Brink Review

Well here it is folks my first review of a game.
I brought brink on the recommendation from a friend and its not a bad little game. Ill start by going through the basics.

The basic premise is you choose to either save the arc or escape the arc, i decided to go for the escape the arc first for no other reason than there guns have cooler skins on them. Before i started playing the game offered me a thousand xp to watch the tutorial videos. A nice little trick that will probably get more people to watch them. So after watching the video I got to make my character, I had very little unlocked at this point so i just went with a tattooed covered bald guy.

As I loaded up the first mission I decided that I would play as an engineer as the thought of landmines was too awesome. Now unlike most games where everyone can complete the objectives, most objectives have a specific class that can do them for example soldiers destory things like doors and bridges, whereas the engineers repair things. This means its imperitive to have at least one of each class on your team, although you can change your class whenever you want to help out with things, useful in singleplayer but more on this later. So for the first playthrough I decided to stick my game to normal difficulty not too hard but enough of a challenge that i wont blitz through the game in a couple of hours. As i jump into the game it takes me a couple of minutes to get used to the button layout as run is on the left bumper (I play on xbox).

Ill take a couple of seconds to explain the run feature here, the game calls it SMART, basically it means that all your climbing sliding and jumping from obstacles is handled for you. It actually works for the most part with only a few slight hiccups where i run off a ledge instead of jumping to the next one etc, and helps to provide a couple of different routes to sneak up behind your opponents.

Anyway so i played through the first couple of missions before i realised that i hadnt been upgrading my character and had a few points to spend, The game works off an interesting system as you get one upgrade point every time you level up but have to rank up to unlock new perks to purchase. There are a total of 20 levels and 5 ranks and its impossible to fully upgrade every job although the game gets around this by letting you create several different characters so each one can specialise.

You also unlock attachments by doing challenges such as escorting a repair bot or a checkpoint race. These challenges seem to be more to get you used to the games systems and different classes and to also make sure that you know what your doing. The attachments are all reasonable and most have some downside as well as the goodside for example the muzzle brakes decrease your guns recoil but make it louder so you show up on radar from further away.

My main problem with the game at the minute is networking issues, the online play can be very laggy for some people, so much so that its actuaally unplayable. This is the only real downside to the game and will hopefully be fices very soon.

All in all i enjoyed brink thoroughly but its not going to replace COD or battlefield as the big FPS in town. Its more the sort of game you would turn and say to your friends fancy a couple of games of brink. A respectable game but like any has its problems that need fixed. Id give it a 7/10 overall though.