Should you play Brink or Section 8: Prejudice?

Posted by on May 10, 2011 in Features

Brink and Section 8: Prejudice are both new; they’re both team-based; they’re both very multiplayer but with excellent bots; and they’re both all about objectives and loadouts and special abilities and delicious asymmetry. So it’s six of one, half dozen of the other, right? Not quite. They provide different experiences in some very important ways. So should you play Brink or Section 8: Prejudice?

The short answer is “definitely”.

After the jump, the longer answer

* Section 8 is more American
Section 8, having been made by Americans — Texans, no less! — loves freedom. Brink, having been made by subjects of her Royal Majesty the Queen of England Helen Mirren, loves order. Brink developer Splash Damage does a great job channeling the action, but they definitely channel the action. You will beat your head against the same objective every time you play. It will always be there. Sure, you might take a detour to capture a command post or build an MG nest from time to time, but Splash Damage doesn’t trust their players to decide where to fight. They fully intend to command the experience with an iron hand. But in Section 8, you have multiple options at any given moment. Once the dynamic missions start appearing, your options increase dramatically. Unlike Brink, where every match on that map will be the same, no two matches of Section 8 are the same.

* Section 8 offers free-range shootering
Although it’s certainly got its share of wider arenas, Brink is very much a corridor shooter. It’s almost always indoors. There are no vehicles. You can’t fly. Both games give you unique ways to get around, but Section 8 gives you more room to move wherever you like, finding your own killzones, hotspots, and campgrounds. You won’t find any of those in Brink, because Splash Damage will show you them. But Section 8, which has huge open outdoor maps, has an almost RTS flavor to the way you can shape the map with deployables, and specifically the sensors that detect enemy players and the AA guns that limit where they can spawn.

* Brink’s special movement is more gratifying
Among Section 8′s greatest innovations is the way you get around with the combination of drop ship spawning, the jet pack, and the overdrive. These are easy tools to use. But the special movement in Brink is more gratifying for how it feels once you master it. Parkouring your way across the map like a monkey, shooting as you go, is unlike anything you’ve done in a shooter before. Yeah, it might remind you of Mirror’s Edge, but that was a pretty poor excuse for a shooter. There’s a reason you won’t unlock the true parkour option in Brink until you’ve played for a while, but once you’re ready for where a light body type will take you, you’re in for quite a treat.

* Brink does not use Games for Windows Live
If you don’t have first-hand experience with Games for Windows Live, allow me to assure you that everything you’ve heard is true. It’s that bad. And Section 8 on the PC is thoroughly tangled up in it. Brink isn’t.

* More stuff happens when you’re playing Brink
Partly because it’s such a directed experience, Brink offers more concentrated action. With pulp. And not just shooting. You constantly have the option of contribute to your team, whether it’s giving buffs, spotting targets, replenishing ammo, dealing with mines, or helping out with the main objective. There is virtually no down time in Brink.

* The weapons have more personality in Brink
One of the innovations Prejudice brings to Section 8 is the ability to tune your weapons, which includes some balance changes with various types of ammo. But it mostly feels mathy, with +5% here and an unspecified bonus against shields there. Brink has a similarly mathy approach with the way weapons are tuned according to a handful of stats. But Brink gives its weapons a delightful amount of personality above and beyond the numbers. You can’t fully appreciate the Ritchie Revolver’s substantial kick, the thunderous Hjammerdeim automatic shotgun’s room clearing sweep, or the clean precision of the Rokstedi assault rifle’s reach until you’ve actually fired them. If you liked the cartoony gun porn in Borderlands, you’ll have a grand time getting acquainted with Brink’s arsenal.

* In fact, Brink has more personality, period
Section 8 is entirely derivative. Whether it’s a bland space marine or just another lava level, there’s really nothing new to see here. Although you can see a lot of Team Fortress 2 in Brink, you mostly have a freshly colorful and well lit multicultural dystopia. That consists entirely of dudes, by the way. Neither game has female characters.

