Brink was weird. It mashed together multiplayer gunplay with single-player narrative, then spiced up its chunky concoction with parkour and levels set on floating cities (because global warming). It’s also telling that I speak about it in the past tense, because while it continues to exist, you could be forgiven for assuming otherwise.
The Bethesda-published, Splash-Damage-developed game — originally released way back in 2011 — is suddenly free-to-play on Steam. Why now? Beats me. The announcement is two sentences long and offers zero details.
I will not, however, look a gift game-that-had-all-the-makings-of-a-cult-hit-had-it-not-been-abandoned-before-its-time in the mouth, though. According to Steam Charts, a site that tracks the player counts of every game on Steam, Brink now has around 1000 people concurrently playing it. That’s way up from the (oof) 10-30 it’s been pulling since the beginning of this year.
If you never got to try Brink but spent many a sweat-stained night wondering “what if, what if,” there’s no better time than the present. And I mean that, because unless Splash Damage has plans to start supporting the game again, I doubt those 1000 players will stick around for long.
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5 responses to “Six Years Later, Bethesda’s Brink Is Suddenly Free-To-Play”
Brink makes me sad. It had so much character and potential, it was just let down by bad performance and wafer thin content.
Agreed. Such a shame it never took off.
I pre-ordered. I watched every dev diary the day it came out. I preached to friends about how great it was looking. Especially the campaign with its challenging themes about ethics and morality in a realistic climate-change apocalypse.
The campaign was a strung-together list of the multiplayer maps with moronic bots and an interminable grind for unlocking abilities and cosmetics.
My poor heart.
No-one’s done the movement quite as well as Brink ever since, though. That was always good. And drilling a clip of ammo into an enemy to drop them was always deeply satisfying.
No Man’s Brink
Capture that command post brothers!
The Enemy is capturing our command post!
Comaaaaaaaand pooooooost!!!!!