Definitely Remedy's weakest game in terms of the bit where you play it. Shooting and movement are fiddly, which the game is mostly aware of as they don't really put it to the test until the final boss fight - but damn, that fight is really annoying. I'm still glad I played it though simply because of its ambition. The TV series in it isn't great (though as usual Lance Reddick lifts the whole thing) but come on, it's a miniseries in a game! The time effects are extremely impressive at times, too. It stretched my PC a lot but it's pretty clear why when you see some of the things they have going on in the realtime part of the game.

I think Quantum break is a really interesting and great attempt at a mixed media narrative. It's not quite a show, not quite a video game. I think there's a lot that's great here. The decision making is really great in that no decision ever feels truly like the "correct" one, and the storytelling goes beyond the script and includes the environment and supplemental texts which Remedy does so well. The world field palpable and lived in, which goes a long way towards making the stakes of "saving the world" feel fresh.

I do think the combat is simply good to serviceable, and I almost wish this game focused fully on environmental exploration and storytelling to enhance a film narrative instead. I can see how that would be a touch too experimental though.

Overall really enjoyed my time with this one. I think someone who prefers gameplay over narrative would struggle to like this, but in a world where gameplay is almost always the primary driver of a video game, it's interesting to take a peek at a timeline where narrative is the well executed focus instead.

I originally played this on Xbox One when it first released and just finished it again on PC in the tail end of 2022. During the early days of the Xbox One, Microsoft had this weird obsession with watching TV on your gaming console, and in my opinion that is the biggest detriment to this game.

The graphics and the overall visual presentation are absolutely phenomenal, even in 2022 (4K, 60fps). The audio in the game is also excellent. Everything from the sound effects and voice acting, to the banging soundtrack. Speaking of voice acting, the cast of characters in this game are played by some very recognizable Hollywood actors and actresses. They did a great job with the motion capture as well with top notch facial animations.

The combat in this game is pretty good and fun. It can become a bit repetitive but the game is on the short side, so the repetition doesn't get enough time to become tedious. Unfortunately the gameplay takes a backseat to what feels like countless hours of walking around, reading documents, listening to audio tapes, and watching cutscenes.

There are 5 acts in this game, each taking about 1-2 hours to complete on normal difficulty. After each act you are forced to watch a full TV episode of a Quantum Break tv show. Yes, you have to stop and watch TV after every 1-2 hours of gameplay... That is incredibly annoying, frustrating, immersion breaking, and pace breaking. Especially on repeat playthroughs.

Thankfully you can skip these TV episodes, but you will miss out on a big chunk of the story. After the 2nd Act, I got confused about what was going on and I lost interest. Side note, I personally tend to struggle to keep up with time travel, parallel universe, multi-dimension type of storylines in video games and movies. But if that is your cup of tea, then I think you will find the story in this game interesting.

Overall, this was an ambitious project, which unfortunately didn't hit the mark and has not aged very well with its structure. It has fun gameplay moments, an interesting story (for those who can keep up), but the overall experience is pretty frustrating and underwhelming.

Quite possibly the most "fine" game I have ever played.

Gameplay was fine.
Story was fine.
Writing was fine (I usually enjoy Sam Lake's stuff).
Graphics were exceptional (this was actually my introductory game to the 8th generation of consoles, and on that front it delivers).

I don't really feel anything towards this game. I neither like it nor dislike it. It just simply is...

As far as third-person shooters go, it takes a while for this one to pick up. The gunplay itself feels pretty shallow and stiff without the use of powers and not having many puzzles to interact with while playing the game can make you feel like you're just wandering around endlessly listening to whatever dialogue the game has in store for you. However, the dialogue and the lore are definitely the game's bread and butter. They have put so much love and thought behind it that they even incorporated TV show-like episodes into the video game where the consequences of whatever actions/choices you made in-game directly affects the outcome IN THE SHOW (I'll be the first to say that I've never played a game with that feature before and I welcome it) They also had a lot of "narrative" collectibles you could pick up (to add on more layers to the story) but the gameplay loop to seek those out while progressing through the campaign could've been more to be desired. It basically boiled down to constantly spamming the "Time Vision" power in fear of not missing one. It's definitely a slow burn but thankfully the game provides amazing visuals and a well told story. If time travel excites you then you're in for a treat with this one.

An ambitious game with some very interesting ideas. The project was an attempt to combine a live action show with a video game where the decisions you make in the game alter the direction the tv show goes in.

