Full review at https://piepscave.com.

I played Brink when it released, but being only a young teenager at the time I didn't really know what to think of it. Looking at it back now it's really quite something, but that certainly isn't all with positive connotation.

The premise of Brink was already too convoluted: they wanted to make a class based, objective based, "body type based" movement shooter with a sprinkle of tactical shooter seasoning. It didn't require a genius to tell them this wasn't going to work, but it was 2011 and I presume whatever execs funded this project must've been enthralled by the admittedly bold aesthetics. Brinks biggest shortcoming is being utterly confused.

The first thing you notice booting up a match is how slow the movement feels. Looking back at the promotional material that is about the last thing you would expect. But on the other hand the tactical nature of the objectives, usually requiring some variation of point defense, would make the game feel "too fast". Holding angles and blocking or opening up flanking opportunities are genuine intended strategies. It is actually baffling how blatantly conflicting it all feels. The only true time any of the "advanced movement" can be utilized is when moving back towards the chokepoint after dying.

This conflicting design continues to manifest itself in other facets of the game. Most notably the map design. Oh god, the map design. Almost all of the maps are variations of "move unopposed from the spawn for 80% of the map's distance, then actually fight in the remaining 20%". The game offers a fairly solid vaulting/geometry traversing mechanic, but it's never used. You occasionally slide under something. That's about the extend of what the game actually incentivizes you to use. But again: making maps too vertical would go against the more tactical aspect of the game. They really put themselves in a big lose/lose situation.

Brink's aesthetics are great, until they aren't. The characters are expressive and unique. The cosmetics are cool. I like most of the weapon designs. The Arc based levels look pretty good. The slums based levels look like absolute ass, and not intentionally so either; the color palette used in the textures is just absolutely horrid.

The sound design is good. It's not uniquely good, but by 2011 standards it's very solid across the board. The UX (especially menus) is good. The objective wheel works. The concept of side-objectives opening up flanking routes is actually quite fun. Performance is very inconsistent and the single player is capped at 30FPS (you can unlock it by altering the config files and hosting your own dedicated server over localhost).

What an utterly confused mess of a game. There were some good ideas in here but the game designers responsible for this at the time should probably leave it off the record. Since it's free I will recommend trying it. It's an interesting trainwreck to say the least.