Reviews from

in the past


Quantum Break isn't interesting enough for it's own gimmicks and it's gameplay is too weak to patch up the holes.

Time travel meets Jack Reacher.

I want to preface this by saying I played on PC Gamepass and it ran like absolute ass for some reason (Alan Wake 2 ran well on my set up for reference) so my judgment might be clouded. But even with that in mind, I think a lot of my problems aren't necessarily with the gameplay. Gunplay in this one can be really fun, and messing around with the time powers zipping around and using time powers is fun. But this suffers the fate of being an early eight generation game with a lot of ambition on its plate. Every interesting decision is really undermined by how undercooked everything is. When you aren't doing pretty decent third person shooter arena fights, you're going at a snails pace as characters in the game say "Hmmm, I wonder if theres an entrance round here."

The timeloop is well fleshed out, but its really hard to care about that when most of the characters are very one note, only elevated by mostly decent performances. With Aidan Gillen (I'm CIA) and Lance Reddick (Rest in Peace) picking up slack. Anytime they were on screen I perked up, but the writing in this one feels so flaccid in this one. Not helped by the fact that the optional written text/audio in emails and radio is mindnumbling long in this one. Anytime I bothered to read it felt like I was completely distracting from game flow. And that is to say nothing of the well-shot but ultimately very uninteresting television aspect of the series (of which it wouldn't load properly on PC Gamepass, this was a Microsoft funded project).

I think there are cool things in this game, but a lot of them can be found in other Remedy works before and after. Might be worth your time if you think it'd be up your alley, but I'm glad Remedy has made more interesting works after this one.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of a 6/10 game, but I wouldn't be surprised to see many lower scores from other players. The gameplay is incredibly basic for a third-person shooter with a few extra abilities added in for some spice, and it's clear that Remedy was more focused on the story and cinematics. Four episodes of a live action TV show that tell part of the story may have been a novel idea, and I applaud them for being so bold as to do that in the first place, but...well, I'll just say this: thank goodness they decided not to do that again in their later games. I know Microsoft approached them to make this one, so maybe it was their idea? It would fit with the philosophy of the marketing for the Xbox One at the time ("it's not just for games").

At the end of the day, I found this to be a satisfying experience, albeit the ending feels really anticlimactic. It's interesting to see the various aspects that the devs would expound upon for Control and Alan Wake 2, as well.

quantum break… alan wake… sam lake… giant snake, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake