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Master(G) hat geschrieben:REVIEW: Brink http://www.thegnet.ch/article/738/XBOX-360/BRINK

Brink has been kind of strange. I’ve said that I like it when scores on games are widely disparate, and this one has some dips that verge on the subterranean. If the game were dumb, I would tell you so. Then I would be done, and we could do something else. But it’s not dumb, it’s just weird. I’d rather convene the Council of Elrond on this motherfucker and see where we can get to.

My first experiences with Brink were with a version of the game that doesn’t even exist anymore, as a result of a day one patch that dropped in many cases after reviews already went up. Sorry, we’re getting into some sausage making here: the Playstation 3 version of the game can’t actually be reviewed at the moment, because of its down webs. I haven’t had a chance to see it at all yet, because while I’m willing to purchase two copies of a game to satisfy my curiosity, I draw the line at three. Of course, now that I've said that... God dammit!

Get over to the PC side of the equation, and - for me, at least - things start to snap together audibly. The art style that on consoles has a smoothed out, vaseline lens, eighties glamour shot quality is instead crisp and real, and the work that people put into their characters (and that Splash Damage put into the world) shows to much better effect. The stuttering and weirdness that asserts itself on the Xbox evaporates here, to the extent that I think it's possible to assess the core gameplay at all.

Brink is a better game than its metascore might imply, provided you can get to that round where every gossamer template of its potential finds alignment. It’s very “designed,” which makes the experience very fragile in cases where its technology fails, which isn’t something you really have control over on the console. Or on the PC, frankly. Which we’ll get to.

It’s certainly true that running back and forth from the spawn point to the scene of the action - wherever that might be at the moment - perfectly captures that Sisyphean hellhole feeling that capture point games can descend into. Where things diverge from the norm is the ring of objectives you can pull up, the unique grammar of its classes, and the incredibly novel sense of momentum. Whenever I find myself running back again and again to form a kind of “corpse bridge” to my objective, it's usually because I haven't considered some facet of this strange triumvirate.

As the shooter of the week, it’s a miss; as Brink, which is to say, as itself - a kind of class-based action platformer - there’s something here.

I wasn’t aware just how lucky I was to be able to jump directly in after installing the game. Part of this is that, as the result of a victorious coin flip at the time of machine creation, I happened to install an nVidia board. Before we move on to the next paragraph, I will give you a few moments to guess what kind of card Gabriel has. It won’t be hard, because there’s really only two kinds.

[...]

I know what draws him to it, because it’s the same thing that draws me: team-based, objective-oriented play, literally from another era - aged ten years in the bottle. He sees the inheritor of the games we played as young men, the long nights of Wolf; meshed echelons of interdependence. He is not wrong; that game is in there. But they have made it incredibly difficult to find.

Master(G) hat geschrieben:sone schlächts spiel. krass.