a server. Apparently, the way to do it is to forego the auto-selection that so many games are fond of these days (I'm looking at you, Modern Warfare 2), and return to the self-selection from a list of servers that PC games are DESIGNED for. I can understand not doing that on a console, the interface would be clunky and awkward. But match-making on a system that's DESIGNED to choose exactly what you want to play? Bullshit. Anyway. I can imagine that this game will be a LOT better once they finally sort the servers out, or more third-party ones come online, as the AI would have trouble fighting its way into a wet sack of shit.
On several occasions, I've been incapacitated, and the medic (sometimes plural) that's coming to save me will, instead of carefully checking to see where the enemies are, run DIRECTLY into their field of fire and be instantly gunned down. Oh, yes. Did I mention that the AI characters seem to be made out of tissue paper? Anyway. The other problem being that in the one mission that I've had to hack so far (I was playing soldier mostly), I had to switch because NONE of the AI characters were actually heading to the hack point. NONE. And once I got there and started hacking, it took about five minutes before they finally worked out it might be a good idea to leg it into the easily-defensible room to protect me and the hackbox. Before that I had to gun down the prolific enemies that seemed to respawn right next door, in about half a second.
I'm also not hugely keen on the style of multiplayer, to be honest. It's one of those games that can't seem to differentiate between single and multiplayer, and as such the multiplayer games are just the single player missions with actual humans facing you. All well and good, but if I'm playing on my own, I don't want random people suddenly jumping in and fucking up my score, and if I'm playing multiplayer, I want more fucking control over what I'm playing. Let's leave aside the fact that these missions are based around days of a certain storyline, seen from both points of view (Resistance or Security), because you don't always fight both sides of a battle, so I have no idea how that'll play out when there are humans on both sides. Seriously, there are about four days between two of the Resistance missions, during which several battles are apparently fought because the Security side has them.
Long story short, Brink has a lot of potential, and could be excellent. It just... isn't. Yet. I hold out hope.
Thanks for indulging my rant, fellas.
Until next time, this is CSquared signing off.
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