Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Actual Review of Brink!

I love Brink so much, it’s hard to imagine how much I hate it at times. Brink is that crazy girlfriend you have who is absolutely incredible in bed but makes your life an absolute nightmare outside of the bedroom. If Brink were a woman she’d shave your cat and call it fashionable. She’d make you drink every night of the week and she’d give you a handjob in the high-occupancy lane of the highway while you’re going ninety just to see how you’d react.

I’m exaggerating, of course. Brink’s low points aren’t actually that low, despite what you may have heard. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Brink?

Brink is a multiplayer shooter released by Splash Damage which follows most of the traditions Splash Damage has lain out in their previous games. It relies on objective centered game play which demands the coordination and cooperation of a number of different classes in order to achieve or prevent the achievement of a set of objectives. Victory depends on how well your team coordinates towards these ends and how well you understand what the class you’re playing is supposed to be doing at any given time. Brink is full of tiny moving parts, so this last part is actually really tricky. Playing it correctly can be slippery, but there are few things as satisfying as working side by side with six of your teammates to accomplish an objective.

But that’s old hat to anyone who played Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Brink brings revolution to bear in the manner in which it asks players to gate their own ability to move and use equipment. In most team based shooters you’re provided with a set of guns based on the class you choose. Not so with Brink! Brink gives you the same guns regardless of your class choice. Instead you’re asked to choose a body type before the match begins. This body type won’t impact the abilities of your class or your ability to perform any objective-specific actions. Instead it impacts your ability to move freely through maps, absorb damage and equip weapons.

Light body types will fly across the battlefield, darting in and out of combat when expertly controlled. But their access to weapons is severely limited, and Light body types will go down a lot faster than their Medium and Heavy counterparts. Heavy body types, on the other hand, can carry some pretty sweet gear. They’re the only character types who can carry the high damage and big clip machine guns that any player who isn’t a Heavy will quickly learn to hate. They can even carry full size assault rifles and grenade launchers as their secondary weapon. To put this in context, Light body types can only choose between a variety of pistols. Medium body types, the balance between these extremes, are still relatively limited to a set of submachine guns and sniper rifles that are often ill-suited to the fast paced play of Brink. But Heavy characters are bigger targets, and they move at a crawl compared to other characters. They respond more slowly to nearly every kind of stimulus and, because of all these factors, they’re all too often the first target in a firefight.

The end result of this new system of equipment, body type and class selection is a very familiar style of play with some fresh new twists. Movement, as the tutorial isn’t afraid to tell you, is a lot more important in Brink than it is in other games. In fact you’ll be hard pressed to crack a well prepared defense or counter a well coordinated assault without a solid understanding of the mechanics of motion and the flow of a level. All of this still contributes to the pursuit of concrete primary objectives, several of which must be accomplished in order to win a match, and there are secondary objectives aplenty for players who want a slightly less intense experience at any given moment. But coordination of movement and the equal footing offered to various classes in terms of combat capability is a bit of a game changer for Brink.

It means that cooperation is that much more important. Every single class has some critical function, not only with regard to accomplishing objectives. Every class in Brink is a support class. A medic, an engineer, a soldier and an operative working as a team all have specific jobs in addition to shooting bad guys, and knowing what those jobs are and performing them well is more important in Brink than it has been in any other game in recent memory. Including Quake Wars, which was already quite demanding in its expectation of players to know their role. In Brink you’ll be expected to be helping your teammates second to second. Buffing each other, keeping track of the health, ammo and supply of your companions, all of these things are necessary. And if you don’t keep track of them you’re going to lose matches.

This is where Brink gets kind of frustrating. It’s difficult to say that a primarily multiplayer game is just straight out hard, but Brink fits the bill. It’s demanding, and it’s not going to tell you just what you should be doing at any given moment. There are certainly cues. Medics should be healing friendlies with low health, Soldiers should be tossing out ammo when they can and Engineers should always be buffing. But what about the special grenades and hacks provided to Operatives? What about Metabolism buffs available to Medics and the bevy of formation disrupting grenades that Soldiers have to choose from? How can Engineers use their turrets and mines to help out offensively?

Players who know their role expertly are a pleasure to play with, and make Brink a fantastic experience. Even losing with a good team on your side can feel good, the mark of a well-crafted game. But playing with novice players, or players who are simply uninterested in the mechanics of the game can be infuriating. Brink has plenty of these people – Medics who run past downed teammates without even thinking to toss them a revive syringe, Soldiers who don’t toss ammo to their teammates, Engineers who don’t buff anyone but themselves. And while it’s an overstatement to say that players like this ruin Brink for people who want to experience it, it does make the game frustrating at times.

It’s a petty frustration when you compare it to the learning curve of Brink. Brink is more than willing to let you flail about all on your own and never realize a crucial piece of information about the game. While it has a nice set of “Challenges,” what Splash Damage opted to call their training missions, following Blizzard’s lead in StarCraft 2, these challenges only touch on the basics of play and none of them, not a one, offers any useful feedback on how to play the crucial Medic class. And playing through the campaign alone will do little more than familiarize you with the layout of the levels. While that sort of knowledge is pretty important to Brink, given how many new ideas Brink brings to the table it’s far from the most important thing for new players to learn.

But that’s how new games work sometimes. When a game emerges with new ideas and concepts behind it it takes the community time to adjust. And Brink shows strong signs of growing into this adjustment after less than two weeks as a fully grown game. Sure, it has its fair share of problems, and new players will face some pretty serious challenges in learning the finer points of play. But despite all of these issues Brink remains one of the most impressive games I’ve played in recent memory, and the new ideas it brings to bear are well worth the effort it asks of you to engage them.