Truly wanted to love this but just didn't land. Didn't mind a chunk of the game being live-action cutscenes (it's still quite a fun concept that has potential) but the story wasn't interesting enough for me. The moment to moment gameplay during combat starts of quite fun and you can really see the origins of what Remedy went for with Control here - but because you get doled out abilities so quickly, it gets a little repetitive and doesn't really provide much challenge until the very end (at least on normal difficulty).

In fact the hardest part of Quantum Break is actually progressing through the game. Playing on Xbox Series S, the game crashed 4 separate times and required me to play through almost the entirety of Acts 2 and 3 not once, not twice but three times. And it was hard to maintain enthusiasm during that time, constantly thinking any non-in-universe stutter was a precursor to my own personal groundhog day.

Technical issues, a busted checkpoint system and an uninteresting combat/upgrade system.

The visuals were pretty cool, especially in the stutter segments, but that is ONLY when the game isn't breaking under it's own tech limitations due to lack of patching. Cutscenes and scripted in-game cinematic moments shifting from 120 to 30 fps were jarring. Tv episodes wouldn't load so had to watch on YT.

I commend the team at Remedy for continuously breaking boundaries with the medium of games and blending it with television and radio.

However, this did not hit for me.

A great twist on the normal 3rd person shooter format which continues to propel remedy up as one of my favourite developers.

This games gameplay is so fun and really carries the narrative in this case. The story is very interesting mind you and I think the idea of paring it with a live action series was very unique. I was surprised to see a lot of faces that i recognised most notably Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan and the late great Lance Reddick who all give very good performances.

In terms of a protagonist Jack Joyce is your stereotypical action hero who unfortunately falls under that "Never used a gun before but has no problem gunning his way through hundreds of people" schtick.

The gameplay though is where it's at. The time manipulating abilities make combat sections so fun to play through and make this game so much more enjoyable. The gun combat is pretty good but the enemies are total bullet sponges with unarmoured enemies taking 20 AR bullets to the chest before going down.

The story is very short only consisting of 5 acts with 3 parts each, very easy to blast through and does have some replay value with the different choices which can be made at the end of each act. The overall narrative about time collapsing is very interesting but one complaint I have is that it pushes too much of the narrative onto finable emails/audio logs, and these are normally very long and can completely kill the pacing if you were to stop and read them all. Also i found that characters would appear and disappear throughout the story but im not sure if that was just down to the path i took with the choices. I think they push too much of the story onto optional content and that can leave it very confusing at times. I would recommend for the gameplay alone with the decent story as a nice bonus

A good game that never reaches the heights of Alan Wake II and Control, but you can see the beginning of remedy's ideas that they would explore in those later games.
The combat and powers are fun, the story is cool and the graphics are outstanding for an 8 year old game, it could've been released today. It has amazing set pieces that create spectacle in the way remedy is best at, like the falling bridge or the crashing ship.
However I felt like it needed more. The tv show aspect was a nice idea but it was kind of a prototype to the live action mix we saw in Control and Alan Wake II, which works much better. It needed more enemy variety, more weapon variety, better upgrades, and just more gameplay. Much of the time spent on this is by watching the show and reading documents. Which is fine, Control has tons of documents too and remedy knows how to create interesting lore. But in Quantum Break specifically I feel like there are very few encounters and actual gameplay which in the end just left me wanting more.

Let's start with the good bits:

+ There is a very distinct Remedy touch to the world - it's a little bit sarcastic, a little bit wacky (very faint in this game), and it's got all the hallmark elements of a Sam Lake production - the live action, the actors, the episodic construction, the music and the twisting storyline.

+ The gameplay loop is a surprisingly simple one (coming from AW2, it felt a bit boring) - you shoot dudes and then do some simple environmental puzzles. Regardless, it never felt too frustrating, or pointless.

Cons:

- The game really suffers from its game-TV show duality, which feels disjointed and pulls you out of the game. Where, in AW2, the live action sequences were meticulously interspersed between the narrative, and each felt unique and unpredictable, here it's just a very structured, very methodical B-roll action movie, spat out in your face after every act of the game, in insane 30-minute lengths. Even worse, you can't download the videos, so you better hope to God that Microsoft servers aren't thinking of taking a break right when you want to watch the videos. Thankfully, the story presented in the "tv show" is not very consequential, and is just more garnish. Also, it's really not that interesting. Woah, the main selling point of the game is that my decisions make a difference in a LIVE ACTION TV SHOW? Like come on, you just make a few different scenes and suddenly it's a genius invention?

