Driven to the Brink of Insanity: Brink Review

Before I begin, I have one thing I have to say............ I'M BACK BABY ! I've finished my last ever school exams and have graduated ! So, with that out of the way, lets get this review started.

When I first heard about Brink I had high expectations for it. I also had a long time to wait before I was able to play it. Got it for my birthday and had to wait till the end of my exams before I could try it. After waiting 23 days to play it, I was expecting to be blown away. Well, lets find out what I thought of it.

Story
The story of this game is of a civilization that lives on the Ark, the last Bastion of Humanity which is a floating city anchored in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.  Once known as an oceanic paradise, civil war has broken out and you must choose a side to play as. You can join the Resistence and revolt against the Security force or join the Security force and stop the Revolution.

Gameplay
To me, this game was looking pretty good but as it sometimes turns out, looks can be deceiving. The campaign did not turn out the way I expected it to. Each mission of the campaign consists of primary and secondary objectives. Now your first primary objective could be to defend a certain position for a set amount of time. If you do this successfully you can complete the mission right away. But if you fail you'll be given another objective to do. Completing secondary objectives can help with your primary mission but throughout my time playing, I never got the chance to complete these objectives.

The movement in the game itself is not as smooth as it could be. While sprinting you will autamatically jump over any obstacles and if you encounter an obstacle that is the same height as your character, you can either crouch under it the old school way or you can sprint towards it, press crouch and slide underneath it. The movement speed itself is perhaps a bit too slow for my liking, kind of annoying, for me at least.

Really Annoying Things
One of the things that really annoyed me was something that I never anticipated. Every mission has a time limit ! If you fail to complete your objectives it's Game Over. There are no checkpoints. Once you run out of time, you must play through that mission from the very beginning ! Now this I found to be my main reason for not liking this game. And the difficulty balancing is a good bit off too.

You have three difficulty settings; Easy, Normal and Hard. Now I'm no stranger to playing games on their hardest difficulty settings, but when you're getting your ass whooped by the AI on the Normal setting, something has to be wrong. Seriously, they have pin point accuracy and are able to knock you down with a melee attack and finish you off before you have time to react. Ridiculous !

Graphics and Music
The graphics are decent enough. It's another game that is following in the graphical steps of Crackdown and Borderlands with the cell shady look.

Where the music is concerned, I never really paid attention to it, which is strange for me. Guess I just got too annoyed with what was going on that the only thing I could hear was my own expletives in complaint of what just happened to me.

Overall:
My final verdict on this game is that I would NOT reccommend it. The amount of customisation is definately something I'd love to see in other games, aswell as the 8 player co-op. It's just the rest of the game that really lets it down.

                                              This game gets a low 4.0/ 10 

A very dissapointing game.