Brink

There are two things I found remarkable about my last online outing in Brink: one was the number of fetishistic gas masks on show, which surely says something about Brink’s “expressive” community, and two, I didn’t kill anyone, which most definitely says a lot about my playing style.

But try to avoid rushing to obvious nasty conclusions; I wasn’t horrendously bad, and I even finished top of the leaderboard ahead of 15 not-too-shabby players. So, how did I get there then? Well, I got there through playing the way Splash Damage wanted me to play: I gave up being a lone wolf and learned to be more objective.

I was a Security medic, playing on the aptly titled Container City map, and my team’s objective was to escort our maintenance bot through hostile territory. Keeping this bot moving wasn’t easy, due to an opposition who were keen to shower us with bullets. Nevertheless, we stood up to their attacks and made them think twice about getting close.

But we had to think carefully about our approach. Had we allowed ourselves to get caught in a firefight, we would’ve died time after time, and this wouldn’t have helped our cause. The Resistance would’ve gleefully vandalised our bot as we undertook long, arduous treks back from our spawn point.

Standing watch over an objective

We’d have lost too much precious time, not to mention any sort of organisation, making it impossible to protect our engineer. He needed half-a-minute to repair the bot, which was about 20 seconds longer than the Resistance were willing to let him live. He needed constant protection, so it’s a good thing we had a plan, albeit a simple one: stay alive and near the objective and ignore those inner Rambo urges.

READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW AT PS3 ATTITUDE