Greetings fellow board warriors!

I have been watching this game for several months and was very happy when it released to have a chance at this new take on the shooter genre. After logging in about 20 hours, I feel that I can give an fair an accurate review.

First the Pros:
1. No K/D tracking. Awesome. Now we have people looking to take objectives and support their team rather than camping out with a sniper rifle to pad their k/d
2. The mobility features are incredibly fun and a nice change of pace for the shooter genre
3. The controls are great and quick to pick up
4. Alternate objectives give each match a different feel
5. The ability to change classes mid game without waiting to die first
6. The Buff system does well to inspire teamwork even without communicating which is good for the shyer gamers
7. Character customization is always fun and the way body types affect they way any given class plays
8. Each match has this innate since of urgency when you start playing drawing you in and forcing you to make decisions about what class to play. It encourages a more tactical mindset which I find refreshing

The cons:
1. Using the single player maps and objectives verbatim for multi-player is a bad idea. It can stagnate the game for some people
2. Not enough weapons and what weapons are in the game seem to be pretty similar and in the end there are really about 4-5 weapons that everyone uses
3. Melee system is weird. It almost seems out of place with the way it functions
4. Lack of lobbies is felt. Its nice to enter a game full of actual humans
5. Bots are seriously lacking in intelligence. In single player they almost seem to work more against you than with you
6. Running is a tad slow and jumping is a tad too low for a game with such a cool system for mobility


With that said here are my suggestions. This game has a ton of potential and it would be great to see some of these improvements added to the game:

1. Make running and sprinting about 10% faster
2. Increase jump height by about 15-20%
3. Expand the melee system - Since this game does not go with the usual OHK melee routine, it should be expanded so that players who run out of ammo (happens a lot in-game), still have a viable way to fight. Have a way to enter melee mode where the R/L 1 are the left and right hands and R?L2 are the left and right feet. Include in the general abilities section an improved melee that adds a special move based on body type. Another way to go is to add melee weapons. Look no further than Unreal Championship 2 for original Xbox to see how well melee and guns can work together in a shooter. This would add a lot of depth to the game.
4. Game lobbies obviously are necessary for any game to have a robust online experience and add in clan matches
5. Add more weapons, possibly including melee weapons
6. New multiplayer-only maps
7. New game type - Territorial Control. Similar to the capture and hold type in Killzone 3 but expanded to include all the neat sub-objectives that make Brink unique.
8. New game type - Attack and Defend. Similar to BF:BC series but once again with the added feature of other ancillary objectives that can change the tide of the battle of accomplished
9. Voice coms please....c'mon guys. This is a team based shooter and teams need to communicate

I feel that doing this will take this game to the level it was meant to reach. It will make the matches more fast, furious, heart pumping and immersive.

Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts.

^^^ Agree but here's some other things to chew on in terms of ideas:
1) How bout katanas? Shadowrun's katana was halarious to use if you knew how.
2) For that hand to hand combat... Add some grapples maybe?
3) Make some points in the map a little higher like sniper spots and add an actual climbing system to the light bodies can scramble up!
4) Maybe some other parkour moves would be cool like monkey vaults or rolls? Maybe even some stuff from the announcement trailer like backslides?
5) Why does the ark have no women on it? You'd think they'd join sides or something? Come on give the ladies some rep here!
6) DEDICATED SERVERS!
Overall, Brink's a really fun and original game and I'm looking foreward to more!

Agree with you 2, except for the rolls ... we would get headache with rolls, but they could add run on walls for light body type, this is what is really missing for now (about SMART).
I also 150% agree about the melee weapons ! You should at least add a knife that you can slay an ennemi from the back (DAMN !!!! you remember the freaking trailer ??!!!!! We want to do exactly what's in the trailer !)

The lobby is essential !! They should add a lobby, clan system, and online stats as soon as possible (apparently online stats are coming) !

And another thing that nobody suggested before : you should add more abilities that every engineers or medics, ... could be differents ! For now, there is about 9 abilities for each classes ? You should go for more (and restrict the number of abilities you can choose for a class if you don't want a classes with 20 abilities). It would be awesome to have 2 ingeneers with differents specs ... See me ? For now you don't have the choice, you want to play as an engineer ? Spend your points in every abilities and you will just be like others engineers .... I think that we need more choices, more liberty

I love this game !
See you !!

