Texture pop-ups gallore!
From the get-go Brink presents itself with some characters that clearly look like they've been under the Team Fortress design influence. And what's this? The game is a team based multiplayer game where you switch job-roles in order to finish objectives; I'm pretty sure I've seen this somewhere before, too.
That's not to say, however, that this game doesn't pack fun. The games customisation, for one, is something a little different to the usual run of multiplayer FPS games as you really feel you're making a completely unique character suited to your tastes. The same goes for your weapon customisation, which you can unlock new parts pretty early on; which leads to some of Brink's little problems.
It's pretty easy to unlock most of the equipment and weapons in the game because it's a pretty fast levelling up system, and a pretty easy challenge mode. This little problem takes away most of the actual challenge leaving you to just pick up on scraps and hope the online is enough to entertain you. Unfortunately the online can become laggy and the AI can be pretty dreadful at times, so you can't rely even on the offline play to keep you enthralled as the developers get to work on fixing the bugs and glitches... that is if they ever do.
To top it all off, the game does suffer some graphical glitches, and a shocking amount of texture pop-ups that don't seem to improve, despite the updates and the fact the maps themselves aren't exactly exploding in exciting scenery. An example of my encounter with the texture pop-ups was when I found myself guarding an objective and facing a barrel, and every time I did a 360 turn, the barrel would lose its textures and then reappear 2-3 seconds later, despite me being at point-blank range.
However, despite these niggles, Brink isn't a terrible game. It may not be original, may lack in the maps department, and you might get a little put off with the graphical glitches, but the game does it's job that it set out to do and does it well. It's a multiplayer focused FPS shooter with the complete checklist that most mainstream multiplayer games have today.
It may be unoriginal, but it's worth a blast at such a low price that you'll find it today.