Greatness is rarely achieved without ambition. Jumping into the battlefields of Brink, you get the immediate sense that you are playing an ambitious first-person shooter. Four interdependent soldier classes and three distinct body types combine to create a diverse array of ways to kill your enemies, support your allies, and move around the battlefield. Brink's team-based skirmishes are rich with opportunities, but they are also hampered by design issues, including frustrating problems with the movement system and the artificial intelligence. Nagging visual shortcomings and online lag also hamper your immersion in this interesting world. There is definitely some fun to be had in these frenetic firefights, but for all its ambition, Brink falls well short of greatness.
Set in a nearby future, Brink attempts to do something different with multiplayer gaming by focusing on free-running and parkour. With some good ideas, Brink borders on fun, but its repetition, lack of depth, and graphical problems keep it from being a real contender.
It would be a disservice to
categorize Brink as a typical
FPS (First Person Shooter);
devout Call of Duty or Halo
fans won’t encounter much
familiarity here. At its core,
Brink is a class-based,
team-oriented shooter in the
same vein as Valve’s Team Fortress 2 or Splash Damage’s own Quake Wars: Enemy Territory.