Brink (video game)/YMMV

• Broken Base: Not a few days after its release Brink polarized many of the people who have played it: On one hand you have reviewers like IGN and Joystiq saying it's plagued with bad design choices and harping on the game's technical issues (which Splash Damage immediately began addressing), and on the other you have the players who are genuinely enjoying Brink for everything new that it brings to the table despite the technical difficulties. The only people on the middle ground seem to be the ones who haven't yet purchased the game because they're waiting for the dust to settle and all the problems to get fixed but still have an interest in it.
  • Those with Windows 7 and NVidia cards have had zero problems.
• Fridge Horror: Play one campaign. Then the other. The people you saw in the a opening scenes of the other campaign, talking about making breakfest for their kids, or worried about their family? Those are the people you're now gunning down.
  • In one cutscene, a Resistance member frets that his brother is on Security, and a fellow Resistance member warns him he can't hesitate to shoot Security, since they won't hesitate to shoot him.
  • Even worse is playing the Resistance campaign and then the Security campaign. In the Resistance campaign, the main goal is to leave the Ark and make contact with the outside world. In the Security campaign, the main goal is to stop that from happening because the Founders already sent a group into the outside world and they were slaughtered to the last man. The world is exactly what Security claims it is, and the Resistance is effectively crippling the Ark to embark on a hopeless suicide mission.
    • Later changed in the Agents of Change DLC, where it's revealed that the escaped resistance members actually did find civilization outside the ark, revealing what Mokoena said to either be a lie or an uninformed statement
  • It's not just the Resistance who end up on the wrong end of this, though. Fighting for Security to prevent the Resistance from escaping and bringing doom upon your heads seems like a noble goal, no? Then you read one of Chen's audio logs. The Arkoral is mutating and going sterile. The Ark, the basket in which you have decided to place all of your eggs, is literally dying, and it's only a matter of time before it crumbles away beneath you.
• Memetic Mutation: "Are you ready to use these, Brothers?!"
  • The Splash Damage CEO's "Brink takes place on the Ark..." speech.
  • Chen's bombastic "FOR THE AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHKKKKKK!!!" and variants thereof could qualify among players.
• Most Annoying Sound: The music that plays when you've run out of health. Seriously.
  • Also, the sound effect that plays when you're out of supplies. A hollow "donk" sound that repeats several times until you have enough supplies to use an ability.
  • "The Enemy has captured our Command Post! Get it back!
    • This goes for any minor objective notification, especially if you're playing with mostly bots. Your team will often run off to complete the less important objective, leaving you to complete the main objective AND fend off eight enemies at once.
• Memetic Outfit: Designing a black guy with with skull facepaint, The Wasted jacket, The G pants, and dreadlocks is a very popular choice among players, possibly because of how grungy it looks and how it is damn near invisible on the infamous Container City map and Shipyard map. It may have originated with an Xbox player named Haru Daniels.
• That One Level: The final objective of Security Day 3. It is the longest and most indirect of the retrieval missions, there are many different places where the enemy can ambush the carrier, and the allied bots refuse to help the carrier.
  • A quick explanation of how bad that part can get: On easy mode, at rank 4, and with a buddy it took until less than ONE MINUTE left to win!
    • Easy mode weakens your bots as well as theirs, remember
  • Be More Objective, two-stars. This challenge is the subject of many posts on message boards.
  • All Hacking objectives on the offense, combining the worst parts of Bomb (get to a tiny point to start, defend said point from even a few seconds of Engineer action, all progress lost if stopped) and Repair (locks down a player or several who has to do nothing but work on the objective for a long long time, relying on teammates for defense, stops if player is incapacitated). Security Day 6 is the worst offender here.
    • On the other hand, Hacking objectives are the only objectives that don't require you to be stationary
    • Yes but if with bots they never stay in a good and easily defensible position instead going out into the open.
• Uncanny Valley: The artists went with a deliberately exaggerated style of character design that emphasizes key features of each model's outward appearance, both for a distinctive look and ease of identification at a distance, much like a certain other multiplayer shooter. The fact that they applied realistic textures to these stylized models, however, does not help their case.