The Back to Karkand DLC for Battlefield 3 hit the PC and 360 yesterday while PS3 owners got it last week. (damn exclusivity deals) If you pre-ordered the game you will get free access to the pack which re-imagines four maps from the brilliant Battlefield 2 and also throws in a handful of new unlockable weapons and some new vehicles to play with. If you didn’t pre-order you can get the DLC for £11.99. A steep price, but quite possibly worth it. Hit the jump for some thoughts.

I won’t give a Verdict on Back to Karkand just yet, I have only played two of the maps, Gulf of Oman and Strike at Karkand, the map after which this DLC is named. While the full map choice is limited compared to what could have been chosen, I think that these two maps, along with Sharqi Peninsula and Wake Island really show us what could have been achieved with Battlefield 3 on release.

The more I play the core maps of Battlefield 3, the more I realise that they lack the je ne sais quoi (pardon the French) of maps like Karkand and Oman. Playing these two maps last night was, to paraphrase one of my clan mates, like taking a trip back to your old high school and seeing how things had changed, but still feeling quite at home.

DICE have certainly given these classic maps a makeover, the approach to the Hotel flag on Karkand has been heavily revised, as has Market, while Oman feels like a town which has grown up and expanded in the shadow of the US carrier. Further, for the first time really since I started to play Battlefield 3 I felt like DICE had truly captured that feeling of being in a warzone like they managed with Battlefield 2.

It is pleasing to seeing the Conquest Assault game mode return, one side starting the action with a ticket bleed really kicks up the intensity, and hopefully with lead to an increased level of teamwork. Well, that would require VOIP to be added to the game, but one can live in hope. The assignments to access the new weapons seem like a solid approach to how unlocks should be handled, but I haven’t looked into them in much detail so far.

It does come seem a bit steep to charge £11.99 for this DLC, but you get guaranteed quality maps for your money, which we weren’t able to say about the main game. I’ll be honest that a few more maps wouldn’t have gone amiss, but for now I will take what we have with open arms and bask in the joy that is Battlefield 2 in Battlefield 3.

How genuine are they? Well, the entire portfolio has been hastily deleted for one thing. Storyboards from Human Revolution were also available on the site… so there’s a good chance these are a significant find.

Honestly though, aside from suggesting that the fantastic style of the original trilogy’s cutscenes may be retained, there’s not much in this leak other than rooftops, thieving and steampunk. Par for the course in a week when Grand Theft Auto V was revealed to have cars, theft and organised crime. Even despite their now infamous crime against typography, Thiaf‘s developers seem to be on the right track.

Thief 4 was announced to be in development in May 2009, with nothing further mentioned about its potential release date or target platforms.

RAGE is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a game frankly. There are bits of game bolted on here and there that don’t feel as though they belong together. For every moment of traditional iD FPS corridor shooting, there’s a strange Simon says mini-game, or a 5 minute drive through the wasteland in a mad-max style buggy. But the important question is, does it all come together as more than the sum of it’s parts, or does it lumber around morosely before attempting to murder the twisted genius who first gave it life?

At the core of RAGE, is a linear corridor shooter. The ‘critical path’ through the game, is a series of levels we’d expect from an iD shooter, with guns and ammo being gifted to the player in a steady stream of upgrades, giving us more tools to play with and more ways to shoot people in the face. This is when RAGE is at it’s best, when it isn’t trying to be something it’s not. At times the seams of this very directed experience show. There are obstacles it appears we’re allowed to hop over, with invisible walls keeping us on the straight and narrow. But these seams don’t really detract from the experience. The levels are universally beautiful to look, with decayed buildings looming in the distance as we forge our way onwards through the freak-filled levels. The Dead City level in particular – a mutant infested urban sprawl – provides some spectacular vistas.

The guns we get to play with are meaty and each has enough utility to keep it becoming obsolete, with varied ammo types meaning every weapon retains a place in your arsenal. The shotgun for instance can be changed from a traditional low-range wide-spread head-popping device into a grenade launcher. The crossbow can be used for silent take-downs, or equipped with bolts that allow you to briefly control, then detonate your foes.

