A game that had such positive reception before its release should never have been as bad as it turned out to be but alas that is Brink, a fairly terrible game.
There is close to no story and there is no character development whatsoever.
The actual idea for the story – a previously utopian city called the Ark floating above the flooded Earth whilst two factions, Resistance and Security, battle it out to gain control – isn’t bad at all but the way it was implemented was horrible as apart from a handful of poorly done cutscenes you would never know a story was intended to be in the game.
There is a cutscene introducing each mission but this is basically just saying what the goal of the mission is and no more is said, leaving absolutely no room for character development as the cutscenes leading the mission out are usually just people shooting and escaping, sometimes with a liberated person.
The gameplay isn’t as bad as the rest of the game with the shooting being fairly solid and the objective based gameplay working well.
The four classes work very well and are easy to get used too though you will probably use mainly one class as apart from being able to hack, plant a bomb or whatever else is attributed to another class, nothing else is notably different.
The AI, at least on your team, are bloody awful and will rarely do what you expect them to do.
It takes them ages to revive you even if they are right next to your body and they will usually leave it up to you to kill people or complete an objective.
This makes the game difficult if you are playing alone as the enemy teams AI is really good, completing their objectives by having pinpoint accuracy and actually doing something rather than just standing there, it’s like Splash Damage didn’t bother with your AI as they expected your friends to always be available to play with you.
This is also a problem as there isn’t even a multiplayer menu, you just start a campaign game with the option to allow people to join and because of this you will constantly be on the same 7-8 maps and doing the exact same thing time and time again.
The parkour, which is the selling point of the game, doesn’t work too well either.
There are 3 body types you can have which include light, medium and heavy and with these types you have access to more or less parkour abilities.
The light type allows you to jump over things, wall jump and slide but you will die quicker and are limited to a smaller number of guns.
The medium type has the same abilities with exception of wall jumping and you have moderate health and can use most guns.
The heavy class may as well not have parkour abilities at all but he has the most health and can use any gun.
The parkour gameplay feels clunky, unresponsive and the linear maps don’t provide you with much reason to extensively use parkour.
The graphics are pretty good but they don’t compare with some other games, especially some games in the fps genre such as Killzone 2 and 3.
I didn’t notice any screen tearing, pop up or frame drops which is good considering quite a lot happens from time to time but things are not as detailed as you would expect a game to be especially as the maps could have been really attractive given the areas the game was set in.
Some of the art in the game was really good, though, especially the drawings of women that are used to advertise various products inside the shopping centre level.
The opening cutscene was really well done too which made the story cutscenes look even worse in comparison and that Splash Damage aimed for the hype and to get big sales rather than putting the quality into their work.
I didn’t really agree with making the characters look like they were stretched or squashed, depending on their class, as the ‘story’ was meant to be serious but they made the characters look cartoony.
The customisation is also another selling point but this one works well and I had a lot of fun customising my characters, probably even more so than actually playing the game.
The selection of clothes and gun customisations were good but not good enough to warrant a purchase considering most of the other aspects of the game were lacking in quality.
I’d rather have had the option to create a woman rather than having more customisation options though as chances are you will not change your character enough to warrant so many options.
The audio was fairly good but none of the music tracks are memorable and I cannot remember a single one.
The gun sounds and voice acting were good with several dialects being utilised but there wasn’t much need for voice acting apart from the standard ‘Medic!’ and such.
The explosives sounded pretty impressive also along with most sounds that relate back to a weapon.
I found the lasting appeal to be pretty poor considering the gameplay, co-op and competitive multiplayer are poorly mixed into one experience and so I found myself getting bored fairly quickly and selling it within a week and never looking back.
My overall scores for Brink are:
Story: 2
Characters: 2
Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 6
Audio: 6
Lasting appeal: 4
Overall: 5
0 comments:
Post a Comment