Spring RTS Engine

Man, Brink is one shitty game. The central structure of the game is unsalvageable garbage. So it's a team FPS with neat stuff like extensive weapon and character customization and parkour movement. Fine.

Where it breaks down is what you do with all that: There are eight maps that all work like the Assault game type you know from UT except there are no side changes. One match consists of one team attacking and the other defending (there's an option to play both rounds and go for the faster time but it's clearly not designed around that). If the attackers fulfill their goals within the time limit they win, if not the defenders win. There's always only one main objective in play so all 20 or so players fight over one small place in the map. That can be best described as a clusterfuck.

Since the game is designed around defenders winning regularly (as opposed to assault where only a very good team can prevent the other from finishing) it's designed to encourage stalemates. Winning or losing by the clock really isn't a fun thing (I once read that time limits are lazy game design used by people who can't come up with a proper loss condition). Fighting for half an hour over one objective that's balanced so it's pretty doable to defend it for the whole half hour is not fun. Often the objectives get heavily bunkered down and as there's no early-late game progression the balance in the first minute is the same as in the last* it's a constant repetition of attacking and failing until you get lucky and the defender's bots got distracted by something shiny on the other end of the map, leaving you alone until you complete the mission. You'll spend more time running to the objective after a respawn than actually fighting.

Who decided that an asymmetrical multiplayer game like that was a good idea? Who decided that having a 20 person game with fairly large maps should only have one objective in play at a time in a room that can't even fit those 20 people? Did they think the secondary objectives like capturing control posts that give tiny boosts would be enough to disperse players and avoid a total clusterfuck in the middle?

And who thought that this mess of a game could retail for 70 Euros? I got it as part of an Amazon deal out of curiosity, the deal was good enough that I could count the game as a total writeoff and still have saved plenty of money on the other games in the deal. I can't imagine how horrible it must be for people who saw all the hype and decided to pay full retail price for this. Section 8 Prejudice is more deserving of a full retail release than Brink. Hell, Blacklight: Tango Down has more content than Brink.

*= The bots are intentionally dumbed down until the game reaches the final minute. Makes it even more stupid.

I have not run into deadlocks as assault but maybe it was the group I was playing with.

I found the customization wanting
I found the parkour cool but ultimately you ignore it and often will choose the heavy or medium guy which makes no fucking sense, yeah skinny guys are going to be more adept at agility ... because they are skinny, bullshit on that! Guys who are good at parkour are fucking built guys not crack addict looking pieces of shit who probably cannot do a fucking pullup.

it is as though the developers have no concept of physical fitness.

The maps I can deal with except how dark the visuals were. I liked the style but this is the only game I have ever had to raise my gama on. I had to raise it all the way up to see normal shadows on my tv(which is a fucking nice tv so in before your tv sucks)..

The guns were ok but mostly samey unless you go with the heavy who cannot do diddle.. because he is a heavy guy and obviously cannot do a fucking pullup (ROLLEYES UZUMAKI STYLE)

So what? in order to have variety I have to play a class that removes the whole parkour thing? awesome.

I agree, it was a huge disappointment. Don't get me started on all the shit I wanted to climb but couldn't. You know shit that my no way a parkour guy can climb no problem. The levels could have been amazing labyrinths of sea-cans and sheet metal walk ways. The heavy COULD have been able to pry things apart and allow access to places or seal them back up again... but no that would make sense..

So yeah seconding the huge disappointment sentiment.

a lot of the official reviews i've read agree with u

(i mean ur title, didnt read ur actual post, it was too long)

People who are good at parkour have a wide range of body types. Tying it to weight is incredibly silly.

I watched a few people play Brink, that was more than enough to turn me off the title.

KDR_11k wrote:Section 8 Prejudice

It frustrates me when I log on and there are no multiplayer servers with people in them. Furthermore, I hate the Games For Windows/Windows Live integration. In spite of these problems, Section 8: Prejudice is one of the most fun FPS I've played in a good long time...

I also felt brink was sort of a let down. Anything I wanted to climb was kind of not climbable.
@ people playing section 8. Friend me! I love this game and play it quite a bit.
steam: oksnoop2
gamesforwindows: oksnoop2

come play planetside :) the game is good, (a bit weird at first maybe at first), strat + fps in a mmo, planetside next is announced for the end of the year, the only problem : it's way more fun to play it with friends, and most people playing it don't understand shit to strat they just go where the main fight is to shoot

I lost interest when I found out that a game that was supposed to be about parkour and the Art of Move was going to go for the slow-paced console-style cover-oriented-FPS.

When I first heard about a parkour/class-based FPS, I was imagining Team Fortress Warsow.

It's not very cover based but the objectives are in a fixed location so you don't really need mobility outside of getting back to the action. Only a very small number of objectives have players move an object to a goal location by carrying it, most have you escorting slow bots or NPCs if they're mobile at all, usually it's a matter of taking and holding the target location for long enough. Which is where the silly only-one-class-can-do-this objectives come in that serve no real purpose, never mind the class that gets the most objectives by far is the engineer (ALL defense objectives are either for everybody or only for engineers). Class differences are so minimal that it's not even a matter of getting a fragile team member in there securely, the spy who hacks the target can be a minigun wielding brute.

It seems like they were completely confused about what kind of game they were making. A sort of messy design-by-committee thing with no clear idea of what the end result was going to be.