One downside of this game is the movement of characters through 3D space. Perhaps I am used to the smoothness of Crysis 2 but the movement seems a little dated to me. It can be slow, jittery and confused. I think that if this can be improved then this game could be a classic. (By the way, it is not a problem with my computer as I have the very latest Sandy Bridge processor and Nvidia Graphics card - 570 GTX). This is the first thing to be fixed in the actual mechanics of the game itself and not things like - '2 engineer types'.

Nevica

Sure the movement are not as good as they was in Mirror's edge, but I got used to it.
Another thing : We need de have the possibility to play without any bots in every freeplay settings !

See you

I agree with the majority of things said in these posts so far. Only a handful I don't. Prepare to get nitpicked:
I don't think the movement speed + jump height needs altering. The light, and maybe even medium characters mobility is generally already above the average humans capability. Of course this is reality, but it's a case of just because they can, doesn't mean they should. It would have a dramatic effect on the pace of the game and alter the viability of each body-type. They've kept it just low enough to not need an explanation to give to the player. I believe they want the players to still feel average in their character. It's one thing to have a city full of people who are "okay" at parkour, but to have a city full of people who are very well trained in it is another.
If you take a look on youtube, some players with a more parkourish mindset have found some prtty impressive shortcuts using what they already have. To take it further would just bring us to the bouncy-rubber-ball gameplay we'd see in Unreal Tournament where it would better suit.
As a counter-suggestion, I think that future maps should simply have a greater vertical factor. Make the gap between normal transport and parkour a bit bigger. Make normal transport a bit more taxing. The lesson will be carried across all existing maps. Maybe I'm just not observing other players enough, but I swear people select the light body-type thinking "oh yeah now I can do parkour" but do they honestly remember make good use of it... not often enough. They essentially stay the same but with less health. Either they've adapted to being floor-bound from other shooters or normal, on-foot paths appear barely less efficient.
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Next one I don't fully agree with from the second post. One parkour movement I do agree with is the simple roll to change downward momentum to forward (reducing fall damage), although if anything it should be button activated like in Mirror's Edge. Players do not like to be forced to sacrifice their weapon use for even a second. Fall damage may be preferable to giving the enemy a few free shots.
For the same reason I don't think they should waste time on including the monkey vault at all. It's a two handed movement used mostly to overcome long, waist-high obstacles. The thought of doing it with a gun in one hand would be extremely awkward. Otherwise having a way to holster both weapons would be too situational and too underused to be worth it.
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For my own suggestions:
Melee needs to be altered in some way for console players. Having played PC and 360 versions, I can say as an example just beating an incapped player is much easier on PC. In the consoles case you seem to need to take your time a little more. The console simply needs a little extra aim-assistance when melee is triggered. Not too strong, it's not Halo or CoD, just enough so that you don't miss because of something very silly.
The decided damage on melee attacks seems suitable. I would avoid pure melee weapons like a katana. If the knife already does roughly half a medium players health in damage (back to that in a minute), I don't want to know what a katana would do. Especially if combined with a previously suggested movement speed and jump height increase.
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The pistols that lights are restricted to. Please can we have more useful semi-automatic pistols. The knife won't ever get used up close if your main weapon has ammo. Melee might, but the knife won't. Even then, there's no reason people will pick a semi-automatic pistol over the fully-auto pistol won from the challenge. If the stats are to be believed, the damage on the fully-auto is even better per shot. Superior, yet so easily obtainable, it pulls character customaization to being more about aesthetics and less about practicality. I've yet to test how many shots a semi-auto takes to bring down a light, but I'd probably feel better equipped with a pea-shooter. No no, a stapler.
The fully-auto pistol calls for no change in tactics with the likely chance that your primary weapon is also fully automatic. With medium and up the secondary weapons seem just as reliable as primraries. With light on the other hand, secondary appears to be a very desperate last resort with all except the one option.

Not so sure how to wrap it up. I probably could've shortened it but resisting my explanative nature would've wasted more time on thinking. Tear it up, agree. I know I don't sound very positive. I do like the way the games shaped up.