I had been anticipating Brink for at least a year before it was released and now that I've played it I am totally disappointed with what Splash Damage and Bethesda have delivered.

Here's why:

BIG PICTURE DISAPPOINTMENTS

Brink isn't really a campaign game at all. You don't need to real-time respawn anywhere near as often as you do in any campaign-orientated game as you do in Brink. In fact, you don't respawn in campaign games anywhere from recollection, because real-time respawn suggests that the gameplay continues without you, whereas in 'real' campaigns, you go back to the last save point and replay the scene. If you die in Brink, you respawn, then the opposing team overthrows the objective in your absence because your unintelligent AI teammates have let things go in the real-time meantime. Imagine playing the Modern Warfare campaign and you die every 20-30 seconds then to add lemon juice to the wound, the game additionally moves the AI forward to spawn camp you - it kills the story and flow, which is what happens in Brink. In fact, there is no real story in the gameplay and the script in each scene has the same paragraphed statements. There's backstory, but that doesn't come together in the gameplay. You often forget the story because the game has made such a big deal about small objectives, aka command posts. Brink is clearly a multiplayer game, designed with Team Fortress 2 in mind, with lots of class changes and respawning. The problem there is that multiplayer isn't a central feature of the game either, because it's called Free Play and it isn't as simple as entering a TF2 game. There's way too many customisable rules when it should simply be map orientated. I purchased TF2 for $20-$40 brand new three years ago and still play it for hours most days because it hasn't been sold to be more than what it is, like meat and three veg, it's simple and hearty. Uncharted 2 is a great example of having campaign and multiplayer within the same game. It has an EPIC campaign but the multiplayer lets you pick from 2 modes and a quick vote on the epic maps during the load screen gets you in.

It wouldn't have disappointed me if Brink was a campaign-focused game, or multiplayer-focused, or both, but it's not focused on either. Sadly, it's focused on features, and the gameplay is left lacking. Not nearly enough attention has been paid to the potential of the game's human-fun-orientated core.

THE STORY

The story, as mentioned before, is pointless and contributes very little to the gameplay. Splash Damage don't abide by the popular design rule: If it's in the story, it has to be in the gameplay. After all, who wants to buy a game that doesn't allow you to play the story? Thankfully Splash didn't go with QuickTime events, because nobody really wants to push a different coloured play buttons every time the cinematic pauses. They did however manage to add story without giving you any story-coloured gameplay. On two occasions, both a Security and a Revolution member mentioned they had family on the opposing side, which grabbed my attention right away but meant absolutely nothing in the gameplay. At first, I thought, "OK, that's heavy. Looks like I'll need to make sure I don't shoot my teammate's family... great, added gameplay value... this will be really good", but there is no family, they're not on the other team, they're never identified in the gameplay and in fact, there's NO NPC CIVILIANS ANYWHERE. The entire world feels empty. There's all of this detail in the models and texturing but no civilians use the world or seem to exist in the world. So you feel like it's a great big empty metal desert. The resolutions for both factions are also a major inconsistency. The Security want to defend the Ark, but the Revolution don't want to take over the Ark, they want to leave it. And even as they all have boats, none of them simply jump on a boat and leave. I listened to the story narrator in the intro just after I bought the game and thought, "Wha?... I just wasted my $60... just take a boat and leave." A secret is revealed towards the end of the campaign telling of at least one other floating and/or mountain cap city above water elsewhere, which is why the Revolution want to hijack a 747 to escape the Ark. Although, I'd like to see them fly and land something that no one's touched in 20 years. The Security appear to be defending the Ark for no apparent reason, other than 'savages' returning from distant cities having obtained coordinates from the escaped Revolution members. The savages never return though, so it's an empty threat, unless you've completed the game as Security and failed the last mission where the Revolution steal the jet, THEN Splash decide to release a savage DLC to continue the story. For now, it's just an empty threat and an empty storyline.

AI

LtMkilla from Achievement Hunter warranted a Rage Quit episode. There's lots of swearing, which I'm not a fan of at all, unless I too am playing Brink - http://youtu.be/shPgIiZt7v0

• Bots on your team aren't nearly as concerned about your objectives as you are, making them extremely unreliable. They spent 90% of the time fighting over a command post then decided to cut their loses and move to the main objective - too little, too late - and it's obvious that they've been programmed that way to create more gameplay, but it's frustrating as I don't care about the small merits of command posts.
  
