You just can’t get the staff. In the first six games inside Brink’s first campaign mission we only took one primary objective, and even then failing the second. To clarify, our team wasn’t up against any elite players. We were up against bots, and it wasn’t as if it was the bots that were the problem. If Brink is to succeed as an online multiplayer of some worth, then its players will need to break free of the ‘lone wolf syndrome’ that they have utilised for every Call Of Duty game for the past three years, or even for recent games such as Crysis 2 and Homefront; games were you can get by perfectly reasonably by playing away from the rest of your team-mates. Brink enforces teamplay – if the class that can complete an objective isn’t selected, or isn’t adequately protected, then it’s game over, basically. Wave upon wave of incoherent attacks will falter and break. The first few hours, then, were frustration personified.
Of course, it got better. It couldn’t have got any worse. Once a few more like-minded players had dropped into our server, things started clicking into place. And when Brink hits its stride, it really shines. Playing as Medic, Soldier or Engineer is likely to yield an avalanche of points from successful buffs – the medic can boost health bars and revive team-mates, Engineers can provide a damage boost, and Soldiers dispense all-important ammo – a commodity that disappears with frightening speed inside the environments of Brink’s futuristic floating city, The Ark. The best part about these supporting actions is the ease in which they can be executed – if you’re close enough to a player that requires a buff, then the ‘X’ button (or Square on PS3) will appear over them. Hold down the button, and the buff is applied. It’s context-sensitive too – Medics close to fallen comrades will get the same prompts in order to fling them revive syringes, all without needing to select them like in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Even better is the auto-run feature which sends your player scurrying after a team-mate that has run off whilst you were in the middle of buffing them – a mechanic that should become a de-facto standard for team-based FPS shooters from now on.
With three suitably well-balanced classes, each able to compete on a level-playing field points-wise, it’s a shame that potentially the most fun class, the Operative, feels the least useful. Lacking in any kind of buffs, the Operative’s chief skill is to disguise himself as fallen enemies in order to infiltrate enemy lines. But without being able to fire weapons or administer instant stealth kills (such as the sneaky knife kill to the throat in Crysis 2), its usefulness feels limited. Granted, we haven’t experimented with the Operative enough (these are only first impressions after all) but after completing the Security campaign in a single afternoon’s intensive play, it was easily the class we used the least; except when the primary objectives commanded it of course.
And it’s those primary objectives that make up the crux of the momentum of Brink. You’ll always know where the action is unfolding on any particular map, and a quick scan of the Objective Wheel (accessed by holding Up on the D-pad) will soon show you if not. Whilst this enables you to get in and mix it up quickly, and score hundreds of points in the process, it also invariably devolves into a brutal standoff, with players or bots dropping like flies on either side. We found ourselves lying on the floor far too many times for our liking; inches from the main objective, praying for a Medic to have hopefully hung back out of the line of fire in order to be able to revive.
The Security half of the Campaign was brief and slight, with the cutscenes being limited to short intro movies and brief interstitials between the completion of objectives. If there was a deep story in there, we missed all of it. But Brink was never going to about the Campaign, and its a bold and innovative move for Splash Damage to integrate multiplayer elements into the singleplayer, either by dint of co-op, or against other human competitors. The only trouble is, the implementation of those ideas has been so poor that we’ve not been able to test them out – every time we selected a Versus game mode for a Campaign mission, the lag was easily the worst we’ve ever seen. We use our Xbox to regularly compete in online multiplayer, and very rarely do we have a problem, but the lag has been so extreme as to make any kind of Versus play completely unplayable. Splash Damage tinkered with a few server side changes last night to reduce the number of human competitors to 8 (out of 16) per map to try and address the issue, but we’ve yet to revisit it to see if it’s any better. We’ll be sure to report it in a review, which for multiplayer games such as this, can only really hold any weight once many hours have been sunk into the live servers.
There are fantastic ideas here which deserve to win out over the technical issues though, so we’re hopeful that they are resolved sooner rather than later. But most players are an impatient bunch, and with so many other quality multiplayer shooters on the market already (and behemoths such as Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 on the horizon), it won’t be long before such crippling defects turn them away for good. Let’s hope that’s not the case though; we want players to get enough practice in to quash those lone wolf mentalities for good…
