Game Discussion of the Week: Brink

I got this game dirt cheap, like significantly less than a small piece of candy cheap, brand new, but even at that price it wasn't much to praise.
I can totally understand if anyone gives it a lower score after having bought it when it was new and expensive, you have my sympathies, it's a very run to the mill average mediocre type of shooter with multiplayer focus and it doesn't have anything that makes up for it, it feels like an Xbox Live Arcade game that ended up on disc even though there are plenty of actual digital download only games that deserve it WAY more than this game did. It's not awful or unplayable it's just not remarkable or good at anything either.
From what I've heard it was one of those games that got pretty excessively hyped before release that it was going to offer really deep character customization and stuff, but when it came out it just had some basic t-shirts and other generic stuff for a small set of preset characters who all looked fundamentally the same anyway, so it bombed pretty hard and went almost instantly from the new games' shelf to bargain bins all around the world, which is where I found my copy.

I've played it a few times but it just isn't that fun, it's very repetitive and the weapons, levels, game modes, controls and characters don't feel balanced, fun or interesting at all. It's easy to get lost as everything looks the same and it's equally easy to mistake friend and foe for the same exact reason, the few colors used are pretty muted and not implemented well at all and in my opinion the characters themselves are just plain ugly, it's just not a very aesthetically pleasing game to look at.

I've only played it offline against bots, of course since I don't do online, but I doubt there's a huge sprawling online community for this game even if I was give that a try so I think my experience is probably very similar to most others who have tried this game.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone but I also wouldn't directly warn to stay away if you can find it cheap as I did, then it can be okay to add to your collection and try it out some day when you're really bored of everything else you got.

Well, I did hear people saying this game was hyped, but I never saw they hype myself over PlayStation. I believe it, but I still think Shock Troopers PS3's port had better PR, even though it didn't need it because Shock Troopers is beyond amazing.

Found a trailer on YouTube.

Was this game a big deal? I never heard of it til now.

Honestly, I have never heard of it until now either.  Whenever I see someone attempting to fire a rifle sideways, I automatically lose interest though.  (I think scipioafricanus would agree with me there.)

Strangely, I had never heard of this game until now. But I must say, August of 2011 was truly a terrible time to release a competitor to TF2. Why? Because TF2 became free to play that same summer AND was peaking in popularity. So even if Brink had been free to play, it really stood no chance at all. Just watched Mark's review of the PS3 version on Youtube and it looked a bit like CoD mixed with any generic squad shooter form that gen but with a TF2 paint job. Definitely not my kind of game. I heard it became free to play on PC recently, but between my atrocious internet speed and dislike of this kind of FPS, I have no desire to play it.

I spent the entire last half of that summer playing TF2 non-stop and was legit addicted to the game. It sucked; my addiction, not the game. TF2 is fun, very different from the generic looking Brink from what I can tell, but sadly like all non CS GO Valve shooters, the player base has dwindled a lot in recent years, and it's hard to find servers for game modes besides CTF (or "capture the intelligence" as it's called in TF2).

But going back to my struggle with game addiction, let me tell you: despite only lasting a month, it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I can only imagine how terrible other addictions like alcoholism or obesity must be.