Brink

Gameplay

Splash Damage developed the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) System. By noting a player's position and predicting what they are trying to do, the system automatically navigates complex environments without interaction. By holding down the SMART button, a player will automatically clear obstacles without the need of complex button input from the player, like in Mirror's Edge. SMART automatically mimics adaptive parkour, similar to Prototype.

There are four character classes: Soldier, Medic, Engineer, and Operative. Similar class systems could also be found Splash Damage's previous titles Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Soldiers: Soldiers are primarily concerned with destroying important objects with explosives. They are also in charge of resupplying their teammates with ammo. Soldiers can also throw damaging speciality grenades, such as molotov cocktails, flashbang, and plant satchel charges similar to C4. With the proper abilities equipped and utilized (Scavenger), they are the only class that have access to a potentially unlimited supply of ammunition.

Engineers: The Engineer is concerned primarily with building, repairing, and upgrading things on the battlefield. Engineers must also disarm enemy explosives and landmines. They can also upgrade the weapons and body armor of themselves and their teammates, and plant hidden landmines and turrets.

Medics: Medics revive downed teammates and buff their teammates' health. They also have special health buffs they can dispense to their teammates, such as improving their teammates' metabolism (how fast they heal on the battlefield) or temporarily boosting their sprint speed. They are the only class that can buff their own health or self-resurrect themselves when downed.

Operatives: Operatives are the spies of Brink. They can hack computers to complete certain Mission Objectives and can also disguise themselves as the enemy. They are the only class that can spot hidden landmines.

Players can customize their loadouts and buy special abilities with experience points, which are earned by completing objectives. The abilities that the player can buy for their character are either "universal" (abilities that the player will be able to use regardless of their class during a mission) and class-specific (abilities that the player can use only when they are in that class). All characters in the beginning will have the "basic kits" of each class so that they can perform the essential objectives only. The class-specific abilities that they buy, however, can enhance their ability and their role in a certain class, potentially making objectives easier to complete and allowing for a greater gain in experience points. The same experience points can be earned in both single-player and multiplayer, adding a special "online bonus" to the player's experience points after completing a mission online. Bethesda claims that players can create a total of 102 quadrillion unique character combinations, if minor variations are factored in.

Plot

Brink takes place in the near future during the mid-21st century on an artificial floating island called the Ark. Built during the 2010s, it was conceived as an environmentally and economically self-sustainable city. However, global warming lead to a dramatic rise in sea levels around the world, causing most of the known land masses to disappear and civilization to collapse. Decades later, the Ark has become a place for refugees coming from all around the world as they view the innovative island as the only suitable place to survive. The Ark is now home to tens of thousands more people than it was originally meant to sustain, and its supposedly renewable resources and technologies are being drained to the limit. Now, the Ark exists in total isolation and has lost contact with the outside world, with many people believing that the entire planet has been completely submerged. Most of the refugees live in tight spaces arranged from wreckage, dealing with extreme poverty and degradation while the original inhabitants of the Ark, the Founders, reside in its luxury districts. These frictions have caused a civil war to begin, between the revolutionary forces of the Resistance and the military troops of the Ark Security.

Factions

The Resistance is led by Brother Chen, a name that the Resistance affectionately uses for him. Joseph Chen played a significant part in the Ark's design and construction. However, he became angry at the Founders' and Security's decision to ration water and isolate the Ark's refugees from the rest of the island while Security and the Founders live in relative wealth. Chen armed and founded The Resistance, a group of well-trained refugees, and demanded that the Founders share the Ark's resources, and water, equally. The Resistance's goal is to protect refugees from Security forces, distribute Ark's resources to those in need, and to establish contact with the outside world. The Resistance agrees with Chen that the Founders and Ark Security are corrupt and oppressive, and that only the people from the outside world can help them overcome the ever increasing hardships of the Ark's situation.

Ark Security is led by Captain Clinton Mokoena. Security's point of view is very different from that of the Resistance, whom they view as terrorists with dangerous ideas and goals that could eventually destroy the Ark. Ark Security's goals are to stop Chen and his terrorist plots, protect the Ark's remaining resources (and maintain control over them), and to preserve the Founders' vision of a self-sustaining island. Captain Mokoena believes that the rest of the world is in far worse shape than the Ark, and that it would be too dangerous to establish contact with them. At one point in the game, he tells "classified" information to Ark Security, revealing that there is an outside world, and that years ago the Founders sent out Ark representatives to try to make contact with it, only for them to be captured and tortured to death by the outsiders, who wanted to know the Ark's location to raid it.