- The game's storyline is surprisingly simple. Yeah, you got the crazy elements - a time machine, literal fracture and end of time, all of that jazz, but where Alan Wake retains a constant mystery, and slowly nurtures the player by feeding him/her bitesized pieces of lore, Quantum Break basically explains the entire framework behind the time problem in maybe first fourty minutes, and the story never really develops from there. The rest is just generic character drama, and it's not so much about the time, but about the characters and their desires.

- I didn't feel like the game allowed most of its main star actors to really flesh their characters out. The only exception is the perfect Aidan Gillen, and maybe, to some extent, William. The main character is a generic dude character with very little in terms of uniqueness, and the others all look like they jumped out of a literal B-grade action movie that plays on some 6th-8th channel on TV, at 10pm weekdays.

- Finally, and this is really where I snapped and decided to shelve the game, is the game's atrocious save system. Unless the game has a gameplay reason to restrict manual saving (e.g., presenting actual challenge, impossibility due to live action) or anything else, then it at least, at the very least, present a way to save the game at set locations (like what AW2 does - not ideal, but it makes for a challenging world, and gives you a clear indication of pacing). Here, the game saves...whenever? There's no manual saving, and some of the save spots are incredibly moronic. There's one bit where you have to cross a bridge jumping platform-to-platform, and I missed once, which brought me about 10 minutes back in the storyline - forcing me to fight through a miniboss battle, watch a cutscene, and walk the entire bridge across just to arrive at the place where I fell. After it happened the second time, I gave up. If the game doesn't respect my time, I sure ain't going to respect its time. Fuck this.

Overall, it's a mostly decent experience, but it could do without the tv show.

Quantum Break is a decent game, but it has some major issues. First of all, the story isn't the best, and you have to literally watch a show within the game. I'm talking 20-25 minute episodes. The story does get interesting at times, but also boring and cliché at other times. The game looks very good though. That's definitely a positive, but it runs terribly. I have a high end card from 2023, but the game keeps stuttering like crazy, even though it originally ran on a 900p/30fps Xbox One console. It makes no sense why the game runs this bad on PC. For the stuttering alone, I have to give it a negative review. Might be worth it on a deep sale, however.

This one really hurts, and I mean that. I was pleasantly surprised when I began this game by the quality of its writing. It's genuinely very impressive, and the premise is very interesting. I would've loved to see where the plot was going.

However, I literally could not. This is possibly the most broken game I have ever played (and I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 day 1). This isn't just glitchy, it is progress haltingly broken. The amount of times levels would entirely break, with things not spawning, level triggers not going off, collision with terrain completely breaking, and being killed for reasons I cannot see or understand. It happened constantly, but the worst thing is that every single time it happened, something about my save would corrupt. Numerous times I was booted back to the very beginning of the level, because something near the end would break and I would insta-die to nothing. I suffered through this far beyond where I would for anything else, because I really wanted to keep playing and to see where the plot went, but there's only so many set backs I can endure.

The game feel is quite terrible. The movement is clunky and the gunplay feels strange. I had attributed this strange feeling to Jack Joyce, the character you play, being relatively unfamiliar with firearms, but that fact can only excuse so much.

Graphically, the game is quite nice, albeit bogged down by massive amounts of motions blur, and also a 30fps cap. This isn't something I normally complain about, but there's something about games from this era that are so close to looking like they do in 2024, but technically just missing the mark. The graphics and animations are great, but the system can't cope with it well enough. At least, that's my unknowledgeable stance on the matter. See also 'Ryse: Son of Rome' and ' The Order 1866' for more of what I mean.

The strongest part of this game to me was, very ironically, the TV episodes that you are sometimes obliged to watch. I can't say it's the greatest show ever produced, but it sure beats playing the game; the story can shine without the game bogging it down. I'd a mind to watch the rest of this game on YouTube, from the perspective of someone who presumably didn't have so many game breaking issues, but ultimately I'll probably just move on. I will lament what could've been though, it really saddens me that something so promising was attached to a game this badly made.

My thoughts on Quantum Break are somewhat conflicted, but I want to start by saying this: The soundtrack is AWESOME!

