Conceptually, Enemy Territory and Brink are the exact same games with different feels, art styles, stories, and mechanics. However in terms of classes, and being objective based which were the core fundamentals of ET, all of that carries on over to Brink, and while that was basically being summed up to me in the very lengthy tutorial video, more on that later, I was very excited to jump into what I thought would basically be the current generation Enemy Territory, it isn't exactly.
The first thing that I noticed was immediately different was how different the game feels from Enemy Territory in general, movement felt much clunkier and slower than it was in ET, it also adopted the Iron Sights method of shooters instead of completely by the hip. I personally didn't mind the iron sights and it probably was the best addition to the series although at the same time it still felt way different than original ET which did fine without iron sights. The idea of iron sights and slow movement without aiming down the sights at all in the first place seemed very very contradictory as the first tip I was given from the loading screen I think (or maybe it was something else) is that movement is very important in Brink, and you always want to be moving, but I found movement being more of a hassle than anything else and I didn’t end up doing it much.
Next thing I'll talk about is the tutorial video, I generally don't like videos in substitution for actual tutorial levels but hardly any games actually do that, but Brink did. So, mainly because the video was straight to the point and did give you important information that was useful, also maybe somewhat unique in having a tutorial video in video games at all, I'll say that the video wasn't that bad. On the other hand, there's a video that plays while you're being given voiced instructions, that video that plays gives a very bad misrepresentation of what the actual game play in Brink feels like. As I mentioned before, it's movement is clunky, and it's gunplay isn't the fastest thing in the world, but the videos do a very good job at making it look like it's in-fact, the fastest thing in the world thanks to camera angles and short recordings of gameplay. Yet even then, I never found the gameplay as fast paced as any single one of the recordings in the tutorial. Lastly, while I said the tutorial is effective, if you've ever played a first person shooter before, you can probably skip maybe a third of the information in the video such as HUD indicators of where your ammo and health is at, or even some information like when you're a medic you can see other team member's health bars, but knowing that ahead of time can be useful too. With that said, the rest of the video is useful if you've never played a Splash Damage game before, but as a ET fan it was pretty much review for me.
Finally there's a few things that the game did that are similar to ET, the first is the multiple objectives structure. Using a ET map called Gold Rush as an example, the objectives for the Allied team were to escort a tank to a bank (which took most of the game most likely), then the tank would blow the bank open, from then on Allied soldiers would steal gold from the bank, and put it on a nearby truck, and finally they would have to escort the truck away while it escaped with the gold. On the other hand,the Axis forces simply have to defend from the Allies, they only lose when the truck leaves, if the round ends before then, then it's assumed that they successfully defended and they win. In Brink, using a Air Port level as an example, the multiple objectives were a lot more human based rather than waiting for a tank and were able to be accomplished quicker, if I remember right, the first for the Security Team was to hack into a security console, from then on they had to open a vault, and finally escape with a card key. The Rebels on the other hand simply like the Axis, had to defend from them. The main difference between these two maps is that one has more escort objectives while the other doesn't, in Brink time is also added to the attacking team before they fail and have to retreat rather than having a total amount of time to complete their objectives, while they aren't bad decisions and are simply design decisions, this gives an idea of how similar but different Brink is to ET.
Brink also lets you select your class at a command post whereas ET only let you select your class if you weren't in the game yet, so either by dying, or just joining the game. A few classes have different things as well, besides having one different name the classes in ET have their obvious brink counterparts such as Soldier is Soldier, Operative is Covert Ops, Medic is Medic, Engineer is Engineer, and there is no Field Ops in Brink. They also primarily serve the same function as well, except their functions were arguably more useful in ET than Brink, an Engineer and a Covert Ops could win a game on a map called Fuel Depot in seconds (where the objective is to blow up the fuel depot) by ignoring the main way to breach the Depot, which is again a tank, and just sneaking past everyone to blow it up with dynamite. No class really has a difference making ability like that in Brink, instead they all have additional abilities that help them in combat, and certain objectives only they can fulfill, such as only a engineer can repair a console, and only a soldier can set explosive charges to blow something up. It makes the entire game feel like a heist pretty much rather than a war zone. Like I said before though, these details just separate Brink from ET a little bit while keeping it's main points and continuing along the developer’s legacy.
Finally the last bad thing about Brink is it's campaign, while it has a very interesting set up for a story in that there really isn't any good or evil faction, instead it's two factions who want to do what they think is the best for their city, the Arc. One side wants to protect the Arc even though there isn't much left of the Arc to protect, and the other wants to leave the Arc to save themselves. While it's not explained into too much depth other than that, it's hard to find any real good or evil in the factions as both factions have their share of it, and their original goals are pretty much both good. You can't fault people for wanting to escape a dying place, but you also can't fault others for wanting to keep them there to make it better, so instead that results in a conflict (which is somewhat questionable considering how things are). The actual good and evil factors are found within the cut scenes where some characters don't show any regret for wanting to take lives to get what they want while others do. In short the story sets up to be very good but I didn't get far enough in our test run of it to see how far it develops, according to other reviews that I read, it doesn't take advantage of it's plot and doesn't delve much deeper than that.
The other part of the campaign is of course playing the game itself, it is primarily the player(s) with allied bots against enemy bots rather than a scripted campaign. As someone who doesn't really like bot matches as a campaign, this was a immediate turn off for me, as I personally would love to have something more like Halo rather than Unreal Tournament as a campaign, especially with the story as a set up. I understand that Brink is a primarily multiplayer game and the campaign further pushes towards that ideal as being “practice” matches, but even then and even with the bots still around the game presents almost no source of interest for players with no story events happening during the missions, and the only challenge occurring when the mission is about over, at which point the normally cannon fodder bots become much smarter and dangerous.
Well in any case, while Brink wasn't the game I was hoping it to be, it at least brought back memories about ET, and considering how popular ET was there still might be quite a few servers around to play on. So in short, Brink does enough things to deviate itself from Enemy Territory but at the same time it also tries to change too far from the actual game play mechanics resulting in a clunky shooter with neat concepts. This more encourages people to play the game that they created that was the aged but smooth shooter with as equal of interesting concepts more than anything, but I'm glad to see things from one of my favorite developers around and while it wasn't exactly the most popular or great thing around, I hope that it was popular enough for them to take that into advice, continue, and make a better game because of it.
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