Certainly a unique experience with the TV Show format. I'm conflicted about this game so I'm just gonna make a pros and cons list.
Pros:
+ Originality
+ Actually embraces the physics heavy time-travel story instead of using it as a plot device
+ Makes you play as both the good and the bad guy, and choose for both of them.
+ Choices actually feel like they hold weight for the story as they all have advantages and disadvantages of them.
+ Good, relatively known actors have their acting abilities utilized especially with the live action sequences.

Cons:
+ The combat. Just... All of it.
+ Story gets messy after two chapters.
+ Internet connection is required for the live-action sequences and it's problematic. Alternative is a 100GB download.
+ Even that much time powers shouldn't make you be able to overcome a gun fight with a bunch of trained special forces.
+ Not every story has to have a "world-ending" threat to feel overwhelming. A lot of games and movies suffer from this for a while now.

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.

Great game! Very enjoyable, rich story, beautiful graphics, good 3rd person action shooter with some time lapse/bullet time mechanics, funny powers and very nice live action serie following and improving the storytelling.

Remedy has a good achievements with me, personaly. I am a huge fan of max payne and some of this game gave me some payne's taste. Story, charisma of entire casting, good acting and also voice acting exceeded my expectations for this game. However take a note: the physics, interation of Jack with enviroment and the some repetitive mechanics could make the game tiresome, in my opinion.

I could'nt believe the game was like 8 years old. In my opinion, the combat mechanics and abilities in this game are way better than any other new gen game currently out there. Comparing to Control, this one has a better story and gameplay. The time related abilities are so cool to use during combat. Personally, I liked the concept of integerating live action series of this game into the gameplay which really gave a great playing experience. Stating some bad experiences for me in this game were, as I played the Xbox Game Pass version, this version of the game held a problem of having graphical glitches occuring in game and the live action episodes were not available to stream when it needed to be. Besides bearing these technical faults, this one is a must play one.

Começando o ano com mais um da maratona Remedy.

Quantum Break é... curioso. É uma tentativa ousada de contar uma história, com um uso bem interessante do tempo na narrativa, e capítulos de séries live action entre sessões em gameplay que achei que ia ser bem paia mas até que gostei bantante deles. Eu gosto bastante da ideia que eles tem para viajem no tempo, em que é impossivel mudar eventos do passado e tudo é um grande loop temporal. Os personagens num geral são bem legais com você ditando muito do futuro deles, em especial os que são mais presentes nos episódios, e a história por mais que seja interessante acho que o pacing da uma arrastada foda lá pelo meio. E sofre o mesmo problema de AW, sessões de gameplay que se arrastam demais as vezes.

O combate também não é um grande forte, um TPS basicao, com inimigos que não variam muito durante a jogatina. Pelo menos os poderes do Joyce fazem você ter uma certa variedade no approach pra lutar com eles. O que dá uma incomodada mesmo é a quantidade interminável de textos gigantes pra ler sobre a trama, 500 e-mails sem fim entre personagens secundários, matérias de jornais enormes, rádios que as vezes não dá pra ouvir direito e nem tem legenda, pelo menos são coisas opcionais kkkk

É um jogo ok, com uma história cheia de vertentes e personagens legais, mas nada impressionante na parte de gameplay, ficou com algumas pontas soltas que adoraria ver numa sequência que melhorasse em várias áreas mas né kkkk relacao da remedy com xbox é complicada. Enfim, mais um passo da maratona concluído, próximo é Control!

Enjoyable but forgettable. I love remedy games and love that the universe just keeps expanding with everything they put out. I sadly missed this one when it came out because it was an Xbox exclusive and I feel like it didnt come out to much fan fare. The new Alan wake 2 DLC with the main character made me want to go back and play this on my steam deck finally. While I enjoyed it, It isnt my favorite genre - spy FBI thriller type stuff. I do like time travel but this felt pretty generic when it comes to what I am used to remedy doing.