* Brink doesn’t fuss much with unlockables
The original Section 8 and Splash Damage’s previous game, Quake Wars, had no longer term meta-game unlockables. Everything was available in the context of a single gameplay session, whether it was Section 8 always giving you everything or Quake Wars carefully built to roll out unlockables over the course of a match. Like a sitcom, everything reset to zero between games. But now Prejudice and Brink have opted to stretch out unlockables over the longer term. Brink’s gameplay unlockables are mostly a formality. You can unlock all the weapons and weapon mods by spending about an hour playing the challenges. Beyond that, you can probably hit the level cap in a few nights of play, unlocking all the special abilities for the class of your choice. Section 8 will draw it out a bit longer, and it’ll reward you with less dramatic choices, but it’s definitely a longer term proposition. Neither game is as mercenary as, say, a Call of Duty game when it comes to unlockables.

* Brink needs more cooking time
Brink has graphics and networking problems. I’ve seen some erratic frame rates, some based on graphics, some based on bandwidth weirdness. On the Xbox 360, textures routinely melt in and out, as if Brink is more than the 360 can handle. I’ve seen weird glitches during online matches. At one point, character models weren’t loading for many of the players, which meant we were fighting invisible enemies. The online stat tracking is apparently not working yet. Section 8: Prejudice, on the other hand, is the second iteration of an already polished engine and game.

  • http://digitalonanism.blogspot.com Omega Chervil

    I haven’t spent much time with Brink yet, and all of it has been single player, but so far I’ve only had minimal performance issues running it on high settings on a mid-range video card. Absolutely gorgeous game, fantastic, frenetic play, but there’s another knock against it on the PC: it costs $50. Prejudice is a steal at $15.

  • Rorschach

    Nicely done Tom, for a non-CoD player (not that there’s anything wrong with that) I’m really enjoying some FPS.

  • Alan Kleiman

    That last one is kind of a big issue, though. Are you suggesting people buy the game right now, or wait until the issues are fixed and the price goes down? Brink is a full retail game, so up to 4 times as expensive as Section 8.

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    Yeah, that’s an excellent point, Omega! However, I tend to think the more valuable investment in a game is the time spent rather than the money. I know that’s not the case for all folks, but I tend to gloss over pricing issues because so many of us have such different priorities. But no matter how you feel about the issue, Section 8 is a heck of a value for $15.

  • RedHerb

    “with excellent bots” Really? A lot of critisms aimed at brink were that it’s bots are terrible. I haven’t been able to play it yet, so I can’t speak to it myself. Although I will say in Section 8 the bots are pretty good.

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    Yep, excellent bots. They fill in just fine for human players. They know the map, they use the tools of their class, and they don’t do stupid things. They make Brink a viable single player game, and they make it easy to play with only a few friends and bots filling out the server, just like Section 8. What are the criticisms about them beyond “the bots are terrible”?

  • thebigJ_A

    Jeff Gerstmann thinks the bots are one of the worst parts of the game, and the guns are a bit crap, too (Amongst many other problems).
    http://www.giantbomb.com/brink/61-26694/reviews/

    I’ve not played the game at all, so I have no opinion. It’s hard to see how two people could come to such very different opinions. It’s not even subjective things like you’d expect.

  • RedHerb

    Many reviews have given the AI a poor review, saying it incopentent, dumb and often gets in the way. Jeff Gerstmann has probably been the harshest on that aspect saying the AI can’t play it’s own game. I was surprised to hear some positive stuff about it, is all.

  • http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp#excerpt Neuromancer

    One thing I would like to point with Section 8 Prejudice, at least on console, you can’t play a match with a friend or two against bots without the stupid game autobalancing you and your friends and splitting you up to opposite teams. The last game did this as well and it’s a real head scratcher.

    There is this other mode called swarm that you can do this with, but it’s not very good. Kind of like a horde mode where you just hang out at one control point the whole time fending off enemy bots.