  
• Waypoint and pathfinding code doesn't gel with the environment or SMART well at all. AI bounce, jitter, get caught and fumble over traversable objects or when shot. Medics run on my head without healing me, enemy AI jitter and bounce away when you shoot them and I often get knocked out of the way by my own team and have to keep restarting SMART.
  
  
• Enemy AI are way too efficient. They've been coded to know where your head is the moment they can draw a line of fire to it. This happened time and time again when I was shot dead a split-second after exiting a building. Half the time I couldn't even see my opponents because they were that far away, and showed only the smallest part of their body.
  
  
• Enemy AI also heal and respawn with super efficiency. Starting out, I had no idea my opposing team was going to heal and respawn that quickly, probably because no other game works this quickly. It felt like you couldn't get a break to even unlock a command post in a star 1 challenge.
  
  
• Team AI medics often don't have a brain, or a heart. They don't appear to have a brain because they'll run right to you without killing the AI [and friends] using your body as bait. They don't appear to have a heart because they often ignore your plea for help, no matter how loud I scream at the TV.

OBJECTIVES

• The designers force you to focus on command posts for some reason. I'm constantly hearing, "They're taking our command post, stop them!... I'm going for the command post!... We just lost our command post!" So I focused on a command post for a change, got killed a half dozen times and by the time I took it over, I wasn't able to spawn any closer to the main objective and I had wasted all this time just to change classes, which I could do at the respawn point anyway. The most I heard "command post" mentioned within 5 seconds was 3 times!
  
  
• There is often way too much time allocated to objectives, whereas in TF2 time is mostly subjective to how quickly you complete the objective. The game extends your time if you're going to fail the mission time but are currently waiting for an objective timer to complete, which is handy except for when the AI gets the same privileges and you lose when you otherwise had clearly won. A MAJOR DISAPPOINTMENT having achieved all objectives only to have the enemy AI win on a technicality.

FEATURES

To save on space, I've decided to put everything else into features. I have left out a bunch of other minor issues as well because while I feel the need to express myself, I couldn't be bothered to spell everything out.

• Guns. There's so many guns that aren't that different. Surely focus testing would have revealed a stronger average use of much fewer guns. The other issue is that you get tons of weapon attachments that don't actually create an advantage to the gun at all. Watching the stats on guns as you apply extra bits shows the bars go into the red, or orange in this case. What's the point of having so many silencers when very little of them actually do any good at all.
  
  
• Grenades. They're tiny and useless. Throwing a grenade isn't so bad, except that AI just sort of calmly back away from it and when it pops like a firecracker they return to the charge. One class has two upgrades to make grenades splash damage range wider and more threatening but that's about it. A grenade often doesn't even clear out a bunch of incapacitated enemy AI.
  
  
• The Heavy body type doesn't really add hit points to your experience at all. You can still be downed in an instant with a handgun from 50 metres away.
  
  
• Waiting for medics is mostly a waste of time, as you will return to your location with full ammo on a respawn than waiting for a medic on average by far. Half of the time, I'm still strafing when I'm killed, so I end up selecting respawn by accident and don't get to wait for the medic anyway. What's with the respawn counter too by the way. It cycles through a 15-20 second countdown, why? What's the point of making me wait even longer if I've taken the risk of waiting longer for a medic as it is? And why is it that I can accidentally select respawn and instantly respawn instead of having a 3 second buffer to choose. Respawn is NEVER convenient, so isn't that enough of a punishment as it is?
  
  
• There's no gameplay difference between Revolution and Security - it's exactly the same. The is probably the largest disappoint I have outside of the big picture. I looked at the game from 2 view points, as the story suggests, but the Revolution have all the same tech, weapons, abilities and means of achieving them as the Security does. So the designers have you play through the campaign twice, where you simply either set a bomb or diffuse one.
  
  
• Outside of the objectives, the environment really isn't interactive at all. There's nothing dynamic about it, no destruction, no dropping tanks on enemy heads, no operating cranes and no using your weapons in conjunction with anything else in the maps to create more kapow.
  
  
• The game rewards you for going through the tutorial because they desperately want you to know how to play the game before you enter the game. So you end up watching minute after minute of video trying to take in all this information about how to play without even touching a single button. It feels like Splash and Bethesda have a room full of RPG D&D designers working on the game, typically speaking, they love these sorts of details and processes.
  