Enemies range from punkish bandits and rabid-mutants, to your fairly bog standard dystopian cyber-military types. None of the enemies have a particularly engaging back-story and their motivation is written into their skin. The bandits are violent outlaws, tribals or tech-hoarding eastern Europeans (no? me neither), the mutants are flesh-hungry maniacs and the cyber-military dickheads are your basic cyber-military dickheads, out to dominate the wasteland and control the people. But they are all sublimely animated and intelligent enough to duck every now and then. Their unpredictable movement and varying levels of technology and armour mean you’ll have to experiment with your weaponry to find out what works best to take each type down. As a linear shooter with spectacular scenery RAGE works well and follows on in the iD tradition, with some lovingly inserted Easter-eggs that bring a knot of nostalgia to the stomach of any 20-year-old-plus gamer.

However, at times, it feels like iD are ashamed of bringing us a decidedly old-school shooter. All the extra bits – roaming around hub areas populated with interesting looking people, (with very little interesting to say), the side missions that see us trekking back through previously visited locales – they feel like filler, or worse a disguise, existing to trick us into forgetting how old-school the core mechanics of RAGE are. The problem is not that the additions are necessarily bad, – the car racing sections are well made and engaging in short bursts, the crafting system is simple enough that it’s never an annoyance – it’s just that they feel superfluous to the main game. As someone who is normally a completionist – hunting down side-quests and pursuing them to the bitter end – I found myself curiously unmotivated by RAGE’s extra curricular activities. Perhaps this is because although it’s entirely possible to devote hours to working your way through the various racing modes and upgrading your car into a Super-monstroso-destructo-mobile there’s very little reason to. A couple of basic upgrades can see you through most of the storyline without any trouble (one moment near the end aside, where suddenly you may find yourself outnumbered and outgunned). Most often rewards for these kinds of activities come in the form of extra money, or perhaps a collectors card you can add to your deck in yet another optional mini-game.

From a technical perspective, although RAGE is a very pretty game, capable of rendering far off in to the distance, it’s not without issues. The mega-textures which are the big technological advance are far too complicated for me to explain with my limited aptitude for such things. But suffice it to say, there are jarring issues if you try and turn around too quickly in the game, (although on the PC version at least, a patch has allowed options to tweak this) and performance with most ATI cards is still far from perfect.

RAGE is not a bad game and there are moments in the shooting where it brings into sharp focus what it is that iD do so well. There aren’t many developers capable of making gun-play feel so satisfyingly punchy without resorting to gimmicks. But the game gets bogged down in the unnecessary; there are few things more irritating in a game than standing by an NPC and pressing the same button repeatedly so they can give you a quest, without the option for input or response and without engaging dialogue to back it up. Especially when they ramble on for minutes at a time, before referring you to another NPC and the whole ordeal starts over again.

Perhaps it’s slightly unfair that if this were from another developer we might be more forgiving of the faults. But this is iD we’re talking about. They created a legend for themselves through making uncompromising shooters, heavy on high-tech thrills and shooting satisfaction, light on unnecessary fluff. In RAGE, the fluff almost overpowers everything else and sometimes it feels like you’re fighting against the game to get to the good stuff. These reservations aren’t enough to stop RAGE being fun to play, but there are times you may wish someone at iD was willing to say ‘No’ more often – “No that feature ain’t necessary, we’re iD for chrissakes, we’re making a shooter, the hell d’you need a card-game in there for?”*

Verdict – On-Target

*I like to imagine that as a Texas based company, everyone who works at iD is a kind of techno-cowboy

Platforms Available – PC, 360, PS3
Platform Reviewed – PC

For more information on our scoring system, please read this page.

Chris

I’ll be up front and honest, my first impressions were very poor. I experienced major performance issues, the stat tracking system was initially broken and the singleplayer AI is, to be kind, a bit shit. These are by no means game destroying, but they do cast a cloud over the it in my mind. I know Tripwire are working furiously to sort the issues out, but part of me wonders how many people might be turned away from the game for good thanks to these issues.

Another problem is the skill level of the vast majority of the people you face online, there was a fairly lengthy beta period for people who pre-ordered, and I am sure that those people who took part in the beta have such a greater level of game knowledge that it makes things difficult for new players to come in and settle.

I will suggest you avoid the single-player campaign, I honestly preferred what passed for a singleplayer campaign in Battlefield 1942, at least there the AI was able to move towards the action rather than walking in circles. The only worth while aspect of the campaign that I can see is the tutorials which will teach you some of the finer details of the game which may help you out in multiplayer.

