Back in 2001 Return to Castle Wolfenstein hit store shelves, to high reviews and great sales. It is to this day one of the games that often comes up when the “Greatest FPS ever” argument begins. And rightfully so. One of the reasons it is brought up though is not for the main game itself. It’s for the multiplayer, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, developed by Splash Damage (unlike the singleplayer.)
In “Enemy Territory” two teams split into various classes fought to destroy or defend objectives. It was great, and some people still play it to this day.
Splash Damage didn’t do much for a while after that. Continuing to partner with ID, they made the multiplayer for Doom 3, which was nothing spectacular. But then they were given another beloved franchise to play with. This time it was Quake.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars took the Wolfenstein established multiplayer and built upon every aspect of it. Better classes with unlocks, more incentives to work as a team, more varied objectives and the addition of side-objectives that could give either the defending or attacking teams the advantage. Overall it was a fantastic game as well and was generally loved and again, people still play it to this day.
And so this overly long introduction leads us to Splash Damage’s latest FPS. Brink.
You may be asking yourself “Why did he bother explaining Splash Damage’s entire development history?” well, there’s good reason for that. As Enemy Territory Quake Wars built upon the original Enemy Territory, Brink attempts to build upon Quake wars and in some ways succeeds. In others it stumbles.
First thing is first. Brink is not a single player game. It technically has a single player campaign, in the same way that playing Unreal Tournament 3 had a single player campaign. It literally just puts you against the bots in Multiplayer maps with cutscenes explaining why before and after. Although admittedly, you can play it online and just fill either or both teams with your friends or randoms online.The story is fine, but really short and generic, it basically tells of two factions fighting for The Ark a large city-ship-thing cut off from the rest of the world one hoping to escape it the other seeking to save it (apparently to escape they need to blow it up or something), however the world of The Ark is surprisingly well fleshed out via Audiologs that you seemingly randomly unlock (I honestly have no idea what the flag is for unlocking them) explaining the backstory and the political tensions between the two factions. It’s really well written and thought out and is a real shame that it wasn’t incorporated into some kind of proper single player campaign.
There is some better single player fun to be found in the Challenge maps. These maps set you against certain tasks working basically as a tutorial of each class. They are short, fun and also unlock all the guns in the game, so they are worth playing through at least once. They can also be played co-op! That’s good I guess.
It’s very clear that single player was never the target for Brink. It’s primarily a multiplayer game, and on that front it very much delivers. It offers a similar gameplay style to Quake Wars, there are 4 classes to pick from each with it’s own abilities. The Soldier is the basic grunt who has a Molotov cocktail ability and is the only class able to plant explosives for objectives, The Medic can give revive allies from the dead and also revives VIPs during Escort objectives, The Operative can disguise as players in the opposite team and hack objectives and the Engineer can repair objectives and plant mines (and once you unlock it make turrets.) You can unlock further abilities for each class by gaining XP and leveling up.
Each map has a bunch of objectives and side-objectives to complete, and the level design is near flawless. Seriously, these guys know how to make good levels. Especially one of the maps which takes place in a large shopping mall-esque location, which is multi-tiered and has a bunch of branching paths, each leading to the objective in different ways and making for more tactical approaches.
It also helps that each of these maps is realised in a very unique and beautiful art style. In motion everything just looks absolutely fantastic. The lack of framerate drops is also good, however the corners cut to make the framerate good on consoles is unfortunate. There is some weird texture pop-in problems on both versions (which are significantly worse on 360 from what I saw, but I haven’t played the 360 one extensively…) but overall it looks good.
As for controls, the game plays like a good FPS. The guns (something I always hated in Quake Wars) feel really good, and the new movement system the devs made that basically calculates your jumps and slides for you while you sprint is pretty cool and makes some of the bigger maps easier to manage.
Now, the cripplingly bad parts of this game that makes it really hard for me to recommend it despite having a lot of fun with it. The main issue is that Brink is a multiplayer focused game but there is next to nobody online. There are hardly any players online on either console version of the game (I’m sure the PC version has a small but more dedicated fanbase) which brings me to point 2. The matchmaking is god awful. While I’m generally against devs taking the lazy option on consoles and using matchmaking without any form of lobby support a la PC gaming, Brink takes the biscuit. Your chances of finding a match online are hindered by various things, the first being the matchmaking system itself, which will pass up putting you into a near full game to put you in a match full of bots instead, then there’s the ways you can actually get INTO games that MUST be segregating the playerbase. You can go into campaign and hit versus, go into campaign and hit co-op, go into challenges and hit co-op, go into the Public Game option and pic from a bunch of options there. There are just too many options that, unless they do indeed all go to the same destination in which case ignore all this, makes it harder to find games.
So, overall, do I recommend Brink?
Yes. I do. It’s fun, pretty and fast paced. And lets face it, even after two really successful games, nobody does what Splash Damage does. If this is your kind of game, get it. If you are getting it on consoles however, you should probably encourage all your friends to buy copies too…