I’ve just completed Brink. “Completing” a multiplayer FPS sounds a bit absurd, but Brink is a bit of an odd game. Splash Damage has hyped its revolutionary blended single and multi-player, touting a seamless transition between the two. I watched countless videos that explained how this game would give life to a stagnant genre, scratch that shooter itch, and fill a team-based void left blank by today’s modern military shooters. Allow me to explain.

Brink is not shy about competition in the market. Graffiti sprawled across the walls of the Ark declares “WE EAT COD,” an obvious nod to Activision’s cash machine. In the options menu, you’ll find different custom control setups identical to every popular shooter on the shelf. It wants to fit in, and it wants players to feel at home.

But the ironic part is, for being the supposed next great multiplayer shooter, Brink keeps forgetting it’s a multiplayer game first and foremost. Many people, upon firing up the game, will immediately run through the solo challenges to unlock the weapons and attachments, which takes about an hour at most.  Most games post-Modern Warfare require you to put days into unlocking everything, and Brink throws it all at you at once. A tad overwhelming, especially when you’re struggling to grasp the game’s deep interface and class system.

Hopping into the campaign, you’re put up against 8 AI bots, which range from extremely stupid to “I can’t believe he made that shot.” The campaign missions are frustrating because your own teammates rarely have the competence or miraculous luck the opponents are granted.

All of this makes Brink feel terrible, repetitive, and unbalanced. Hopping online should fix these problems, right? This is a multiplayer shooter after all; everyone knows the single player biz is just for scrubs. Except you run into problems immediately upon firing up multiplayer. Joining a public game is simple enough, but it often throws you in the middle of a match on unbalanced teams. Because of lag issues, Brink can’t handle 8v8 matches with humans, thus allowing only eight players total, filling the rest with dumb bots. Many times I would be on a team of six against two, utterly destroying the competition.

I luckily have a dedicated group of friends whom I game with regularly. We all bought Brink and coordinated a time to play together. Except, once we partied up via Xbox Live, there was no easy way for us to get into a match together. One person would join a game and have to send invites, but because of limitations like full servers or the annoying ranking system, it rarely worked. We were forced to fight bots or keep hoping we got an empty server.

That fixed, it became apparent that the multi-player maps were identical to single player campaign missions, and many are horribly unbalanced a favor one side. One particular mission involves hacking a missle before it launches. The problem is that the opponents spawn almost on top of your objective, and the hacking is incredibly slow, while defense can defuse your hack in quadruple the time it takes you. As a late campaign mission, this makes sense to me as an increase in difficulty. As a multiplayer map, this becomes too favorable to one side, and also not very fun if you’re stuck hacking the missile.

Once my friends and I got into the flow of the game, it became ridiculously easy for us to win. Since the measly eight maps follow the same objective each time, patterns were easy to memorize, and outsmarting the competition (which mostly consisted of unorganized random XBL members) became trivial. Without a lobby system, partying up against other groups of players was near impossible. If it was that difficult for us to get into the game together, it was statistically improbable for us to be pitted against a similar group. Multiplayer became just as easy as outsmarting bots.

So after playing these campaign missions masquerading as “maps” countless, countless times, ranking my character up to it’s maximum level (the game practically gives you experience points for standing still), and acquiring every achievement (which were so easy, I feel as if I should return them), I’ve got nothing left to do. The missions are dry, the online is unstable and cumbersome, and there is nothing left to explore. I’ve read some reviews saying Brink had “potential,” but I don’t see it. The tremendous hype and marketing wanted Brink to become the next great shooter franchise (and wants you to believe it is), but it falls short of even touching any other contender. After years of playing FPS games online, I’ve never burnt out on a game so quickly (less than a week!).

So there, I’ve finished it. I can’t even say it was a nice distraction. I wish Splash Damage the best of luck on their next endeavor, and perhaps if they decide to support Brink they could turn it around. Although personally, it’s left such a bad taste in my mouth that I don’t think I’ll ever come back to it.