Brink: Failure or Death

I wasn’t really paying attention to Brink when it was first announced. It looked like just any other shooter. It had a cool art direction, but that was it. I knew little else about the game and there wasn’t any information at that point to really pique my interest. 

It wasn’t until a month before the game’s release that my interest in the game started to pick up. It was at this point when they started showing clips from the game, and explaining how it was played. It seemed interesting. It goes without saying that prospective gamers were talking a storm about the game, as if it were the second coming of Team Fortress 2. It was objective based, team based, and a move on for those of us who still played Call of Duty and Bad Company 2. 

In short, it was the next big game. 

The early reviews of Brink were anything but positive. Joystiq slammed the game for its mediocrity, and Ars Technica recommended that gamers stay away from it—at least until it was patched. The reviews were for the 360 version of the game, but I decided to give the game a shot, anyway. I don’t rely on game reviews to shape my opinions, and so I simply waited for the PC version of Brink to unlock on Steam—which it did, on the 13th, three days after its release in the US. 

Impressions from friends of mine were favorable. They compared the game’s cooperative aspect to Left 4 Dead 2, and called it more strategic than Team Fortress 2. They suggested that while the game was a bit hectic at the moment, it would improve as more people played the game and familiarized themselves with the maps and Brink’s gameplay. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think that most players will have the patience to master the game—I certainly don’t. The reasons for this are numerous. First and foremost, Brink suffers from a severe lack of polish. The game is, quite simply, unplayable on various high-end ATI graphics cards, which run the game at a sluggish framerate. I can attest to this, for the fact that I own an ATI Radeon HD 5850, which is more than enough to play games such as Dragon Age 2 and Crysis 2 at the highest resolution and settings available. 

Furthermore the sound tends to cut out on various maps. The developers at Splash Damage have acknowledged this as an existing bug and have pledged to fix it, but it goes without saying that the game is in an unplayable state at this point in time. To say that the game would have been better served by further development is a moot point, considering the fact that it has already been released.

What little I’ve experienced of the game was marred by the performance issues I encountered. Maps—split between sterile, high-tech environments and rundown post-apocalyptic trash dumps—were labyrinthian. The minimap does not have any navigational purpose whatsoever. 

Each map contains choke-points and requires character classes to work together—it’s one of the few things Brink does well. Unfortunately, due to the newness of the game and everyone’s relative inexperience, trying to figure out objectives and getting players to work together was as hectic as herding cats. 

Some may see little hope in the developer’s ability to salvage the game. Brink failed to live up to the hype leading up to its release, and it also fails to compare favorably to Quake Wars and Enemy Territory: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, two games developed by the studio prior to Brink. The game's lack of polish has ultimately doomed it—or has it? 

It was a risky venture for Splash Damage and Bethesda to invest as much time and effort as it did on a new intellectual property, and given the lackluster state of the game, it's one that could've benefited from further development—or have not been developed at all. 

That said, Brink isn't without hope. The announcement that a new DLC, titled Agents of Change, would be released at the end of the month—that's July 30—may pump some much needed vigor into the game, supplementing what seems to be missing from it at the moment. 

If Splash Damage is willing to put as much work into the game as its community, then the fate of the game may well be turned around. I've got my fingers crossed