Despite these problems I have stuck with the game, and when I look beyond the problems, I see a very good multiplayer shooter hiding. It isn’t an easy game, and as such it is very refreshing compared to some of the droll we see being released at the moment. Hopefully Tripwire are able to get the issues resolved before the community fades away. Myself? I’m going to keep at it, I feel that soon enough this game will really start to shine.

Michael

My first experience of Red Orchestra 2 (other than a very brief look at the single-player) involved me, a gun, another dude and what is known as a ‘TK’. More precisely, it involved me accidentally shooting someone on my team with a large machinegun as I dumbly failed to recognise that he was wearing the drab brown of the Russian soldiers, rather than the drab green of the Axis. Five seconds after that, I was killed by another member of my own team. Initially I presumed this was as retribution for my own folly, before a glance at the scoreboard told me that it was actually a griefer – taking pleasure in purposefully spoiling the game. So, lesson number one – friendly fire is back. Friendly fire is anything but.

In the next match, I decided that running ahead of everyone else on my team would put me in a position where my own allies are less likely to be milling around in front of my iron sights and that I’d be a safer proposition for my teammates taking point. My death was swift and inglorious, I was picked off quickly by a crack of rifle fire. The spawn timer counted down slowly from eighteen to zero and by the time I was back in the game, my compatriots had taken cover in sensible positions and were exchanging fire with our opponent. Lesson two – spawn timers are long and every death is felt when trying to secure an objective. Running forward in a bloodthirsty rage is no substitute for clever positioning and tactical awareness of the battlefield.

Eventually I got to grips with the game after a few matches and started to have a positive impact for my team. Although I could lament the lack of teamwork at times, I was having quite a bit of success in flanking enemy positions and carefully moving myself around to set up lines of fire at important choke points. At one point I was even leading the scoreboard, having taken on the role of the elite rifleman. The one hit kill nature of battles is rather satisfying, if your enemy has their back to you, you can sit for a moment coldly calculating when to take the shot. Unfortunately at this point I experienced a crash to desktop.

It’s worth noting my performance generally was actually quite smooth, I was lucky enough not to experience the stuttering and bugginess others have encountered and I wasn’t running the game on anything resembling a ninja-performance PC. But ultimately – Lesson Three is that I can sense a thrilling and tense shooter in RO2. There are learning curves to overcome and bugs to endure, but if Tripwire can polish the game up to a higher standard, then it may just offer a tantalisingly different proposition from the more arcadey shooters currently flooding the market.

Ben

In theory, I’ve had a lot of experience with Red Orchestra. I played the original UT mod years ago and dabbled in the first standalone Red Orchestra during it’s many free weekends. But admittedly, I never truly ‘got’ it. So it was with some trepidation that I booted up Red Orchestra 2, as I wasn’t sure entirely whether the game would be a little more accessible this time.

It started promisingly enough with the single player mode offering me a tutorial, which I jumped at the opportunity to take. And sure enough I found myself on a training field being shown, alongside the usual basic movement controls of most FPS, some of the little details that define Red Orchestra’s identity – having to adjust the iron sights for distance, taking wind and gravity into consideration when making a shot, not being able to rely on a HUD to tell me how much ammo I had left. All things the game definitely deserve it’s standing with it’s own community, showing it’s a game with more teeth and far more smarts than your average shooter.

Sadly, my fears were realised soon after, as it dumped me into the first single player mission. The game told me I had to capture certain areas, but gave me no indication how in terms of the game to do so. The HUD was telling me something, but I had no idea quite what it represented. The map sure was gritty, and felt more organic than a lot of shooter maps, and the cover mechanic seem to work quite well, but I was struggling to work out exactly how well I was doing – the ends of rounds and victory seemed to almost come out of nowhere. Red Orchestra 2 is still a game that is incredibly difficult to penetrate into the mind of the casual gamer.

However, a couple of multiplayer games later, and I could start seeing the light behind the cracks. The difficulty may be tough, but it makes it all the more worth something when you do achieve victory. Kills aren’t some cheap score tally in this game, they’re a mark of how skilled you are versus your opponent. Tense standoffs are common place, and when faced against a good opponent, it can come down to who wastes the least of their precious ammo to make the one successful shot before you need to resupply. It’s a fragile balance – almost literally – but it’s one that Red Orchestra gets right for those wanting something a bit more than a casual shooter.

It’s still early days, but I’m starting to see the appeal of Red Orchestra 2. It’s certainly a tough nut to crack, but for those who persevere with it, there’s a great game underneath – although it’s certainly not for everybody.