  • http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp#excerpt Neuromancer

    Speaking of bots (not to go too far off topic here), Tom did you know that Treyarch has been improving bot matches in Black Ops? Now you can do hardcore deathmatch/team deathmatch games (no HUD, bullets do more damage), and the bots can now call in care packages, drive RC cars and plant claymores.

  • Dirtyboy

    The bots in the game are horrible. You either play multiplayer or not at all. I spent more time cussing out the idiot bots than enjoying the game.

  • thebigJ_A

    Interestingly, I was just listening to the Giantbomb podcast (http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast/ at around the 32 minute mark), where Gerstmann laid out his issues with Brink again, and he brought up Section 8: Prejudice. (He starts talking about it While he doesn’t think that game is great, he thinks it’s better than Brink, and has a similar amount of content, for only $15 rather than $60. He seems to think it’s not worthy of a full-game price tag, even if what was there was really good. In some ways that sounds like the first Section 8.

    The singleplayer campaign is, according to him, just the multiplayer maps loosely tied together by cutscenes and populated by bots. Bots which run into walls, don’t complete objectives, stare at you for several seconds before shooting, etc. The only thing they are good at, he says, is reviving you when you fall. But even then it’s to a fault. They make a beeline for you, regardless of enemies, often getting killed. The guns are samey and lack punch and he doesn’t like the grenades. The way the multiplayer is set up is odd (having to choose a map first when trying to play the mp campaign, thus dividing up the playerbase into twelve.)

    Actually just listen to it and maybe read the review. He makes more points than I can fit here.

    I have it on my Gamefly queue. I’ll go into it with an open mind and see how I like it.

    I

  • thebigJ_A

    I demand an edit button! Ignore the “(He starts talking about it”. That was a cut and paste fail.

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    Neuromancer, good to hear they’re working on better bots for Black Ops. I felt really cheated by how limited bot support was. But mostly, I don’t like how they’re segregated from the rest of the game and the whole leveling up system. And, yeah, it’s disappointing that Section 8: Prejudice doesn’t give you the same level of control over bots as the last Section 8. I hope they’ll address that.

    Mr. JA, I can’t really speak to Gerstmann’s experience; you’ll have to take that up with him. I’ve spent the last four days playing against bots and I’m pleased with how well they work. For what it’s worth, Splash Damage did similarly solid bots with Quake Wars, their last game. Did you play that? If so, you can see that Splash Damage knows how to adapt an AI to their game design.

  • http://blog.homisite.com HomiSite

    A missing similarity of both games: They have freeze bugs! S8P since the launch, still waiting for the final patch (I don’t have much lock-ups as some users in the forums) and Brink, too, according to forum posts and at least one review.

    @Neuromancer: The splitting of friends is an issue, but according to the developer, they already tweaked this a bit (see Title Updates and Hotfixes). I think it’s more a problem that you have to play at least one match to put together in a team/squad (if it works, only tested it once).

    When I look at the Brink reviews so far, I am quite disappointed that after Homefront there’s another “just good” shooter. Well, I like S8P, besides the freezes and some other smaller issues.

  • thebigJ_A

    I didn’t mean to cast aspersions. Your experience was your experience. And I haven’t played it yet. It was just surprising to hear praised the one thing every review I’d read previous to this (Gametrailers, Giantbomb, Joystiq, to be precise) had problems with.

    I can say that even if the bots are fine, all the other issues I’m hearing about would prevent me from paying $60, especially the lack of content. Luckily I’m renting it. I’ll give it a fair shake, and perhaps purchase it if it turns out ok. I bought S8:P after reading your write-ups, even though I disliked the first Section 8, and I definitely don’t regret it. Fifteen bucks well spent, there.

  • roamunit

    Curious — were you playing with the bots in the actual campaign, or are you referring to the bots that are used to fill up empty slots in multiplayer? I haven’t touched the latter yet, but my experience with the singleplayer bots on the default difficulty last night was rather… underwhelming. I’d often rush past teammates who were just standing motionless in the middle of the map, seemingly paralyzed by some sort of existential dilemma; many of them seemed to care more about the secondary objective than the primary one; medics rarely actually healed anyone, preferring to wait until they were downed to hand them a syringe; etcetera.

