Brink sort-of review.

You. Maybe.

The reaction to Brink has been weird, and I think that's because it's a really fucking weird game. Some people have glanced at the vibrant white environments and the first-person climbing stuff and compared it to DICE's Mirror's Edge, but that's only a superficial resemblance. The climbing doesn't reward skill in the same way Mirror's Edge does, and the game contrasts it's sparkling utopian industrial locations with rusty, dilapidated slum towns, which is precisely eight-million percent more varied than Mirror's Edge was. Where Brink really resembles Mirror's Edge is that it takes some unorthodox approaches to the fundamentals of the genre. I personally think Mirror's Edge suffered critically from not having a focus for it's novel mechanics; it controlled great, but struggled to invent a challenge better than 'go forward'. Brink's dodges this pitfall by being a tried and true team-based online shooter. If all else fails, you will get to shoot some people in the face and win matches.

The impression I got from the game's marketing was that the quasi-multiplayer nature of the game would be a more important than it is. Blame my expectations, but I was kind of hoping it would not only be novel, but also click together in a satisfying way. In the end all it amounts to is, outside of a few challenge maps, a game that features only multiplayer modes. Yes, it's possible to play the 'campaign' mode offline, but 1) you don't want to 2) I'd technically still classify it as multiplayer. The campaign in Modern Warfare 2 is not multiplayer because the enemies and allies are constructed to perform select functions. They only carry one gun, they peak out of cover for the player to shoot them, and they are balanced in way to entertain the player rather than to express themselves. What I mean is that the enemies don't have agency in the way we understand a player character, or even a potential player character, to have. Even when playing against AI, you're all playing with the same set of rules - the game is not rigged against them in the way a true single player game would be, and their winning is a perfectly reasonable outcome of the game system.

Now, the problem with recent online-heavy shooters like Homefront and Medal of Honour is that rather than try to acknowledge the elephant in the room, they try and sell their own elephants. It's hilarious to see THQ spent all this money trying to come up with something that would ape Call of Duty, and the method they chose was to essentially make exactly the same game and hope people would pick it up by mistake. The conundrum is that they want to make a game that will make people sit up and notice, but they also have to make something that's going to sell if even it doesn't. They've been paralysed into making me-too products, seemingly ignorant of the fact that CoD got big by appealing to people who didn't like CoD. Brink immediately wins kudos for trying to offer an alternate experience.

There are no 'KDs', or even a post-match readout of your performance, in Brink. Some reviews I've seen have talked about this as a 'missing feature', but this fails to consider that it's missing on purpose. The focus is not on what you're doing for yourself, but what you're doing for your team. Not 'am I getting kills?', but 'am I winning matches?'. Actually, it's more like 'am I gaining experience', which I suppose CoD does as well, except not really. Experience in CoD is just a by-product of how many people you can murder and how big you can make some numbers on your playercard. Experience in Brink, thanks to the omission of post-match read-outs, genuinely directs the player into performing certain actions above and beyond kills: building gun nests, capturing command posts, completing objectives or buffing your team mates.

So what makes Brink so weird then? Well, it's actually two game design ideologies pulling against each other with no clear victor. Brink wants to one-up CoD in terms of customisation, but it also wants to be a game where you work as a part of a whole. This clash of individualism and collectivism ultimately leaves the game unfocused and hard to understand from the player's perspective.

Let's talk about CoD again. There's no denying that CoD4's multiplayer caught on in a big way. Whether it was innovative is arguable; it was more-or-less a combination of an online-shooter with a character RPG. Instead of choosing what fire spell some spiky-haired berk was going to use, you were deciding what guns and equipment you would be taking out into the game. It was more than just unlocking new guns, it was building your own character. It was making choices to define your own interaction with the game world. The extent to which this approach has been borrowed by other multiplayer games in almost every genre imaginable is a testament to the power of that idea. I think it was a forgone conclusion that Brink would have customisation in the vein of CoD, but it then tries to one-up it by allowing you to customise not only your guns, attachments and perks, but also the appearance and body-types of your character.

However, this kind of system is designed for a game of individual triumphs. Even when you're playing with friends on CoD, the focus is on how you are doing. What's your KD? What gun are you using? Are you having a good or bad match? In Team Deathmatch, the winning team is largely irrelevant, and while objective-based game modes are hampered by excessive individualism, victory in them is at best irrelevant and at worst unnecessary to the meta-game of levelling up and building your load out. Brink, however, makes a number of decisions to emphasise collective action over individual heroism. Assault rifles have barely enough ammo to kill somebody and while using a pistol grants you a knife it's not a one-hit kill by any stretch of the imagination. The idea is that firing as a group will be more effective than flanking 5 enemies on your own.

Also, whilst it's possible to customise your guns and abilities extensively, you still have to choose one of four classes, but you can switch between them from any command post on the battlefield. It's a muddied system: The logic behind some things being customisable and some things not being customisable is unclear. For instance, it's possible to change to any gun you like from within a match, but it's impossible to change what attachments you have on them. I'm not saying that every game should be like CoD, but the weapon system is used for the same effect and gains nothing by being limited the way it is. The game gives you enough freedom to choose your preferred class, weapons etc., but it also wants to be a co-operative classed based shooter, so it can't prevent you from winning games with your inappropriate personal choice, that's presumably why classes work the way they do.

Splash Damage are actually a London-based developer literally down the road from me. I'm halfway tempted to just kind of walk up there and leave these questions at the reception for somebody to answer (That won't be creepy or anything). I don't want to speculate on the internal workings of Splash Damage, but they're past work is dominated by team-based online shooters rather than individualist ones. This, in conjunction with the excellent art design and fiction the game lavishly under represents, leads me to believe that Brink was an absolute labour of love for the development team. However, it's been tempered by the realities of the market and the conditions of cultural relevance for a video game in 2011. Brink isn't broken or poorly made, but just unfocused; the result of two approaches to online shooters pulling against each other. Right now it's clear the developer was passionate about it, but it's hard to understand exactly what they were going for.

Brink feels like the poorly-timed punchline to a joke. Just take a breath and try again. I'll promise to laugh next time.