Dan Ellis also received a review copy of the game, but due to technical issues he was unable to run the game.

Dead Island shot into the limelight, thanks to an emotional and artful trailer, depicting the backwards zombification of a family at the holiday resort of Banoi, which serves as the game’s setting. The trailer managed to make a zombie game appealing again, at a time when many gamers seemed to be suffering from a touch of zombie fatigue after a deluge of titles dealing with zombie apocalypse, including Valve’s Left 4 Dead and Capcom’s Dead Rising series.

However, as gameplay videos started to emerge and give us a taste of the ‘real’ Dead Island, it became apparent that the game has very little to do with the trailer – it’s more of first person action RPG bruiser for want of an easy description (FPARPGB anyone?). In actual fact Techland have tried to crowbar some emotion into the game, via character interactions and cutscenes. As a result, most of the dialogue is unbearably serious, badly acted and poorly written. The cutscenes depicting what are presumably meant to be heartbreaking scenes are excruciating. You should probably skip them entirely (thankfully a skip option is included).

How does a game come back from this? The trailer that got our attentions is a smokescreen, the story elements are fragmented at best and the whiff of misogyny and incompetence hangs over the game like a bad smell thanks to the botched release. The answer is simple really – Dead Island is incredibly fun to play.

Melee action in FPS games has often been a curiously underwhelming proposition with imprecision and poor feedback leading to several lacklustre titles. Previously only Zeno Clash and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic have really succeeded at making first-person melee feel satisfying and fun for the duration of a game. But within just a few minutes of starting up Dead Island it’s evident that Techland have managed to perfect the elusive formula. Somehow the melee here just works. There are occasions where the timing feels a little bit iffy, or a zombie gets past an attack you’re pretty sure should have sent them crashing into the ground. But for the most part it’s a brutally satisfying experience. It follows in the footsteps of Zeno Clash in making the action feel truly weighty – sounds and visuals combine to ensure that you can feel and see the force of a sledgehammer weighing down on a zombie’s head. You might even find yourself flinching away from the screen as a hardened Thug Zombie slams you to the ground with a wild haymaker. The feeling of weight is further amplified by the way limbs have a tendency to splinter and snap, accompanied by gushing fountains of blood. It all amounts to an intensely visceral experience and you’d be forgiven for feeling as though you need a wash after a session with the game.

Longevity and depth come in the form of the RPG system which is reminiscent of the way Borderlands tackled the FPS genre. You choose from one of four characters (blunt weapons expert, edged weapons expert, throwing expert and firearms expert), each of whom has three skill trees to explore and upgrade, as well as their own unique fury ability which can be unleashed on the undead populace to devastating effect. Some combatants seem more useful than others in the single-player experience (the nearly invincible Sam B is a more straightforward proposition than the gun-toting group buffer Purna), but in co-op the skills compliment each other nicely, allowing different characters to take on specific roles. Further cues from Borderlands are taken with regards to the weapon system. Not only is there a pretty big variety in weapon types – from machetes to shotguns via morningstars and katanas – but assorted weapon mods can be crafted and attached to your weapons. The first time you zap a zombie with your customised cattle-prod police baton resulting in an impromptu ragdoll cartwheel is guaranteed to bring a smile. Early money management can be a bit of a chore, with expensive repairs rapidly exhausting your limited cash supplies. But later in the game and with the right character upgrades, you’ll have more freedom to experiment.

The Co-op mode is where Dead Island truly comes alive – within about five minutes of starting the game with a couple of friends (the game allows up to four player co-op) you’ll likely be grinning from ear to ear. Moments reminiscent of the ‘Don’t stop me now’ jukebox scene from Shaun of the Dead are commonplace, as you stand in a circle around zombies using crude wooden paddles to slowly bludgeon the (un)life from them. There is something inherently comic about the gruesome melee styling of Dead Island and one wonders if the game as a whole might have benefited from embracing the zanier aspects in a similar manner to Dead Rising. Even so, running around the resort (and later city and jungle environments) with your friends; smashing, stabbing and looting like a fiend, you may suddenly find that you’ve lost a day to the unassuming Banoi Resort and it’s rather unwelcoming inhabitants.