    That said, I do like the other elements I’ve seen, so I’m anxious to get in some multiplayer when I get the time. I’m quite looking forward to what appear to be some nicely vertical maps in Brink after years of the largely horizontal expanses of TF2.

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    I don’t think there’s any difference, roamunit.

    I wonder if some folks glomming onto this “the bots are bad” idea don’t understand how the game works. If you see bots just standing there, is it because they’re waiting for their health to recover? If you’re dead and a medic doesn’t revive you, is it because he doesn’t have the supply? Because if you’re convinced these things are AI glitches, they’re going to stand out much more in your mind than the times a bot was actually playing the game well.

  • Mono

    I hate to be that jerk, but you folks playing either of these games on a console are dead to me. Dead! There’s no teamwork on consoles!

    Of course, I only say that because I miss you when you’re not playing on the PC with me.

    Isn’t the 360 hardware about 17 years old already?

  • http://www.nohighscores.com Michael Barnes

    The bots complaints are a little silly. They’re as good as the ones in L4D or L4D2, and in some ways they’re better.There’s this myth that bots should create this ideal playing experience where every AI-controlled player does exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. Has that ever happened in any game with live, human players? I’m playing Brink on the 360 and loving it despite some patchable technical issues, and I have to say that the bots in many cases play _better_ than human players. “They just stand there”, “they miss objectives”, “they don’t heal you”. Whatever, all of that shit happens in any multiplayer game with a full complement of human players too. And besides, the AI medics in Brink are WAY better than the human medics in KZ3.

    This game is unfortunately getting assassinated by critics and the armchair forumistas…critics that have been playing and seeing this game at E3, preview events, and so forth are disappointed that it’s not more polished. The peanut gallery is locking on to the memes these critics are establishing, like the “bots suck” complaints. it’s a brilliant design with some unfortunate technical issues that will hopefully be ironed out in time. For all the complaints that the big franchise shooters aren’t doing anything to innovate the genre, you’d think that the same folks would be lining up to praise a game that literally throws the “FPS Design Manual 2011 edition” out the window like Brink does. With a little post-release support, it could become my favorite game of 2011.

  • http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp#excerpt Neuromancer

    @Tom “And, yeah, it

  • http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp#excerpt Neuromancer

    Well that was a waste of time. No point in spending time coming up with responses if they’re going to be cut off for reasons unknown.

  • Telefrog

    I played ET:QW and I loved the bots in that game. Brink? Not so much. They really don’t seem to be playing the same game I am. They’re okay for filling out a team, but they really don’t seem as good as the ones from QW.

  • Q

    I’m an FPS fan but I only like to play objective games, never TDM because I’m just not that good of a twitch shooter. Objectives give me the opportunity to really help my team regardless of my KDR (usually) and shooting skills. Games like TF2 and Brink are my FPS dream games. However, since I’m only a console gamer I have been making due with the CoD and Halo games that we get.

    I’m more concerned that Splash Damage is going to cut and run on the console gamers. I have been very excited about this game for a while seeing it as the console version of TF2 that we never got (since Valve let TF2 die on Xbox). After reading today’s article on Ars Technica about how good the PC version is when they wrote an article yesterday about how bad the Xbox version is I’m getting that same feeling. I know releasing patches for Xbox is more of a hassle but they really need to support this game on consoles if they expect to get people to pay full retail. I hope SD comes through but I don’t think they will. If a company as big as Valve gave up is there much hope for a small dev like SD?

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    Neuromancer, if you paste a quote mark or emdash into the text box, Word Press freaks out and goes all Kanye West on you, except without letting you finish.

