Geekscape Games Reviews Brink

I’ve been waiting for this. Waiting patiently for Splash Damage to add a new entry into the halls of the FPS kingdom. Years of my life were dedicated to both Wolfenstein : ET and Quake Wars : ET. Years I would never wish to forget. The announcement of Brink  got me all worked up. Following videos, seeing pictures, conceptualizing the tech and concepts behind the gameplay mechanics. All this culminating in actually talking to a writer from Splash Damage. Truly exciting. The day of release came and at the stroke of midnight a large part of the gaming review community (the supposed upper crust) took a massive dump on it. Complaints in the form of conceptual issues taken as problems that should exist with everyone, when in reality it seems the issue lies more in the fact that the build given to reviewers wasn’t complete and therefore they weren’t pandered to enough. Who knows. For me, Brink is yet another chapter in what an FPS could be but will most likely never be again. A swell of new ideas on balance and character classing and team work that will be left to collect dust by those who would rather take the easy path of an arcade shooter. Damn you Call of Duty for ruining the advancement of a genre. But that’s an argument for another time (and possibly a person with more knowledge of company inner-workings). For now I am going to try and bring to light the many reasons you shouldn’t write Brink off and maybe think for a minute on the idea of genre definition.

Welcome to Your Playground

In the end, a game is a set of tools. These tools form a sort of ecosystem. The worlds that were set up by Splash Damage in the past have always held a sense of individuality to me. Nothing overly blatant or outright crazy. but always something in the details. Like how your character is able to move around the terrain. How character levels and advanced abilities are used. How certain classes and weapons interact in a group setting. The emphasis on trying to make the idea of working alongside others to create a sense of synergy more appealing than going lone wolf. I feel that Brink continues this bloodline well, and in a very understandable way. Splash Damage undertook a very hard concept. Taking everything they gave PC gamers, diluting it down to fit in the console gamer box and keep both sides happy. Crytek failed in this despite all the work they put in. Crysis 2 forgot its PC roots almost completely and catered near entirely towards the consoles, to the dismay of so many hoping it would continue the dynasty. Not entirely the case with Splash Damage and Brink.

Yes there were parts I didn’t entirely agree with, but on a personal level, not a holier than thou level. I feel restricting guns to classes and giving different benefits to size classes is better for balance, but I understand the decision as possibly being more a freedom thing than anything else. Freedom being a re-occurring theme in Brink of course. Freedom of movement. Freedom of faction choice. Freedom of tactics. Freedom fighters. Its all there. I feel some settings need to be there that aren’t. Skip videos automatically for instance. I know how to do it without using the game but I feel the option should still be there. No real biggy. But everything else seems fine. This, however, is an opinion not shared by too many writers.

Arcade-Shooter-Syndrome

Thanks to my visit to PAX East with the Herocast, I was able to gather more first hand knowledge on my long conceptualized blight that I feel is plaguing the gaming community as a whole. Arcade-shooter-syndrome, or ASS for short, seemed to be running rampant in the masses. Watching as people tried to get a grip on how to play Firefall, Crysis 2 and even Brink. Constantly trying as hard as they could to have the iron-sight button lock-on to their target. Sadly all games don’t hold your hand completely, and this buried a few K/D ratios right away. I almost felt saddened when I put a slew of ASS sufferers in their place in the Brink boothe by shutting down the enemy team while actively supporting my own and taking top of the scoreboard. Watching as the ASSes spammed their grenades hoping for a quick and easy kill, only to find that spam isn’t possible unless your classed and specced for it. Witnessing the droves of people declaring themselves as ASS positive as they ran headlong, one at a time, into a wall of people held together by the golden rule. Power in numbers.