Lets deal with those inhabitants in a little more detail. Dead Island veers away from the slow/vs fast zombie debate by having it’s cake, eating it, regurgitating it in a putrescent spray of vomit and blood (and cake), then eating it again. That is to say, it has slow ‘Walkers’, the screaming maniac ‘Infected’ the deadly mutated ‘Suiciders’, the brutal hammer-fisted ‘Thugs’ and the straight-jacketed ‘Ram’ as well as several other varieties. One nice touch is the way in which zombies in different areas of the game are appropriately clothed. Resort zombies are likely to be chubby semi-naked tourists, in contrast with the more sensibly attired town-dwellers. On top of the zombified enemies you’ll find more traditional gun-toting human foes. They aren’t the most intelligent bunch but they do lend some variety to the game and are a handy source of ranged weaponry. The guns in Dead island aren’t the most effective weapons, but they can be useful in a tight spot and a lucky critical can be decisive when you’re under siege.

Dead Island will struggle to prove to naysayers that games are anything other than artless hyper-violent gore-fests. But for those of us who have accepted that sometimes running headfirst into a group of zombies and exploding out the other side in a whirling shower of blood with a shit-eating grin plastered across our faces is highly entertaining, Dead Island is pretty much a must have. If you have a similarly like-minded friend or three to play with, it may just be one of your gaming highlights of the year.

Verdict: Headshot

Versions Available: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Versions Reviewed: PC

For more information on our scoring policy please read this

Rich Knuckles, a fictional helpline attendant, has returned once again in the second episode in the series of promo videos for Serious Sam BTE. Much like the game promises to be, the new trailer is over-the-top, full of action and laced with a great sense of humour. In between bouts of Rich responding angrily to callers the video shows us more footage of the upcoming game including a few shots of the 4-player split screen mode.

Serious Sam 3 is shaping up to be similar to previous games in the series with bright environments, inventive weapons and crazy enemies all making appearances. Developers Croteam are also looking to avoid conventions that have become synonymous with modern days FPSs such as cover-based gameplay and regenerating health.

It’s a risky strategy which may leave Serious Sam 3: BTE feeling outdated, but if the game is anything like the promos then it’s going to be pure unadulterated fun.

Here is the first video if you missed it:

The new game is entitled simply Syndicate and is being developed by The Darkness and Chronicles of Riddick developer Starbreeze Studios. Most notably, the title has been revealed to be a first person shooter, which will no doubt divide many fans and purists. In terms of story, Syndicate will see players take on the role of ‘Eurocorp’s latest prototype agent’ by the name of Miles Kilo in a “dark Machiavellian world run without government oversight with many syndicates vying for total dominance of their local market place.” Three factions – Eurocorp, Cayman Golbal and Aspari – are to feature prominently in the game, while you’ve been implemented with something called “DART 6 bio-chip technology” which grants you various abilities – with two mentioned so far allowing you to hack computers and to slow down time with no doubt more to be announced closer to the game’s release. Meanwhile on the multiplayer side, the game is also set to feature a 4 player co-op mode that “features missions from the original cult classic.”

Mikael Nermark, CEO of Starbreeze Studios is of course excited about the game: “It’s been a great experience working with EA, and an amazing opportunity for us to use our expertise in the first person shooter and action genres to bring back, and reignite, the signature action/espionage gameplay of Syndicate.” Meanwhile Jeff Gamon, EA Partners Executive Producer claims: “Our goal with Syndicate is to provide a challenging action shooter for today’s gamers as well as fans of the original. I’m sure they will enjoy and recognize the legacy that made it such a classic,” – whether EA & Starbreeze manage to live up to that promise remains to be seen, but we’ve got until “early 2012″ to wait before we’ll find out when Syndicate will be released on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

It is a shame that the demo is so short, I blasted through in half-hour, but it was most certainly action packed. The demo only gives you two weapons to tinker with, an assault rifle and an electro-energy spewing machine which looks pretty funky. There is a lot of shooting, a hell of a lot as there are quite often just swarms of small, annoying robots which keep trying to jump at your face to rip it to shreds.

There is certainly a hint of Serious Sam and Painkiller here with the full on in your face action, that certainly isn’t a bad thing as I really quite enjoyed those two aforementioned titles. This probably won’t be the game for you if you are looking for a deep complex shooter in the style of Half-Life or the good Call of Duty games. But sometimes you just want to let off some steam, and that is what this demo has allowed me to do.