The player will choose one of these two factions. While each level is the same regardless of the factions for which the player fights, the goals of each side will be different, and the plot-point revolving around each level will be different. For example, in one level, if the player fights for Security, the goal will be to break into a bio-weapons lab and steal a viral bomb that could infect the Ark's inhabitants so that they can launch a counter measure. However, if playing for the Resistance, the goal will be to procure a vaccine from the greedy Founders and Security so that it can distributed fairly among all of the Ark's inhabitants.

Regardless of the player's allegiance, the ending shows the smoking aftermath of the battle between the two factions. Spotting the carnage, a boat driven by outsiders head towards the Ark, as the narrator (revealed to be on the boat, scoping the Ark with a model city), who appeared in the introduction, speaks about the uncertain future of the Ark.

Release and marketing

Bethesda and Splash Damage originally planned to release the game sometime in spring 2009, but pushed it back to fall 2010, before delaying it again. They later announced a release date of 17 May 2011. In April, a month before release, they pulled the release forward a week to 10 May, citing early completion of the game and a desire to get it in players' hands as soon as possible.

Pre-order bonuses

At QuakeCon 2010, Splash Damage announced Brink's digital pre-order bonuses for several digital retailers in North America as well as Asia. These bonuses will help expand the players starting customization options, with the Doom (GameStop), Fallout (Best Buy), Psycho (Amazon.com and Direct2Drive) and Spec Ops (Walmart and Steam) packs. The "Doom" and "Spec Ops" packs are both available in Nordic retailers. All the pre-order bonuses were later made available to purchase. In the United Kingdom, GAME released a "special edition" which, while costing more than the normal edition, included the Spec Ops and DOOM packs.

Anyone who bought Brink on Steam prior to August 8, 2011 received a cosmetic item based on a character's hood for Team Fortress 2.

Agents of Change

The first and only downloadable content (DLC) for Brink, released on 3 August 2011 for the Xbox via Xbox Live and 4 August 2011 for the PlayStation 3. The Agents of Change DLC was free on all platforms for the first two weeks of release to stimulate more players into the online servers. After that period, the DLC's price was adjusted to $9.99. The pack contains additional content for the game, including two new maps (along with the relative campaign missions), abilities, attachments for weapons, clothing, and a raised level cap.

Free-to-play

Six years after its release, Brink became free-to-play on Steam on 22 August 2017.

Reception

Brink received "mixed or average" reviews on all platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. In Japan, where the Xbox 360 version was ported for release on 16 June 2011, followed by the PlayStation 3 version on 14 July 2011, Famitsu gave the game a score of 30 out of 40, while Famitsu X360 gave the former version each a score of two eights, one nine, and one eight.

Eurogamer said the Xbox 360 version was "an exceptional team shooter, smart, supremely well balanced and with a unique, exciting art style." GameSpy said, "Brink has the potential to become your new favorite FPS." The Guardian gave the same console version four stars out of five and praised it by saying, "Brink deserves to be ranked among the finest co-op games available."

The game was also criticized for being incomplete or unpolished, with GamePro giving the Xbox 360 version three-and-a-half stars out of five, saying, "Brink is about two or three updates from being one of my favorite shooters of all time, but I'm not reviewing the game I want it to be. I'm reviewing the game that it is, and what it is something just short of being the awesome experience that I want." Game Informer criticized the single-player experience and said, "Brink is not a bad game. If Splash Damage can stabilize the performance and fix some glaring omissions (like a pre-game lobby) with a patch, I'd gladly spend more time with it. But with only eight multiplayer maps, 20 progression levels, no clan support, and average gunplay, it's not a good value proposition."

Some reviews were very critical. Joystiq said of the Xbox 360 version, "Brink's artistically compelling soldiers can sail effortlessly over obstacles, landing acrobatic maneuvers never before seen in the genre with effortless poise—unfortunately, just about everything else lands flat on its face." 1Up.com said of the same console version, "Brink is unfinished. And that doesn't mean it's full of technical problems. Well, it's got those too. But mostly, it's just an unpolished, poorly executed mess of ideas." Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann said of the same console version, "Flat combat and a lack of variety are just two of the things that make Brink such a disappointment."

GameZone gave the game eight out of ten, saying, "Brink is a multiplayer game[,] plain and simple, and going about it solo completely defeats the purpose it was made for. Jump in, meet some people, and work hard to tear apart the mechanics and goals of the game. Brink offers an incredibly satisfying multiplayer experience. Playing any other way is not worth your time." The Daily Telegraph gave the same console version eight out of ten, saying, "If Brink grabs you, it'll grab you hard. Even though the lack of polish is at times a disappointment, beneath the occasional annoyance is a fantastic and refreshing shooter that offers something different to the norm. It's standing on the precipice of true brilliance." However, Edge gave the same console version six out of ten, saying, "Brink is not revolution. It might not even be evolution of the kind the FPS needs. If anything, it's an ideas board: a fun enough game in the short-term, but more valuable in the long run to better and brighter thieves."