Good objective-styled gameplay, but quickly becomes a repetitive brainless friendly AI nightmare.
The entire game is essentially a team vs. team shooter that consists of taking down or defending specific objectives. They manage to throw in a story that gives background info to give these objectives some sort of purpose, but sadly the story is poorly narrated and none of the characters are interesting at all. At least you get to customize your own character who gets to take part in both sides of the campaign (Resistance and Security) that can be played in any order you choose. There are only 8 levels on each side, plus 2 "What-If" missions, which means only 8 maps. The maps have a bit of variety, but quickly become uninteresting after playing on them a few times.
While there are a variety of ways to play Brink, you'll most likely end up with the task of taking on and defending objectives virtually by yourself. There are 4 different classes that can be used to take on the main objective, or other various side objectives that tend to be a waste of time. Each class may also be used to provide support to teammates, such as healing, reviving, and refilling ammo. No matter what you're doing on the battlefield, you'll be gaining points for your actions, whether you are providing support, going after objectives, killing enemies, guarding important locations, and so forth. The leveling system is rewarding, and there is a decent amount of customization when it comes to weapons, and even the size of your character, which affects what weapons can be used, movement speed, and amount of health.
Despite the many things you can be doing, Brink gets repetitive rather quickly. Each level is the same: Go after or defend the objective. It feels like playing an online first-person shooter with only one game mode. Fortunately it doesn't take long to complete all the levels, that is, if you can even accomplish doing just that. A few levels have the potential to be troublesome due to one glaring fault in the single player aspect of the game, and that is the atrocious AI of friendly teammates. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't due to the fact that enemies are much smarter, and are a lot tougher as you rank up, even on the easiest difficulty.
At least there's the option to play these missions online in a co-op or competitive fashion, right? Yes, but unluckily these features are unreliable and overall don't add much to the game. It's just like playing the single-player, but with other people. The matchmaking is practically dysfunctional because you will still most likely end up with most, if not, all bots on your team if you choose to do co-op mode, which if it worked like it should, would make playing through the campaign easier and more enjoyable. Online matches can be intense, but if and only if it actually puts you in a match is full of other people and isn't having connection issues.
Other than the poorly constructed campaign and confined online play, there isn't a whole lot to do in Brink. There are a few challenges outside of the campaign that upon completion grant access to a few more unlocks, but they aren't very exciting, nor do they take long to play through. You can choose to freeplay through any of the maps with custom settings. This still earns you experience, but it still isn't all that thrilling. After roughly 10 hours, there won't be anything new to do. Even with the recent free downloadable content, Brink simply lacks substance and a fun factor that will keep you coming back for more.
In the end, Brink doesn't deliver. It falls short and several aspects, whether it's the subpar visuals, repetitive gameplay, or the lacking amount of content. Brink is just one of those games that is easy to put down, and most likely forever. It was a good try, I'll give it that, but with the lack of replay value, it's hardly even worth a rent.