The result was a bit too abstract for its time. Personally I ended up enjoying it - it has a fantastic cast of actors and I think the premise of the game is interesting. It's also by the folks behind Alan Wake and Control at Remedy and features the same actress who plays Jessie as Beth in this game.

The level to level gameplay has you following Jack who gets caught up in his scientist friend's time travel experiment gone wrong and ends up with time powers, then promptly ends up getting hunted down by a shady organisation and hijinks ensue. The story ends up doing the usual temporal gymnastics with you travelling to the past and the future while trying to understand what became of your friend and trying to prevent a future where time is completely broken.

Sadly the story itself is far more interesting than the gameplay. The time travel powers make for pretty lacklustre combat designed to intermingle with the middling gun-play and is at its most interesting during the puzzle platforming sections.

If you can put up with the pretty repetitive and dull gameplay sections the story is quite good. I appreciate that they went all out with this and while it didn't end up going as Remedy would like the result is something completely unique that explores a multimedia game to provide an experience no other game has (for better or worse).

Ambitious in a lot of ways, as well as being really cool with the time mechanic and amazing graphics for the time. Though, I kind of wish it had MORE for gameplay sections and abilities.

Control did so much more with it's balance of gameplay and story, and as much as I am a merchant for story, a lot of the game being scripted events early on hurts it a bit for me. It has so many cool gameplay mechanic though that I wish we're definitely expanded on in the future.

For it's live action show, I gotta respect them and it feels definitely remedy in that sense. Did think it was handled well and the acting was cool. RIP the GOAT Lance Reddick.

It's definitely the weirdest game remedy made, and maybe cause the big Phil Spencer eyes on them, there may have been a lot of restrictions at bay due to it being advertised as one of the xbox one's flagship.

It's nice though that they bounced back hard with Control. It's like they took two sets forward one step back in retrospect.

Hope they take these ideas somewhere in the future but I doubt so as Xbox owns it.

Anyway, the return to Bright Falls.

I first played Quantum Break a couple years ago, but I recently replayed it this past week and loved it even more than before, definitely my 2nd favorite Remedy game after Control.

"The number one killer is time." How do you save the world when time itself is your enemy? From Remedy Entertainment, the masters of cinematic action games comes Quantum Break. A time shattering, reality bending, hard sci-fi superhero story all about fixing a fracture in time that will lead to the end of time itself.

The narrative primarily centers around protagonist and unlikely hero Jack Joyce and his childhood friend Paul Serene. After being gone from his hometown of Riverport, MA for years Jack returns to help his friend Paul with a presentation at the local college. Paul is primarily a businessman, not a scientist, but lately he's been expanding on the physics work of Jack's estranged brother, William, and has built a time machine. Naturally Jack is skeptical, but agrees to help Paul activate the machine and of course nothing can ever be simple, especially when dealing with theoretical physics. William appears and demands that Paul and Jack stop their actions or "time will break", but it's already too late. Something was off in the calculations and the machine becomes unstable dousing both Jack and Paul in Chronon radiation which gives them both time-manipulation based superpowers. Shortly after soldiers from the corporate juggernaut Monarch Solutions appear to steal the time machine's core...

After that? You'll have to play to find out what happens next. This is merely the first 15 minutes of the 10-15 hour complex yet easy to digest narrative fraught with plenty of mystery, drama and clever twists and turns along the way. This is easily one of the best stories involving time travel that I've experienced in fiction. Alongside taking inspiration from movies like Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future and The Matrix I love how Sam Lake and the development team consulted actual real life scientists while creating the story for the game to make it feel believable and consistent with current real life theoretical physics and quantum physics.

The main cast of characters are all portrayed by a star studded cast of actors like Shawn Ashmore (Jack Joyce), Aiden Gillen (Paul Serene), Lance Reddick (Martin Hatch), Dominic Monaghan (William Joyce) and Courtney Hope (Beth Wilder) and all their performances are just top notch and make the characters feel that much more realistic and human. That said out of all of Remedy's protagonists I find Jack the least interesting, but all the other characters easily make up for him being a bit boring. I have to give a special shout-out to Aiden Gillen especially, his performance is one of the biggest reasons Paul Serene is one of my all time favorite characters.

Something that makes Quantum Break a very unique experience is how it's one part video game and one part interactive TV series. At the end of each Act of the game you'll reach a "Junction Point" where you'll play as Paul and choose one of two paths, this decision will have an impact on how certain events unfold in both the game itself and the TV series as well. Speaking of the TV series it's great, there's only 4 episodes of it and I honestly wish there were more because not only does it have some cool Jason Bourne styled action scenes, but it also really helps flesh out and humanize the antagonists Monarch Solutions more and while main characters like Jack and Paul rarely show up, the leads Liam Burke and Charlie Wincott do just as good and have interesting character arcs. While you can skip the TV series all together you would be doing yourself a major disservice because of how much it adds to the product as a whole.