This is a VERY standard and mediocre game. It's by no means bad, but it felt very bland. The gameplay is what kept me going, honestly. Despite being... well, normal, it's fun as hell! Using Joyce's powers is a joy, the shooting is a bit shallow but it still does the trick and deciding how the series will "change" is interesting. The writing isn't all that great, but the action moments and the actors manage to convince you to stay, towards the final acts.

The thing is, aside from that, everything is just 'OK'! The story is bad on the first 2 acts, picks up on the 3rd and gets pretty good on the 4th & 5th, but it's all just TOO bonkers, without actually trying to explain it to you, in a cohesive way. There are files and audio logs spread around areas, but it's TOO MUCH reading and, quite frankly, it's all very uneventful and boring. In the beginning, the series' parts were weird, as if it didn't know what it wants to be. Some events happened out of nowhere and the whole time travel thing seemed empty. Things take too long to happen and when it does, it's too late. Also the game has some pacing issues. It seems unsynced and unconnected, sometimes. At times, it felt a bit buggy. It lacks challenge and checkpoints were badly done.

Despite the hollow identity crisis that Quantum Break suffers from, gameplay is still really fun and characters are actually well portrayed. I won't recommend it, but if you have Game Pass, try it out! Just don't expect anything beyond an standard experience.

Recentemente, terminei Quantum Break, um jogo de narrativa e ação em terceira pessoa lançado em 2016 para Xbox One e PC, e disponível no Xbox Series X|S pela retrocompatibilidade. Esse game foi desenvolvido pela Remedy Entertainment, desenvolvedora de Control e Alan Wake II, e conhecida por fazer jogos de ação com bons gráficos e com um grande foco na narrativa, e com Quantum Break isso não foi diferente.
Pra ser sincero, nem gosto muito de abordar Quantum Break apenas como um jogo, mas sim como uma experiência transmídia, já que também inclui uma série e um livro contando sobre a história, algo bem diferente e no meu ver ambicioso.
Deixo claro que o que será escrito subsequente representa a minha opinião sobre o game com base na minha experiência sobre, beleza?
Com isso, bora que bora :)

ENREDO/SINOPSE/HISTÓRIA
Dando um panorama bem geral na história pra não estragar a experiência: O jogo se passa no ano em que foi lançado, 2016, inicialmente na Universidade de Riverport, no qual Jack Joyce (protagonista) é convidado por Paul Serene (antagonista), seu melhor amigo e posteriormente seu pior inimigo, para um teste sobre um projeto de viagem no tempo que envolve a participação do irmão de Jack, William Joyce. Essa viagem no tempo dá errado e faz com que Paul e Jack fossem atingidos por uma grande quantidade de chronon, o que fez com que ambos ganhassem poderes de manipulação do tempo, como visão temporal dos inimigos, congelamento do tempo e esquiva rápida, enquanto Serene consegue inclusive ver acontecimentos futuros caso exposto a uma maior quantidade de chronons. Com isso, Jack precisa voltar ao passado, dar um jeito de consertar a máquina e assim salvar o mundo, mas vai contar com uma grande oposição da Monarch Solutions, empresa fundada por Serene, que ao sofrer que quer utilizar da fratura do tempo como um controle de poder.
A história acontece enquanto é narrada por Jack durante uma entrevista com uma das funcionárias da Monarch. Ela possui 5 atos, e no final de cada ato, você controla Paul Serene, o principal antagonista da história, além da “bifurcação”, no qual são duas escolhas de continuação da história oferecidas ao jogador que irão impactá-la.
No geral, gostei bastante da história, foi um dos pontos fortes do jogo para mim. O cenário de viagem no tempo e física quântica é bem interessante e algo que eu não tinha visto antes. O jeito trabalhado com alguns dos personagens também é bem legal, no qual nas primeiras aparições parecem irrelevantes, mas que possuem um papel importante posteriormente, como William Joyce, Nick e Beth Wilder. Perto do final do game, a história aparentemente começa a mudar de rumo, chegando a me enlouquecer um pouco rsrs.
Outra coisa muito agradável é essa transição para o Paul no final de cada ato, no qual é explicitado seus sentimentos e pensamentos sobre o tempo e sobre o seu plano de controle, além das “bifurcações”. A minha única questão é que a história dá uma brecha para uma possível sequência, já que acredito que o ciclo do fim não foi fechado em um jogo único, o que infelizmente acho difícil de acontecer.
Além disso, a ideia de “transmídia”, expandindo o enredo para o mundo das séries e dos livros é algo bem legal, único e ambicioso, algo que eu nunca tinha visto antes, mas que acho também que poderia confundir quem não se aprofundasse tanto na narrativa. Infelizmente, quando joguei o jogo, os episódios não estavam disponíveis para serem reproduzidos, tanto no PC quanto no Xbox. Só para deixar claro: a série aborda um lado paralelo da história e o livro aborda com mais detalhes o enredo comparado ao abordado no jogo. Com certeza vou procurar saber mais sobre eles!


