May 2011 saw the release of one of the most interesting titles of recent years; Brink. On paper, this should have been something brand new, different and exciting. Bethesda and developers Splash Damage created The Ark; an exquisitely rendered man made floating island in the mid-21^st century. The gameplay was a first person shooter, but with the added twist of free running parkour abilities thrown in. Following that you had the allure of being able to choose to join the security or the resistance, with the incentive of having two separate but intertwining plot lines. And then, on top of all this you had a campaign set out to encourage cooperative class based multiplayer, which ran well with either real friends or the AI bots. It sounds in many ways to be the perfect game, so why are we not all playing Brink whilst Call of Duty sits in its lonely case?

A utopia designed to be self-sustainable in a world of pollution and global warming, The Ark was a vision so beautiful that it would have made the hippies of the world take of their clothes, throw on some body paint and all get high together like the good old days. Sadly, global warming put pay to the rest of the world and thousands of refugees flooded into The Ark, straining its self-sustainable resources to their limit. Water and food is heavily rationed, and the refugees are forced to live in slums. Inevitably there is an uprising; The Resistance. They fight for equality with the island’s founders and security forces in a Communist Robin Hood fashion, robbing the rich to feed the poor. In their way stand the Ark’s Security; defending their island against what they perceive as the terrorist threat with the softly softly approach that we have now come to expect from security forces.

The first thing you will see in this game however is not the gameplay. It is the 45 minutes it takes to create your character. Bethesda actually claimed that there were 102 quadrillion possible combinations that you could customise your character with in the game. As apparently we’re proving facts using made up numbers now, I found this to be infinity bajillion times more tedious than any other feature in the game and it was a relief that there is a random button that you can use to JUST CREATE A CHARACTER AND LET ME PLAY! I know there are people in the world who like to customise their characters so they look exactly like themselves, meaning they can live out their lives in a game and not in a darkened bedroom filled with Doritos’ and empty Mountain Dew bottles, but frankly if I’d wanted to play dress up Barbie I’d have gone to my nieces tea party. And anyway, if you are the sort of person who likes their character to be a perfectly rendered copy of themselves when they play a game, you’re in for a truck load of disappointment; all the characters in this game have bizarre swollen faces not too dissimilar to someone going into anaphylactic shock after eating some shellfish, and aside from anything else it’s very strange to watch.

So gameplay then.  As a self-confessed Capitalist pig dog I quite happily signed up to the Ark Security, ready to lay the smackdown on any terrorist scum that had the misfortune to cross my militant path. And for the first few levels things were going really well. Ignore the fact that the aiming function is so fast and sensitive that your reticule is flying around like your character is in fact a raver with a head full of pills, holding a stick shaped like a gun and his trousers stuck in a tree; you’ll get used to it. You’ll find yourself defending objectives as the oncoming enemy throw themselves at you trying to capture and blow up various points in The Ark, however as time goes by and you get further into the game you’ll find yourself defending objectives as the oncoming enemy throw themselves at you trying to capture and blow up various points in The Ark. There isn’t all that much variety between the levels and it can get a bit repetitive as you storm into the map, take up defensive positions around the objective and then sit and wait for ten minutes whilst the timer ticks down.

I would say however, that I very much like the scoring mechanism used in Brink. It accentuates the online multiplayer feel of the campaign by giving you not only points for a kill, but points per hit. If you’ve got an automatic weapon, you’ll get points for every bullet that connects and the number of points increases or decreases depending on where on the body you hit your target.  Similarly, you pick up points for holding, taking or defending objectives, and all these points are used to upgrade your characters armour, weaponry or, should you so desire, their tattoos.

Lastly the other major selling point that Bethesda and Splash Damage were shouting about; the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) System. Your characters body type will determine to what degree you use your parkour abilities, and I’m sure that there are the occasional levels where it is a significant Assassins Creed/Mirror’s Edge like wall climbing fest, but I haven’t seen one yet. In fact, the only time I have found them in the slightest way useful is when I have had to respawn far away from the action and want to run a bit faster to get back to the action. I think the idea was that it would be an easier to use version of the mechanics found in Mirror’s Edge, however for me it just doesn’t work.

When I saw an advert for Brink prior to release, I really did think it was going to be huge. I thought it was going to be the new kid in town that was going to rock the fps genre and give us all something new to be excited about. But I didn’t buy it. And then I forgot about it. Only recently did I become aware of it again, picking up a copy for 40p on Amazon. Having played it, I now understand why it didn’t take off. An overly simplistic explanation would be that it overstretches itself somewhat; trying to master all trades but ending up with Jack all. I have a theory though. When I look at Brink, I could imagine myself sitting in a room doing market research for Bethesda, and them asking me what I would want in my perfect game. ‘A campaign that feels like a multiplayer’ would be my answer. ‘Set in the future, with the chance to choose which side I’m on. Oh and also, if I could be a free runner as well, that would be sweet’. This is what Brink feels like. It feels like someone who doesn’t know how to make a game has asked someone what they want, and gone and done that. And frankly, if I knew how to make successful games, I’d make games. How ironic that when describing a game which is set in a conflict between establishment and rebellion I find myself feeling that I wish they’d decided what was best for us and done that instead.

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