Like many others, I bought Brink on opening day. As is the case with most games these days, this one was over-hyped.

First the good stuff. SMART was seamless and really allowed fluid movement just as it shows in all the released clips. Very well done on Splash Damages part. The amount of weapons is nice and I like the aspect of a cool down for grenades. I personally have never seen that and I think it worked out pretty well. Graphics look good, physics and weapon cone of fire is polished. Animations were also good.

What is not so good. My primary problem is not being able to co-op with a friend... always got a server timeout error when either person invited the other. I'm guessing it is a port issue that I'll have to forward some ports, which is to say a bit of a pain. The second major issue I have with the game is how fast weapons and attachments can be unlocked. A full run through the Challenges area for one character took me about 3 hours including customizing the character with new weapons and load outs. So, in 5 hours I had two characters made, one heavy and the other almost level 7 that will be a light body class. Almost all the weapons are unlocked and all the attachments. That is WAY too fast. At this point only the campaign and unlocking skills remain to really do before end game. Plus SD made it seem like the weapons would be customizable with a lot of different attachments, which is true, but those attachments don't really adjust the traits of the weapons very much. The biggest adjustment was the drop in speed for equipping the weapons or reloading them. The added clip sizes was nice, but some weapon stats compared to like minded weapons didn't make sense. When most of the weapons can be unlocked nearly at the same time before online play even really starts is something that really took away from the game. I don't even know what max level is, but it feels like I'm there already, I'm just missing some skills for each class left to unlock and those really don't seem to make that much of a difference. Especially as much as SD hyped them.

Even with all this being said. The game is still fun to play. I just don't see me playing it that long before I'm ready to move on. I was hoping to see this take me to the release of BF3 and back to 64 player maps with 32 on 32 action. But at this point it might not even make it until SWTOR releases this year. Maybe getting together with friends on the same server will extend that a bit, but only time will tell. I think SD spent most of their time perfecting the SMART system and perfecting the maps for that system. I can only imagine the time it took to design a map to work with the new SMART system correctly. Giving ways to utilize the system isn't like just making a normal COD or BF map... the SMART system would be wasted on those maps. I think the game content suffered due to the development time and money put into the SMART system. They said they intend on having DLC and there is even a DLC link in the game. So, that is comforting, but how long will we wait for that? I'm guessing at least 3-6 months.

I'm sure there will be those that disagree with me and that is expected. This is after all my opinion of the game after about 6 hours of play. I do enjoy playing the game and look forward to the continued online action. I don't think Brink is a failure by any means. I think Medal of Honor was closer to a failure than Brink is. I honestly thought Black Ops was simply a repeat COD title with very little done to revolutionize the FPS market. So, at least Brink has that going for it.

LOL and people were saying that there were more connection issues on the consoles.

The server browser was fine, it doesn't require all the port forwarding. Co-op was basically P2P connection and that requires a bit more networking at times. I didn't hear of any nor did I have any problems getting into public servers, just co-op.

They wanted to make sure you could get in the game at rank 1 and still have a chance fighting rank 20's. That is most likely why your seeing the attachments aren't doing that much of a difference. I find this to be good thing, if you want attachments and unlockables from here all the way to the moon, I guess this is just not the game for you. Personally I would rather they had 0 unlocks and 0 ranks, so people could learn to form their own goals for a game instead of a game having a carrot dangling in front of you telling you how to play the game, instead of letting you play it the way you want to, and not get punished for it.

I definitely see your side. There are of course different personality types playing the game. I'm a tinkerer, so I like being able to tweak things in games that I play. It is just something I enjoy. Plus, it gives it an added realism. You can add all that stuff in RL to a weapon and then some. There are receivers that can be upgraded on some weapons that increase firing speed, barrels that increase range and accuracy, etc. That is why I like doing that and having that ability in a game. There is of course your side that doesn't need that. Simply give you a gun and a map and you'll happily shoot your way all of the map. This of course leads us to balancing. Even on the COD series which has some of the biggest weapon adjustments in the genre, I was always able to kill the highest level guys by using simple tactics instead of run and gun mentality even at the first level.

What I see that brink did was instead of giving perks and improvement to the weapons they had to balance them out due to the buffs from the different classes. But why even have guns and attachments to unlock if you allow them all to be unlocked in the first 5 levels of play? I mean why not just have it all available and say, "here are the weapons pick your favorite and go to town". The only thing that seems to take the most time is unlocking the skills.

It doesn't ruin the game for me, I just don't understand why they did it in that particular fashion. It just seems a waste of time to implement the challenges to unlock the weapons and attachments when they are all so quickly unlocked.

I also am a tinkerer. So far no game has let you take weapons apart to improve others. I'm still waiting for that. I think they just didn't want to plain give them to the players though. Honestly most people online would NEVER play the challenges otherwise. And those people wouldn't know how to play the game properly, leading to them getting served a plate of woopass everytime, which would lead to bad reviews because of "one sided" gameplay. Then they'd have to balance things they really shouldn't. (A good example of something that should've never gotten balanced is the pistol in halo, it took them 3 games to get it right again, and the range hasn't improved to what it should be yet.) They wanted to avoid 13 year olds bashing the game because they didn't know how to play. Not that has stopped said 13 year olds, but it was a good try.