I feel we need to put out a public service announcement or something. ASSes need pity, too. But they are the problem. All I saw when I read the supposedly thorough reviews on Brink were symptoms of a grander ASS-tastrophy. The grenades don’t kill whole rooms of people. The SMART system is meaningless. The bots are stupid. The timers seem arbitrary. Brink is just TF2 but not as good. Whine whine whine. Bitch bitch bitch. Splash Damage’s brain child was day one buried in ASSes. Grenades are weak, or are they just not your favorite game’s grenade? If your aiming for realism in grenades, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. beats out all with a grenade made to explode causing a slew of possibilities. Distorted vision and hearing. Overly affected movement. Bleeding. Death. The explosion fires shrapnel in all directions. The shrapnel causes the damage. Its how they work. Damage can happen to people very far away from the explosion. Not CoD or F.E.A.R. or Crysis. Those are arcade grenades, and Brink wasn’t exactly aiming to be an arcade shooter. Can’t just spam them? Go heavy soldier. Get the EZ grenade launcher and spec for nades. Trust me. I’ve seen them end game. They put the CoD nades to shame. SMART system meaningless? What are you smoking. Its the obvious evolution that all games have been kinda moving towards. Want to vault a wall in CoD or Crysis or BFBC2. Press this button, or in Brink you just hold the button and do the same thing in a seamless action. Where is the down side? Its not useful in combat? just because you’re an ASS and are fighting other ASSes who don’t know any better doesn’t make the tool any less useful. A heavy can’t follow a medium or a light everywhere. Trust me. I play one with a group of friends. They sometimes vanish from my sight and I have to make up for it by arriving for that “in the nick of time” moment. In combat you can use it to rapid slide to cover. Vault over it and move up as your team lays down some suppressing fire. Without it people would probably just say Brink is a clone of another game and write it off. Oh wait, they did anyway. Its TF2? No sir. I’ve put soooooo many hours into TF2 and it took very little time to see the obvious differences. TF2 doesn’t have level-able class abilities. I can’t give an engineer a personal gattling gun, and I can’t have a gunner sized assassin. I can’t have a sniper that feeds himself ammo and knows his way around a satchel charge. Just because the idea of “team” exists in both doesn’t mean they are the exact same thing. I’ve seen teams in TF2 go all the same class and win easily. Doing so in Brink will 9 times out of 10 end in that team’s loss.

Multi-Single-Team-Play

Damn ASSes… getting me all worked up. Moving on. Since release I’ve played this game in all its functions. PvP, Co-op, and even solo, and I’ve found things to enjoy about all of them almost right away. The AI everyone has an issue with isn’t that bad when considered in the grand scale. These aren’t set up fights. You’re not solo running through a corridor trying to kill soldiers in a bee-line towards your objective. Its a tug-0-war. A constant fight to gain another inch on the battlefield.  As far as I’ve seen, the bots actually tend to have moments where they do exactly what any good player should on their classes. Setting up satchel’s near objectives. Placing turrets in just the right place. You can almost learn from them. I understand Splash Damage’s plea to the PS3 community to play it in preparation for the network to come back online. Granted the AI isn’t peak performance all the time, nor is it to par on both sides of the fight, but that’s always been the beauty of Splash Damage. Their games don’t stay stagnant for long. Within a day of release, there was a patch on PC. Their was a patch day of release on Xbox 360. There was a patch two days later and not to long ago they announced free DLC maps and new content. I’ve had my tech based issue categorized and dealt with almost instantly on the Splash Damage forums. Their doing things. Not just sitting around.

Co-op is currently the way me and my buddies roll. Hard bots and all. We’ve had some of the most grueling and hopeless fights, both with and without other people. But this is Splash Damage. PvP is the name of the game. Right now, I feel Brink is still in its birthing phase. People are trying to break in the new shoes. I’m still learning maps, and even then I know that, being a heavy and all, is restricting me from truly getting to know the map through and through. I’m fine with this, but I’m starting to see the possibility begin to shine through.  Team blends that aren’t common. Multi-directional attacks timed flawlessly with flash bangs and grenade launcher saturation. Defense lines that involve an advanced guard unit supported by the core group. So many ideas, all valid on the new canvas Brink has brought us all. The time and effort to refine such an experience must have truly been incredible, where as most companies just rehash the same DM, TDM, CTF, KotH modes and call it a day and we all eat it up like the best new thing on the market. It still irks me that so many wrote this off without even playing it as intended: With a lot of other players.

The Price of Fun

The only point that was made that I sort of see as an issue with Brink is its price tag. 60 bucks on console. The PS3 network outage didn’t help much. PC players didn’t have it so bad with a $50 dollar tag. Less if you picked it up as a pre-purchase through Steam. But this is a thought I’m struggling with. In concept, a game is only worth as much as the amount of fun and playtime you get out of it. I can see myself putting my high tier 300 hours into this. As the bugs get ironed out and everything comes together with competitive play and stat tracking, I could see myself trying to achieve a place in a clan. Develop strats and player synergy. Create alt character built around different ideals of combat.  But I know I can achieve this. The PC platform lends itself to that possibility more instantaneously than console. Thanks to all the ASSes I don’t see this happening anywhere else. Just the same small groups of players dominating the masses of people who don’t do jack together. Truly sad. For them. Not so much for me. I’ll be over here, leaping over a ledge and railing an enemy in the skull with a heavy machine gun, and laughing the whole time.