Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

I was running a bit behind schedule while I was at the Bethesda booth, so I did not have a lot of time to spend with Brink, but I did go through some of the customization options, and part of a mission to see how the game has been coming along since it was announced at E3 last year.  I also wanted to see if some of the show floor rumblings were true about the game not looking as good as it did last year.  After my fifteen minutes of gameplay hands on time, I can say that I see where a lot of the complaints were coming from with Brink.  It felt a bit rough, and this feedback probably led into the annouced delay to 2011 for Brink by Bethesda.

The mission I was in took place in what appeared to be a warehouse of some kind.  I had several people on my team, and we were trying to get some info from a computer.  The big sell on Brink is that you can change your class on the fly, and it was needed in this mission, as I had to go from a soldier type class to an engineer and another class that I cannot remember at this time.  Switching from class to class is simple enough, and when you do it, your objective missions change as well.  Another nice feature about this is when you change to a class like Engineer, other soldier classes get a new objective, saying to protect you.

I felt the shooting mechanic was working well in Brink, and the sounds were very good.  I never had any issues grasping any of the controls, and again, when I needed to switch classes, it worked flawlessly.

Moving through the environment however was less fluid than I remembered it from the last E3.  You have access to a system called SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain), which you access with a simple press of one of the shoulder buttons.  The system works very similar to a parkour style of movement liek in Mirror’s Edge.  However, it seemed that I had to really be spot on with terrain obstacles for the system to work as advertised.  Coming at things at an angle seemed to cause some issues with the system.  As I started to recognize this problem, I was able to navigate the environment with SMART a lot easier, but I felt it should have worked a little more intuitively.

Also, while I loved the class changing, and chaning objectives, the objectives themselves never felt more than pedestrian and generic.  Again, Brink is a work in progress, but the system seemed a lot more fleshed out and refined a year ago over now.  It almost feels as if the game went backwards in development over twelve months, and that is never a good sign.

If you like customization, you will fall in love with Brink almost instantly.  When you are in the character customization screen, you see a nicely rendered picture of your character, and you move a cursor around the body, and when you come across hot spots, a selection list shows up to the side for customization.  There are a huge amount of little items and choices to make with your character model, and it should be very easy for someone to create a unique character of their own.  About the only issue right now with the customization screens is that it is slow to show the changes you make to the character.  Changing a beard or a coat seemed to take several seconds before the change was rendered on the character. 

While I had fun with Brink, I feel that it is a game that has taken two steps backwards from its inital announcement.  Last year, it felt smooth and free flowing, while thie year, Brink felt rough around the edges and less polished.  Brink has been delayed until next year, and that extra time should be able to work out the kinks in what could be a fantastic title, with its effortless merging of single player, co-op and multiplayer modes.  I cannot wait to see it closer to its final release, when we will hopefully see the Brink that was shown to us in 2009, rather than in 2010.