  
• Death. Incapacitation. Respawn. And more death. Apparently I can finish Modern Warfare on Vet but I can't last 20 seconds in Brink. So it's more realistic than actual warfare but the characters are TF2 typecasts.
  
  
• There are thousands of character customisations, however you never see your character in the gameplay. What's the point? So other people see how cool you look, the AI doesn't care and there aren't any mirrors.

In closing, I want to say that I had fallen in love with the idea of Brink when it was announced but have now come to hate everything about it. My opinion and hatred for the game has never changed between playing it for 2 minutes through to finishing it in a few hours. My first paragraph on the Big Picture says what frustrates me most about Brink, having no focus on campaign or multiplayer or story. All of the smaller things mentioned after that still pain me in a bad way, because small things should be cool added bits of value, not the pins you find in your voodoo doll version of yourself back at the Splash Damage design room.

Im really not sure where people got the idea that BRINK was going to have an epic story driven campaign experience. Every interview that I saw described having the campaign play exactly like a multiplayer match, which is exactly what they did. As promised you can lvl up your characters offline or online in either freeplay or campaign.

In response to your bit about how the action continues even if you die, I will just say that this is the only way they could possibly allow for a multiplayer campaign experience. Explain to me how resetting the map every time a human player dies in a competitive (or co-op) campaign match would work. It wouldnt.

I think that the people that are getting hung up on the story aspect of BRINK clearly need to work on their research skills. If you look at SD's previous titles, or at the dev interviews pre release you should understand that BRINK was intended to be a multiplayer game. The campaign was described as pitting two teams against each other and only allowing the winners to advance to the next round.

The cutscenes between the maps allow you to get some back story as well as to explain what the overall objectives of each map are. While lacking a bit on the actual story content, this does serve to differentiate the maps from one another and you get some understanding of your side's motivations.

This does enrich the multiplayer experience. In my opinion it is a step up from say Modern warfare's multiplayer (you referenced it so I will too) where every single map had the exact same objective that had NOTHING to do with any part of the story except for what uniforms they decided to throw you into.

I am not sure how they could add more story content to a multiplayer based game without further disrupting the flow of the matches by adding even more cutscenes, which lets face it once youve seen a few times you would just skip through anyways.

Ok took me a bit to comb through the rest of the post. Id like to start by saying that I'm impressed at the time and effort that you put into making this.

I will agree with you that I would like to see AI improvements as well as including more useful guns. Other than that I think that you are spending a lot more time complaining than attempting to learn how BRINK operates.

Im going to start with your complaint about the command posts. First of all, the devs are not forcing you to focus on them at all. You can ignore the pvssyr that comes through the headset.
Also taking CPS have 3 benefits:
1. your entire team get a health or supply pip bonus (which can be doubled by engineers)
2. You can refill your ammo (not usually a problem)
3. You will make it a lot easier to complete / defend the main objectives because (especially if there are bots on the enemy squad) some of your enemies will leave the main objective to attempt to capture it.


As far as the amount of time per objective is concerned, I think that the attacking squad needs the amount of time theyre currently given. If they lowered the time available then it would make defending in this game entirely too easy.

In this game you have to make decisions about which abilities will suit your playstyle the best. If having powerful grenades is so important to you then you have the ability to invest 2 of your 20 skill points and to play a soldier class. Theres an opportunity cost associated with what abilities you decide to get / improve. Its about game balance.

As far as accidentally selecting respawn the only advice I can give is to learn not to. This shouldnt be a big problem bc statistically speaking being able to respawn immediately is a rather infrequent occurrence.

The gripe about the "Revolution and security having the same tech" boils down to balance. The weapons are given a different look / sound but as far as providing each side with unique weapons would be a balancing nightmare. Very few online multiplayer games do this for this very reason. Cod, BF, GoW all of these games have the exact same weapons available to all players. Also since you do not get to choose which team you are fighting for on freeplay (unless you team switch) then this wouldnt make sense.

For not being able to last 20 seconds, Id suggest spending more time playing with different classes, abilities and weapon set ups as well as coming up with new strategies / tactics and less time ranting.
If you post on this site with legitimate questions as well Im sure that you can get some advice on how to be successful at BRINK, but judging from this post you should probably stick with CoD.