I did enjoy targeting the cliched, but joyous, explosive barrels and a bunch of highly charged objects which send electricity sparking in a delightful way to deliver a nasty shock to the robots. In my short run through the demo I managed to find a handful of secret areas, the trick to Hard Reset is clearly to shoot anything that looks like it might explode, it generally will.

A bit of an old school shooter then, and nowt wrong with that. I’m not sure how well it will hold up over the length of the full game, that will be a bit of a test.

Hard Reset comes out on the 13th September, only on the PC.

The problem as I see it is that Activision or Infinity Ward or whoever you want to blame, actively attempt to court controversy with the Modern Warfare series, purely for marketing reasons. This debate flared up when the No Russian level was detailed in 2009 for Modern Warfare 2. There is an argument that says, being interactive and being able to see through someone else’s eyes, gives videogames the opportunity to make us feel what it would be like in a situation, to shock us and help us to empathise with a certain situation and that is the technique employed in the Call of Duty. That, quite frankly is a load of balls, Call of Duty is not about subtlety or emotion, the only feeling you get whilst playing the game is a rise in testosterone (this is equally applicable to the multi-player, hence the ‘interactions’ of the community). It contains sensationalist elements in the fiction, for the sake of attracting attention to itself. At best that’s populist, at worst it’s distasteful and disrespectful, in the way it can turn echoes of real life catastrophes into entertainment.

To be brutally honest, I can live with that. People are naturally curious and interested in the turbulent events that happen around the world, sure taking part in them through interactive fiction is a slightly morbid past-time, but no more than the way our eyes glue to the scene of a car crash as we drive past. In essence it’s part of human nature to be curious about death and violence, because for most of us thankfully it’s pretty disconnected from our day-to-day lives.

What does annoy me is that I believe there are certain elements of the sensationalism specifically designed to attract the attention of the conservative tabloid press. After the press reaction to No Russian, the developers were obviously aware of the impact that level had in raising awareness for the game and garnering attention, whether positive or negative. At that juncture they have two decisions, they can in future try and tell a story that is a little more sensitively judged so that it might avoid offending people, while remaining ‘edgy’ enough to satisfy fans. Or, they can continue in a similar vein, attempting to use shock tactics to raise the profile of the game. In choosing to set a level in the London Underground for Modern Warfare 3 – the site of a major terrorist attack, in which 52 people were killed – they have obviously chosen the latter route.

Predictably the Daily Mail has already published an article attacking the developers for the inclusion of this sequence in Modern Warfare 3. At the risk of sounding like a paranoia addled conspiracy theorist, I have to say this to me looks like a mutually beneficial partnership masquerading as an adversarial relationship. The developers benefit from tabloid exposure, raising the profile of their game at the time when they are starting to promote it heavily. Which other games get heavy press exposure from major non-specialist press outlets at this point in their development? (The answer is none). The benefit for the Daily Mail is that they get to publish a story that attracts people who are interested in the Call of Duty series, an audience significantly younger than their normal reader-base. They will no doubt also attract more people to their website, which is fast becoming one of the most viewed websites in the world and stimulate debate in their comments sections, while reinforcing their position as a ‘moral guardian’.

You might argue that this cynical exercise (if you agree with my analysis at least), execrable as it is, harms no-one. But as has been pointed out before, the Daily Mail likes to contact victims and support groups, to use their comments to back-up their moral outrage and lend emotion to their words. Hence you have victims of horrendous acts being asked for their opinions on what is for one side at least (in my opinion for both), a marketing exercise. So that’s what annoys me, that victims of terrorist acts are being used as a marketing opportunity, by a product which has elements clearly designed to outrage people. People use the phrase ‘too soon’ in a jokey manner when discussing how appropriate it is to depict real-world events (or make jokes about them), based on the idea that there is an acceptable moment, where people have been able to process the events and accept them. But the truth is, as long as there is a media ready to rush out and harass victims, dredging up harsh memories and slicing open old wounds for the sake of sales, marketing and pretence, it will always be ‘too soon’ as far as I’m concerned.

Brink is an incredibly schizophrenic game in many ways. It wants to be an overarching, cutscene driven story about the struggles of the Ark on which the game takes place, yet simultaneously be a fast paced shooter with the quick pacing and instant gratification that multiplayer focused games need to entice players and keep them around. It wants to offer the character progression and unlockable skill mechanics of an RPG, while offering the fluidity of movement and freedom of traversing the maps how you want in the parkour style made popular by platform adventures. The problem that Brink has is that these elements don’t quite join up as seamlessly as Splash Damage would like, leaving a sort of patchwork game that is by no means a bad one but does contain niggles that might put off players from a long-term investment.