The combat is fun for sure but a bit shallow. I played on normal and found it quite easy. I felt little to no need upgrading my abilities because I was flying through each encounter with little to no problem as it was. I enjoyed the shooty shooty bang bang of it all but I am glad it was as short as it was because if it would have been any longer it definitely would have overstayed its welcome

The story was fine. Like I said, not normally my cup of tea, but I can appreciate what was there. The characters all didnt seem to exciting unfortunately and Little Fingers American English accent was not the most fun to listen to. It was somewhere in the middle of being overly complicated yet not going nearly far enough to be too complicated at the same time, landing itself somewhere in the middle and not in the best way. Surprisingly I kind of enjoyed the live action TV show that was in here and all of its CW glory but was a bit dissapointed some of the characters were just not in the gameplay aspects and vice versa. I was hoping that in the third act all of the characters would converge and i really dont feel like that ever happened and the TV show and the game ended up feeling almost like two different products showing different perspectives of the same story.

I enjoyed myself with it but I am glad it was short.

Depois de Alan Wake, segui na missão de explorar outros jogos do universo compartilhado da Remedy. Enquanto Alan Wake foi um jogo inovador, Quantum Break é o que eu costumo chamar de "joguinho honesto": nada nele é fora da curva, mas ainda assim ele entrega bons momentos de diversão.

A história é o típico enredo de viagem no tempo, com clichês sobre paradoxos e a impossibilidade de alterar o passado. Apesar disso, é uma história bem executada (apesar de algumas conveniências de roteiro que acontecem de tempos em tempos), com bons personagens e ótimos plot twists, dependendo das suas decisões ao longo dos capítulos.

Vale a pena destacar as decisões que o jogador pode tomar. Embora sejam poucas, elas realmente mudam a história e criam um bom fator replay, para explorar outros caminhos. Apesar disso, o jogo ainda te força em determinado caminho e no final eu senti que a história que eu estava criando com as minhas decisões foi deixada de lado em prol do roteiro já pronto do jogo.

Apesar do personagem principal, Jack Joyce, ser um dos protagonistas mais sem sal com o qual eu já joguei, o restante do elenco é interessante e variado. Nesse ponto, a série que intercala os episódios do jogo é muito boa, explorando outros pontos de vista da história e dando um peso maior para as decisões que o jogador toma.

A jogabilidade aqui é um grande salto em comparação com Alan Wake. Os poderes temporais são variados e dão agilidade ao jogo. Gostei de cada encontro de combate e não senti falta de variedade de inimigos, como li em outras reviews.

Mas o jogo tem seus problemas. O número de colecionáveis é excessivo e muito da história se perde no meio de informação inútil. Alguns bugs de áudio também tornaram algumas cutscenes difíceis de acompanhar e a falta de legendas em português (ou até mesmo em inglês) para alguns áudios e vídeos estragam muito a experiência. Sinto que muito do conteúdo extra do jogo (que foi um dos fatores que tornou Alan Wake memorável) se perdeu para mim. Também senti falta de uma trilha sonora mais inspirada, como é comum em outros jogos da Remedy.

No geral, me diverti com Quantum Break e gostaria muito de uma continuação, mas o jogo não apresenta muitas inovações nem narrativas nem em jogabilidade. É um bom passatempo, mas não espere um jogo revolucionário.

a powerful game reinforced by fantastic audio/visual concept -- were that there was more of it.

Quantum Break feels like a game made by a studio that didn't want to make a game, and not in usual fashion of auteurship we're used to. the story's dimensions are directly linked to live action television sections that intersect its five acts to usually present a B-plot with characters who pretend to be as relevant as an already unimpressionable cast.

the gameplay all of this is built upon is serviceable, playing more with the concept of irregular time freezing rather than active travel, both in its combat and platforming segments. Quantum Break is easily at its best when it uses this to create destructive spectacle, but rarely in a way that it's an active threat to the player. much like the live action show, its meant to be more seen than felt.

the fantastic sound design and art style would normally make this forgivable, but the gunplay is missing too many pieces otherwise: i.e. not being able to switch weapons while reloading, a pool of 11 gun types only having one that's viable at long range, and an underwhelming amount of enemy types. meanwhile, the player gains all possible "time powers" pretty early on in the game, making the rest of it feel repetitive.

these issues and others are all things that could have been avoided with a bit more polish and a lot more ambition, but such holes are instead filled by an absurd amount of readable emails filled with eleven paragraphs with company chaff and one guy's horrible screenplay that ironically would have been a more interesting watch than the actual inter-episode productions.

there's just not enough gameplay in Quantum Break to begin with, and certainly not enough to justify replaying it while making different choices along the way.