Quantum Break is primarily a linear cinematic narrative driven experience and when you're not watching a cut-scene or live action segment you'll be doing a lot of reading via what are called "narrative items". These are various documents like e-mails between characters which further detail their motives and daily life or audio logs and video diaries where character's give their thoughts about a particular event that happened. Once again these can be skipped, but since it's a big part of the content of the game and helps you get more immersed in the world I wouldn't recommend it.

When not involved in the narrative the gameplay mostly revolves around 3D platforming time manipulation based puzzles which involve rewinding or slowing down time which give me some Prince of Persia vibes, utilizing your Time Vision to explore for secret Chronon Sources which act as skill points to upgrade Jack's various skills and most importantly the combat in the form of a cover based 3rd person shooter. Jack can find a variety of pistols, assault rifles and shotguns in the various levels of the game. However another factor to Quantum Break's uniqueness is the fact that it's a cover based shooter that actively encourages you to not be in cover due to the amount of powers Jack has at his disposal. You can stop time in a bubble around an enemy and stack bullets for massive damage, do a light-speed dash into an enemy to make them lose their balance or even pop open a time shield to protect from incoming damage in the middle of the battlefield. It takes a little to open up, but once you unlock all your powers you can create some truly devastating fast paced, stylish and fluid combos.

I can't state this enough, but the production values of Quantum Break are amazing. You can definitely tell this game was funded by Microsoft money. The set pieces are action packed, the environments are designed well and fit the story perfectly, the graphics are beautiful and make the character models look remarkably close to their real life actors and the sound design is some of the best I've heard in a video game with the guns having great impact and all the time related effects really capturing the sound of the distorted and warped fragmented time stutters.

Quantum Break is simply another masterpiece by Remedy with a complex narrative full of suspense, mystery, drama and many fascinating twists and turns, a fleshed out and detailed world and an engaging cast of characters. Quantum Break is a must play that will have you hooked all the way through its entire run time and long after that.

The Xbox One's focus on TV over classical video games is widely accepted as one of the key factors that cost Microsofts the last console generation. Quantum Break almost feels like the embodiment of every weird idea Microsoft executives came up prior to the console's launch: It's a third-person-shooter that periodically interrupts its gameplay with TV show episodes detailing what the story's villains were up to.

In my opinion, the concept doesn't even sound that good on paper, and the execution is severely flawed. The live-action parts barely hide the lack of budget, with scenes often taking place in hallways, stairwells, and warehouses. The first episode is the worst offender in that regard, presenting the viewer with boring locations and offensively uncharismatic characters. Later episodes improve somewhat and the high profile actors manage to deliver on the acting side of things, but that doesn't change the fact that I only continued watching because the game expected me to.

Weirdly enough, the ingame parts look way better than the TV show. Setpieces are bigger and even lighting is improved. The TV show parts feel claustrophobic and held back in comparison. The game also already has a lot of slower paced narrative segments in its ingame parts, with lots of slow walking while listening to exposition and rooms upon rooms filled with text, video, and audio collectibles.

Unfortunately, Quantum Break doesn't manage to use all those narrative tools to create a compelling story. Things are happening, but between all the clichés and tropes (an evil corporation secretly plotting and taking over a city, never heard that one before) it's hard to find a reason to actually care about what's going on. Even worse, a lot of plot points have appeared in movies like Back to the Future or Terminator before, but where handled much better. Plus, the atmosphere is not nearly as thick as in other Remedy titles.

That leaves us with the actual gameplay. Puzzles are even easier than those in Life is Strange, consisting mainly of holding down a button or following a yellow cable. Platforming feels terrible. Jack will try to climb pretty much anything when you press the corresponding button, I'll give him credit for that, but a lot of the time he gets stuck on environmental objects or fails jumps necessary to progress.

Fortunately, combat is pretty fun. Jack doesn't have a lot of health, so relying on his powers is necessary to win. Those supernatural powers are all very loosely related to time (it's not a bomb or shield, it's time bomb and time shield) and feel powerful, especially when used against standard enemies. Mechanics never get too complex, but they don't need to for such a short game. There's very heavy auto aim, and since the game is clearly optimized for a controller, I'd recommend using one.