  • Hypocee

    I haven’t played Brink yet – hilariously perfectly timed credit card issues – but I was smiling yesterday when I ran down the launch reviews. I read two within five minutes of each other – the first, paraphrased:
    “The bots are useless, always piling mindlessly towards the current primary objective and never flanking or capturing secondary buffs…the challenge maps are the only worthwhile part of the game…” And the second?
    “The bots are useless, constantly haring off after secondary objectives without contributing to the objective…there is a worthless challenge mode…”

  • thebigJ_A

    I really hate to be argumentative, but the idea that all the people who are saying the bots are bad, including people who play video games for a living, just don’t understand how the game works seems rather far-fetched.

  • http://www.quartertothree.com Tom Chick

    There are lots of reasons people who play videogames for a living say stupid or incorrect things. Not understanding how a game works is only one of many possibilities.

    But anyone who has the game can find out easily enough how the bots play. Just set yourself up as a spectator and follow a bot (ideally, you’ll want to set the difficulty to hard to see bots at their best). There’s no reason for any controversy when it’s so easily verifiable.

  • thebigJ_A

    Sure, but saying the same incorrect thing? In reviews that all came out at roughly the same time? I myself could see the bots running into walls, acting kind of dumb, and not shooting in the quicklook video GB put up.

    I think I will follow your suggestion, though. It’s a good one. No better way to find out than try it myself. Assuming Gamefly sends me Brink and not L.A. Noire (kind of hoping for Noire tbh. That game looks interesting).

  • KeysE2s

    1. “But in Section 8, you have multiple options at any given moment. Once the dynamic missions start appearing, your options increase dramatically.”
    I’d say that while DCMs aren’t some sort of rail objective, woe be to the player who ignores them.

    2. Re: the majority of reviewers saying the same incorrect thing -
    Does anyone here remember the reviews of the original Section 8? I don’t recall the complaints being “this game should be 15 bucks!” Yet, when Timegate releases damn-near the same title for a lot less caish, suddenly everyone is gooing all over it.

    Could it be that a lot of people who make a living critiquing games read each other’s reviews, often before writing their own? Wouldn’t a lot of people in that same position? Gamers don’t like divergent opinion, or at least that’s what I took away from the CCGR post and the subsequent discussion. Present venue aside, I don’t think there’s much of a market in game opinion for significant variance. If your income depended on not being the one jackanape* who had something colorful to say about MW2, would you really want to stand out in the crowd?

    *idon’treallythinkyou’reajackanapetom.com

  • http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/neuromancer.asp#excerpt Neuromancer

    @Tom OK thanks, I will be more careful in the future I suppose.

  • thebigJ_A

    “Does anyone here remember the reviews of the original Section 8? I don

  • thebigJ_A

    Dammit, now I made the copy paste mistake.

    I’ll just give the short version. I find KeysE2s’ idea that professional game journalists are all plagiarists and liars, conspiring to all sound the same because there’s no “market in game journalism for significant variance” (a statement which boggles the mind) to be offensive and absurd. It’s also completely unfounded.

    Besides, the first wave of reviews on a major release all come out at just about the same time. The timeline just doesn’t work for his little conspiracy theory.

  • Creative Anarchy

    It’s worth noting, and mentioned by Tyco at Penny Arcade that most of the media reviewers of this game recieved a completely different build than the retail release. The game they reviewed had significant differences in graphics quality, AI accuracy and control configuration. The guns have also appearantly been tuned greatly because many complaints about the game not being deadly or not allowing one-shot kills are no longer accurate. I’ve gotten a lot of head-shot kills with a pistol.

    There are still graphics bugs that cause the game to jerk and lag and the bots are still single-minded. If you want to find the choke points on a map just play it in the single-player and watch where all of the bots gaggle-up. They always take the fastest route to the main objective. They don’t however get stuck on walls or ignor enemy units or stand idle from what I’ve seen. I don’t know if this is consistent in free-play. I’ve never used bots there.

    A lot of critics have bashed the maps for being poorly designed and specifically they talk about chokepoints. This game isn’t Halo. Your environments are heavy with terrain and surmounting it is a serious part of the game. Dominating at Brink requires you to adapt tactically to problems in real-time, rather than just hammerring through enemies. You need to find flanking positions outside of line-of-sight or get an elevated position with cover to hold a line or crush a barricade.