JOGABILIDADE/GAMEPLAY/TRILHA SONORA
Quantum Break é um jogo de ação-aventura em terceira pessoa, tendo uma jogabilidade baseada principalmente na ação, mas também em diversas vezes com elementos de plataforma 3D e puzzles.
O protagonista possui vários poderes adquiridos com a ruptura do tempo. Entre eles, temos a “visão temporal”, transforma a visão do jogador em uma escala de “cinza” e dá destaque aos inimigos, armas e munições disponíveis no local, além de objetos explosivos; o “escudo temporal”, que protege o jogador de disparos de inimigos; a “esquiva temporal”, que faz o jogador se esquivar rapidamente, entre outros. Isso pra mim também é um ponto forte do jogo.
No geral, a jogabilidade do jogo é boa e tirando os efeitos e poderes, é comum comparada a outros jogos, porém diversos pontos me incomodaram, como a transição do andar do personagem quando anda mais rápido para mais devagar e vice-versa, a falta da mira em diversas situações de ação e não poder carregar mais de uma arma na parte final do jogo, o que não faz muito sentido para ser sincero, além de outras coisas.

GRÁFICOS/DESEMPENHO/LOCALIZAÇÃO
Falando como leigo de gráficos, Quantum Break envelheceu como vinho no quesito de gráfico, mesmo na versão de Xbox One, ainda mais se considerarmos que o jogo é de 2016. A versão de PC tem gráficos ainda melhores que a versão de Xbox. Mesmo estando no preset “médio”, os gráficos se mantêm bons. Outro ponto forte de Quantum Break.
A direção artística do jogo é bem boa, os cenários do jogo são bem bonitos e os efeitos provocados pela ruptura do tempo também são bem trabalhados – um bom trabalho da Remedy no geral. Mas isso não significa que não há problemas: no PC, tive problemas terríveis de iluminação, a ponto de mal conseguir ver o cenário e os outros personagens. Outra coisa que me incomodou foi a repetição de inimigos e armas que o jogo possui – podia ter uma maior variedade aqui.
Agora falando de desempenho: joguei tanto a versão de Xbox quanto a versão de PC. A versão de Xbox (tanto no One quanto no Series) fica cravada a 30 frames por segundo, enquanto o PC pode atingir taxas de quadro mais altas, deixando a experiência bem mais fluida. Praticamente não tive crashes ou bugs nem na versão de Xbox nem na de PC. A minha única crítica é que poderia haver uma versão aprimorada para Xbox Series, com gráficos aprimorados, frame rates maiores e loadings mais rápidos, visto que a versão de Xbox Series é a de Xbox One.
Se você tiver PC/notebook gamer e Xbox e seu PC atender os requisitos recomendados (pelo menos no preset “médio” no meu ver), compensa mais jogar a versão de PC no meu ver.
Se tratando de localização do jogo, o jogo é totalmente localizado em português brasileiro, já que é tanto legendado quanto dublado. Só um adendo: a dublagem é bem boa.

CONCLUSÃO/RESUMO
Quantum Break é um jogo diferente, ambicioso, e no meu ver subestimado comparado as reações do público e da crítica na época. Ele possui gráficos que se mantém bons até hoje, uma narrativa profunda, contando com um elenco de peso, possibilidades de escolha e a execução que ultrapassa a barreira dos videogames com livro e série; uma boa jogabilidade e até variada em certo ponto, com a presença de efeitos e poderes temporais, além de ser totalmente localizado em português. Porém, os problemas de iluminação e de jogabilidade que o jogo possui podem incomodar na gameplay, e os 60 FPS fazem bastante diferença ao jogá-lo, o que infelizmente não foi aprimorado para a nona geração de consoles da Microsoft. Além disso, a história dá um gostinho de quero mais, ainda mais pelos acontecimentos pós-crédito. Dito isso, um sólido 8/10! (4/5)

RECOMENDO O JOGO?
Recomendo Quantum Break, ainda mais se gosta de jogos com foco narrativo-cinemático e da Remedy.