What I liked:
The story is honestly one of the best I've seen in gaming in recent years. It's extremely complex and hard to follow at times, but it keeps you invested with great characters, dialogue, events, etc. The game's scientific focus that explains time-travel in a believable way made the story and concept that much better.

The way that the story was told was also quite nice. I liked having a mix of in-game cutscenes and the TV show that featured many of the same characters. It was cool seeing the in-game characters irl, as everyone is modelled after an actor (most of which are quite well-known). The show gave me a chance to chill and sit back for 30ish minutes while I got more of the awesome story and some payoff from the choices I chose. I also liked the 'ripples' that could be found in-game that would add some minor easter eggs in the show.

Junctions - although this game was criticized for having choices that aren't 'meaningful' and don't affect much in the story, I quite enjoyed seeing how the limited choices would play out and deliver a different narrative, even if it didn't have implications for the one ending of the game. Your choices determine some of the characters you work with and live/die throughout the course of the story - that's enough for me.

The game also looks really really good, especially with all of the time effects that come from your abilities or that just naturally occur in the game world. Using 'time blast' on a group of enemies is satisfying every single time.

The same is with the sound design - especially with sounds related to time, it's impressive how well the sound design conveys the notion of time manipulation, with the violent and jagged sounds of a time stutter, or a stretched out scream of an enemy killed in that time stutter. It's all perfect.

What I didn't quite like:
Although I always try to go for collectibles in any game, I don't like how integral these are to the story. Missing a document may deprive you of a key detail in the story. The amount of collectibles is also very high - constantly pausing the game to read them can get a little tedious.

Chronon Sources - the resource that is used to upgrade your abilities - are not earned in any way, rather they have to be found in places that are most often off the beaten path and easy to miss. In other words, players are compelled to go places where they may not feel is right (as NPCs you may be following in a given mission may make it super clear), otherwise they risk having weak abilities.

The combat is really simple, and seems to lack some basic features that most third-person shooters have: you can't use stealth, you can't use the scopes of weapons that clearly have them, you can't melee or even sprint outside of some very specific instances tied to your powers,

The quality of the show felt a little off. It's hard to explain, as I mentioned above that I generally liked the stories and the acting in the show. But the way it was shot felt like some indie FMV game.

A lot of other minor things bugged me, like missing subtitles for audio diaries, radios, as well as audio diaries only playing through one ear.

Conclusion:

If you're considering buying this game, don't expect some typical third-person shooter with an emphasis on action. This game is HEAVY on the story, and the TV show just might not be your thing. I did not enjoy this game for its deep gameplay mechanics or progression system, but rather the story that it told in different ways.

I need to ruminate on the narrative because I think there's a bit more going on there, but gameplay wise this has nothing going on. Continues the trend of Remedy having stylish at best gameplay with some decent narrative to chew on. A shame then that the experimental TV portions have the same quality as a CW tv show and also have basically no bearing on the actual plot. A few of the characters pop up, but once they arrive in the narrative they're either killed off or thrown away pretty quickly with the exception of Beth. Also hate how much the files and diagrams are both necessary to understanding the world and slow the pacing down to a halt. It made sense in Alan Wake because the pages directly foreshadowed events to come, but none of them were needed to understand the plot. The secondary, or maybe major, antagonist's whole motivation can be missed if you overlook one those near the end.

I need to think on it more because it is taking some swings about terrorism, protest, and corporatization, but there's just so much filler between the interesting bits that this left me more confused than anything. Respect that they took alot of risks here, I'm just feeling like this is more refinement in service of better games they have down the line. Having played a good portion of Control at the time of writing, I can say this is a good step towards that, for good and for bad, but thankfully more good.