Brink – Good Thing I Did Not Buy It

So … I rampaged about Brink in the past already …

The weekend before last was a Brink Free Weekend on Steam – finally! So I had a go – I could find the time to at least play it once. Here is my impressions.

First things first – you start the game, intro plays. Man, the intro is confusing. The Arc is being divided to maintain order (not explained why/how), but later on, no 2 minutes later, the resistance tries to escape the Arc, the order not. Apart from that I don’t know why the order fights then, something was missing there. Explanation.

After the intro you are thrown into character creation – or rather selection, as choices are still pretty limited and more like predefined loadouts. But WHAT THE HECK? How did I get there? From the story intro to a char screen – the link and what I am/will be is totally missing.

Then I am presented the “offer” to watch the tutorial video series. You are – sit down now – being warned/noted though that the video was made for consoles and thus may not really fit you PC gamer. WHAT THE FUCK? I know so many publishers and developers don’t care to adapt the console stuff to PC any more, but what the heck? Well, why not skip the entire video tutorial I have ALREADY SEEN ON YOUTUBE PRE-RELEASE in the first place? Because I get 2,000 XP for watching that. Great work there – getting me pissed off right from the start.

Onwards, we are finally in the main menu. Online statistics. Nice, probably like the ET:QW ones they shut down after a while … Anyway; One can not click/open them. I am presented a key for online activation/account creation in my web browser. Erm, yeah. Probably for consoles, which do not surf the web … !?!?

Onwards in the menu: Console navigation. I can only navigate the current menu level, not even click the visible buttons (categories) I want and can only confirm. I can then not even use right mouse button to get back or anything.

Well, onwards to the options menu. Antialiasing – nice – eeeh, how much is it though? One can only en- or disable it. At least TELL me how much, even if it is only 1 level available.

Well, let’s read the text there – or not, because it slowly scrolls away and you will have to WAIT until it scrolls in from the other side again. Wide-screen anyone?

Enough of the menus! Let’s play.

By the way, the character adjustments – your class type and loadout – will happen way later. Not on your initial creation and not in-game. You’ll have to go back to the main menu.

Going into iron sight stops shooting while the animation into iron sight plays. Wow. What an annoying thing to do. Now I can either feel hindred to go into iron sight or go into iron sight and be frustrated that ppl. shoot my while I do – and I can not shoot back.

If you buff someone your character (not you – you are not that much in control) will move/run towards him. Things like you falling down somewhere, running after your teammate into where enemies shoot or whatever can happen. Anyway you are out of control. Consoles anyone? Walking and aiming is too much, right?

I revive with X. X! The freaking X key. Of all my keyboard and mouse keys I HAVE to use the X key? While I can not do anything else anyway? Oh man …

My first weapon choices resulted in my secondary being way better than my primary. I didn’t really get all of those similiar weapons anyway; and all that configuration unlockable bullshit. You’ll just watch the stats bars of your gun and choose … meh.

Well, I played medic. And you start with nothing, no abilities. In all classes anyway. How do you think this works? Lets make new players have the least unlocks, the least abilities, the least map- and game awareness, that’ll be a ton of fun? Did you think this was a good approach because the bad CoD series is successful with such an unfair bullshit?

The gameplay itself was rather meh. I much prefer W:ET over that. That’s so 2003, and I did not play it in a while, but at least it is super fast, fair, instant loadouts with clear and weapons, instant feedback and great everything. I think I missed everything. Maybe I should not compare W:ET with Brink? Then I would not have been interested in Brink at all, probably. And in the end, I will not buy it, and you will neither.

Really sad how Splash Damage went from a superb W:ET, to a good ET:QW (mainly the community/player-base was missing, apart from the random-spread and custom-content-download-problems at the beginning – etqwpro and other mods helped there) to a really bad Brink. Not necessarily (central) gameplay wise, but everything about controls, UI and usability. It will die even faster than W:ET. Their products seem to get worse and worse …