With the good and bad mentioned, that leaves us with the ugly: the game is not in a state that I would consider polished. The Windows Store version never received the latest updates, and even the patched Steam version still has major animation bugs. Reload animations dont even remove the magazine, and weapons teleport in and out of hands in cutscenes. Annoyingly, the final boss fight is an incomprehensible mess that covers everything in effects and even focuses the camera on areas players should run away from (making you run towards the screen).

By default, the game also uses horrible upscaling, rendering at two thirds of the display resolution with terrible results. While upscaling can be disabled in the settings, many of the other heavily featured post processing effect are mandatory, meaning the game often looks worse than it would without. Colors are washed out and greyish, it's just not pleasant to look at. The streaming quality of the cutscenes is also debatable. Aiming for streaming in a high resolution is great, but the stream starts buffering even on fast connections, with no option to download the TV show episodes. I also wonder how long the servers for this game will remain online - in a worst case scenario, half of the product will be missing in a couple of years.

Out of all the Remedy games I've played, Quantum Break was clearly the worst, and I doubt it'll ever get the sequel its ending set up. There's still Remedy DNA in here, but I have a hard time recommending the game over the studios' other works or other third-person-shooters like Max Payne 3 or Uncharted.

Quantum Break belongs to a genre that many people find irritating or even downright awful, that being the extremely linear action shooter. People sometimes say games like this bleed over into the category of walking simulator. While I understand all the complaints about how restrictive making a game like this can be, I still love a well made one. And if Quantum Break is nothing else, it is REALLY well made. The graphics, the cinematography, acting, sound design, all of it is so polished it makes the presentation of many other games look downright weak. I think the limitations that Remedy had to work within to make this game so linear allowed them to focus on getting every little detail right. The graphics are a perfect example of this, specifically the lighting and faces. The lighting is mind blowing, realistic in a way most games could only dream of looking. I understand from reading online that a lot of it is baked, but it still looks incredible. And the faces are the best I've ever seen in a video game period. They are highly detailed, yes, but it's the animation and performance capture that makes them really come to life. And they do this while avoiding the uncanny valley that games like LA Noire fall into. Looking at Remedy's latest game, Control, these elements are still great but somehow don't look as good as in Quantum Break, a much older game. I think that has to do with the fact the Control is much more open and gives the player real control (pardon the pun) over the world and interactions. While Quantum Break brings that perfect presentation and ludicrous level of detail that Remedy is known for, it's not perfect. The story doesn't feel as important when so much of it is out of your control. The Junctions provide an illusion of being able to control the story's direction, but that's all it is: an illusion. And the PC port is nothing short of atrocious. NO FOV slider, the game wouldn't actually display at my screen's resolution without config file tweaking, horrible motion blur that you can't get rid of, and the game is basically unplayable on anything other than a supercomputer unless you use the upscaling option that renders the game at 2/3 resolution and makes all of Remedy's careful detail blurry. Plus, while the Steam version supports ultrawide, only a select few of the cutscenes are displayed in 21:9, even though they are all in-engine and could easily be shown that way (you can see the black bars fade in and out seemingly at random during some cutscenes). There's a lot to love here, but while the story is deep, the gameplay is shallow, and we won't get to see this game in it's full glory until we all have dual 4080ti cards installed.

Great, fun experience of a game with a pretty entertaining story and a solid cast. I felt lost as much as one would with a time travel story. I'm assuming that a huge chunk of the world-building was through the collectible intel and stuff, but that was a bit too much and the long, winding ones from random characters I found myself just collecting but skipping past.

The episodes were what initially turned me off from this when I first tried this a couple of years ago, but I regret that now that I picked this up again. At first, I thought I would have preferred to play those scenes out in game format, much like how we played as Serene in the Junction chapters, but during the second episode, I realized that it was enjoyable as is. There's nothing quite like witnessing the thrill of a twist in an uninterrupted episodic format (as long as it didn't stop to buffer, which it did for me in later parts, damn ISP).

But yeah, all in all a fun game. But WTF is that final battle, gods I have not cursed at a boss fight that much in so long.

A game that can't reach it's potential while trying to have a poor TV show explain some of its plot and character details that likely put further budget and mechanic limitations on the project. It lacks the fun gunplay of Max Payne, the atmosphere of Alan Wake, the more interesting powers and environmental effects of Control, and the entertaining or deeper narrative of all three with some characters really only primarily being active in the show as it focuses on the side characters that do basically nothing in the main game.