The game itself takes place on an island location known as The Ark where a civil war is brewing between two forces – the Security who feel the people should remain on the Ark, and the Resistance who long to escape the Ark in order to seek out a new life. You, as a member of whichever team you happen to be fight on have to complete a series of objectives on every map in order to further the cause for your chosen side across a number of maps throughout the Ark.

Each map takes place on a different part of the Ark.

After choosing a side, you can create a character and customise their appearance from a series of options, many unique to each team – and though the selection is fairly varied, it perhaps would have been nice to allow more customisation in terms of colour. Then you customise what skills your character has using the initial bank of points provided. Finally you choose a mission and whether to play it solo, with or against other humans or instead take on one of the ‘Challenges’ which allows you to unlock new equipment and weapons with which to use in the campaign portion of the game. Once in the campaign itself you’ll find yourself either attacking or defending objectives as one of four classes; Engineer, Medic, Soldier and Operative that will be very familiar to you if you’ve ever played any Enemy Territory game.

And this correlation remains true throughout the whole of Brink – understandable as it’s from the same developers – and this is essentially Enemy Territory 3 in all but name. Medics heal the team and provide health related buffs, Engineers build and construct turrets, objectives and mines, Soldiers plant charges, distribute ammo and generally form the brunt of the Attack force, while Operatives are required for hacking objectives and infiltration missions with the ability to disguise as fallen foes. It’s a tried and tested dynamic, and of course it shows with roles for nearly every kind of player, while the HUD display makes it relatively clear what roles are needed to complete missions, and a nice touch is the game highlighting objectives when selected to show exactly where each class is needed the most helping to focus the teams.

Perks include letting you throw different grenades to seeing where enemies are coming from and more.

Even with this however, it can be quite confusing for new players to know exactly what’s going on. It’s all well and good having these things highlighted but it’s not always obvious exactly why this is going on. To their credit, Splash Damage have introduced some context through the exposition and cutscenes at the start and end of every match. However it’s hard to see how effective these truly are to most multiplayer shooter fans, who just want to get in and play. Gunplay itself is also incredibly fast and frantic and doesn’t quite feel solid enough at the moment. Shots do have a certain weight to them, but it can be hard to really see the difference between many of the guns aside from your burst fire/rapid fire options, even with the upgrades. The bars do give some information, but it’s difficult for the player to translate that into what that means in real terms.

It’s also fair to say that Brink isn’t the most polished game you’ll play this year. Granted, it manages to achieve an impressive feat by combining the first person action with free running, and the much touted S.M.A.R.T. movement system is impressive in that you can indeed clamber up walls and slide through narrow gaps, it can feel rather arbitrary at times – as if the environments are just blocking your way for the sake of it, rather than the maps feeling natural and fluid. It can feel really artificial when you’re blocked from going a certain route just because the game says so. In addition, at this stage netcode can be choppy at times, and although it’s a minor issue, it’s a shame that one person with a bad connection can drag a whole server down. You’ll really feel the brunt of this if it’s you, especially if you have no control over it. The XP system also feels a bit forced, and more convulted than it needs to be – especially when abilities are more tied to ‘rank’ which is apparently a separate thing that goes up in the same way. In fact, the only real use of your ‘level’ seems to be the difficulty of the bots in challenge mode. Since there’s no way to tell this until you do it, you might spend only an hour playing multiplayer and your level rises to a point where the challenges become frustratingly difficult to complete solo – but you’d have no idea until you went to play said challenges which feels very unfair.

Another neat touch is randomising the characters in the cutscenes, while including your own character.

Overall Brink is a good game. It’s a solid multiplayer shooter, but whether it can hold out for the long terms is going to depend on future maps – currently many do feel similar to each other. The Challenges are a nice touch to help hone your skills, but even when you know what you’re doing it can be easy to feel a bit overwhelmed and surplus to requirements if you’re on a good team. Conversely it can be all too easy to blame your teammates when you’re having a bad day. It’s a title that does come recommended and really shines when playing with a good, well co-ordinated team and it deserves to do well, there’s just a few aspects of the game that might not suit everybody’s tastes. Time will tell how long it sticks around.

Verdict: On Target

Platforms available: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Version reviewed: PC