The maps in the game are well planned out and being able to fight in locales ranging from an aquarium to transportation terminal were a lot of fun. My only real issues were, as I stated before, the overall blandness of the graphics and the lack of real variety of combat options. There are grenades in the game but I found them to be fairly ineffective and operating with a very long fuse that required me to cook them prior to tossing them. The variety of machine guns while impressive generally played out the same as the differences between them in nearly stages of the game were minimal. While some have higher damage and fire rates when the bullets start flying many of them were pretty much the same. I often thought how awesome it would be to fire a rocket or energy weapon and down the halls and take down the bad guys.
The sound quality of the game is also an area that had a dated quality to it. To be honest, I kept coming back to team Fortress two and thinking to myself I’ve seen much of this game already just with the storyline this time but lacking the humor. There are some nice touches to the game such as the Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain (SMART) control system which allows the AI to anticipate a players moves and eliminate the need for extra pressing of control keys. A prime example of this is one of player approaches an edge they can simply continue moving forward and the control system will intuitively allow them to scale the object in front of them and continue on such as jumping from allege to the ground below.
The command interface and the game is also very easy as players can give commands and locate strategic mission objectives easily from a pop-up mission wheel. Teamwork is also key to survival as being able to upgrade, rearm, and heal your teammates not only help accomplish mission objectives but give you valuable experience points as well.
As much as I really wanted to like the game I have to admit that I am disappointed with the final product. To me Brink had a lot going for it but it fails to live up to its lofty goals and instead gives players a fairly vanilla team-based shooter that does not live up to the enjoyment of other games already on the market.
3 stars out of 5