The game plays as a third person shooter and occasional platformer with very poor shooting and the exploration sections just having you climb the yellow colored objects and maybe use your time powers to rewind a section of the map to alter the environment to make a path. Enemy types are limited, as are the weapon types with none feeling satisfying to shoot or even feeling all that different from one another in many cases with the damage being so low and recoil being so high on almost all of them. As you play you unlock a few time altering powers with most ending up being not very interesting. You can aim and fire a bubble that freezes time and enemies in certain location then shoot the bubble to stack bullets on the area, I never really found this useful as it is easier to just shoot them and the way you stack bullets on the bubble creates more of a mini explosion rather than hitting the enemy where you were aiming once time restarts. You can create a bubble around yourself to stop bullets and increase your health regeneration. You can charge up and fire an attack that basically acts as a grenade but with the added effect of freezing time enemies as they are launched through the air. The last two powers are the useful ones, a dash that also allows you to slow time when you come out of it aiming. This allows you to avoid attacks, explosives, and flank enemies but the slow motion is probably one of the worst slow motion shooting mechanics I've seen due to the weak guns, extremely limited time of the mode, and high weapon recoil, the move itself is also somewhat awkward to use as you have to dash a set distance or it might somewhat auto aim you into enemies where you will run into them with an awkward stumble melee attack that barely effects them. The other useful power is time slowing run that lets you run around, kind of a more controlled dash ability but one where you can do melee takedowns on weak enemies, though these takedown animations are very limited in number and most don't really connect with the enemy or animate well.

Your powers are, unfortunately, not upgraded by experience through combat or as you play but instead require you to use your "time sight" (detective vision) to try to identify random spots in the environment of each stage that you can then go up to and collect for upgrade points, adding an element of needless busywork even for people that like to ignore running around trying to gather all the pointless collectibles as upgrading your powers will likely enhance your enjoyment of the combat.

Your enemies also don't allow for very interesting gameplay as you fight a few variants of soldiers whose main difference is the amount of armor they have. In the later half of the game you will fight soldiers that can operate inside of time disruptions and who can also use you dashing abilities. This could have lead to very interesting fights in more dynamic areas but all that really happens is that you have AI that will either stand around shooting at you, dash behind you, or dash right next to you to try to perform one of the most awkward melee animations I've ever seen that will do small amounts of damage if it hits but also doesn't seem to do anything to you visually. The ability they have to dash around also seems to confuse the AI where half the time they seem to not know where they are or where you are once they come out of a dash. Normal enemies are also obsessed with grenades with some just chain throwing grenades while you are in cover, and some just trying to throw grenades at you while you are standing out in the open right in front of them. A different type of enemies seems like it is being introduced near the end of the game, a kind of person that has been altered and turned into a monstrous form based around the end of time event you are trying to stop but you never have to fight the creature that the show introduces or that you see form afar in gameplay, likely something cut from the game in what would have been the more interesting moments playing as Beth or Serene.

Narrative altering choices do little for gameplay and lead to the same end with very little changes in the actual levels, the original plan of having Beth and the main character able to make their own narrative altering decisions instead of you just taking control of the main antagonist to make a few choices would have been more interesting but probably added to many variables to the game and too much cost in alternate scenes for the show. Beth or Liam would have been better leads with Beth just being a more interesting character and Liam at least having a more conflicting circumstance when it comes to what he would be fighting for as well as both making more sense for why they would have the background or training to be able to take part in combat. Control an alternate timeline version of the antagonist as he still tries to fix the problems he caused would be a cliché but even that would be a better main character than Jack who is just a guy who shows up to help his friend push some buttons, has no idea what is going on, gains time control powers, and has no problem or difficulty killing hordes of people because he has "used a gun before." The story itself is never that interesting and the moments that don't entirely follow a cliché time machine based narrative were probably but at some point when Beth no longer became a playable character, as instead you just have Beth and Serene going, "the horrible time ending future, you haven't seen the terrible things we've seen," and you really never do. The story itself just ends suddenly with cliffhangers, unanswered questions, and kind of an odd framing situation for the entire story in general not even trying to wrap anything up with an ending show episode after the final act.

I don't know if the PC version launched with issues or if they became issues later but there were multiple times that the entire environment just became overtaken with blackness and could only be fixed by closing the game and restarting it and whatever weird way they went about adding the TV show where it seems to be pulling from some online source to play it now sees the videos playing at a very sped up pace that you can't alter while occasionally getting count needing to buffer. Both problems might not be a big deal as a reset or just watching the show on Youtube (or ignoring it completely) are easy solutions, though the game's poor checkpoint system that can see you doing a bunch of busywork before getting into a combat arena where it only saves after that battle might make needing to close out of the game more annoying than it had to be.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1620742557646086144