    The game has some poorly pollished aspects. It has no women. It doesn’t explain features or settings very well, wich is normally not a problem for me but there is a lot going on in the game all at once so it’s hard to figure out how to use abilities on the fly. It is missing a lot of the normal sound and language settings American games come standard with like voice volume or subtitles. I haven’t heard from anyone that has topped out the levels but I seem to be getting very close after only 10 hours of play so it looks like there isn’t a lot of advancement.

    Also I’ve gotten the lock-up bug often with Section 8 and not seen it with Brink, could be just my luck however.

  • KeysE2s

    @ A_J

    The fact that you’ve resorted to such a ridiculous strawman argument makes me suspect that you see my point. I didn’t call anyone a liar or a plagiarist. I’m saying that unless a reviewer goes out of their way to sequester themselves, exposure to other opinions will effect their critiques. And I don’t think very many of them practice informational hygiene, nor do I think there is much incentive in the industry to do so. Look at the variation of reviews on Rotten Tomatos and then look at it on Metacritic. Even though they are score differently, I just don’t see many reviews in the gaming world where you’ve got a bunch of 5s and 9s for a title.

    Or are you arguing that there’s a quality inherent in video games that makes them less prone to differences in opinion? Is that why all these intellectually diligent reviewers never score anything in the lower 50 percentile? Is there some non-linear grading in video games that no one ever told me about? The fact that anything below 80% is generally considered a failure should tell you that something stinks in Denmark.

  • KeysE2s

    Man, I was going to add something about Kane and Able, but the above pretty much makes the same sort of point.

  • thebigJ_A

    I don’t think you understand the meaning of “strawman”. You implied that journalists read each others work and write similar things, making them near-plagiarists, and they don’t write what they really think because “gamers don’t like divergent opinion”, making them liars. I was directly responding to your statements.

    I look at metacritic and for most games there’s a spread. Like anything in real life, there’s a cluster in the middle and several outliers. What changes is where that cluster is. If a game is generally considered good, it’ll be in the 80s or 90s. If it’s average, in the 70s, and if it’s poor, somewhere in the 50s or 60s.
    They rarely grade things below 50 because 75% has become the de facto average. Not because they are writing what they think people want to hear.

  • KeysE2s

    You are directly responding to intentionally inflated arguments that I never made. By creating a hyperbolic set of statements on your own, then addressing them instead of the actual content of my post, you are using straw men argument.

    Would care to speak to the reviews of S8 vs S8P? Again, I don’t recall anyone saying that they loved it except for the price. Would you care to provide evidence to the contrary?

    And if you think that big sites like IGN and Gamespot are presenting “one man’s opinion” instead of their reviewers’ opinions about the viability of a given title in the marketplace as a whole, then I’ve got some million dollar condos in Miami that I’d like you to help me finance. Those sites don’t exist to present editorial about games. They are basically extensions of the publisher’s marketing departments. You can’t reasonably expect objectivity from sites that derive revenue from ads for the very titles they are reviewing.

    Again, do some research into the original Kane and Lynch and then please stop this silly white-knighting of mainstream game reviewers.

  • thebigJ_A

    I didn’t say anything about your Section 8 point, because it didn’t make any sense. It’s cheaper, and reviewers liked it better. So what?

    I’ll accept your accusations about these sites when you come up with some evidence to support them. Of course some sites are more reputable than others, just like some businesses in other fields are more or less honest. But you made a blanket statement, as though that was how all these companies behaved.

    And one of the specific sites we were talking about was Giantbomb…. Jeff Gerstmann…. Kane & Lynch. Ringing any bells? Are you going to tell me the guy who got fired from Gamespot (generally considered one of the bad sites, for good reason) for giving a poor review of a game featured on the site, who then went and started a new site with other former employees to be free to review games as they pleased, is being dishonest in his reviews? Hell, GB doesn’t even have banner ads.

    So please stop this silly bashing of the game journalism industry.