after this game Remedy is definitely one of my favorite game developers

my only real gripe is that the ending was way too rushed, but aside from that I loved every aspect
even the TV show, as low-budget as it was lmao

RIP Lance Reddick...

There's an anecdote I heard and can no longer source about either Arkane or Looking Glass Studios. How the games they worked on felt like complete disasters right until the very end of the development cycle, the last few months when every component finally falls into place. It makes sense for an immersive sim, where a change in a single system can drastically change the player experience. But I feel like it could also apply to Quantum Break, a game so ambitious and sprawling that only by the time the individual pieces should've fit together the seams between them became apparent to the leading team. As a result, we have a work that almost seems to be in conflict with itself, despite still showing us the ambition of its vision.

Quantum Break started off as a way for Remedy to bring their signature blend of action gameplay and TV drama even closer together, now using a substantial amount of live action footage to place the two media on equal footing in the overall narrative. So, on the one hand, we've got the designers going back to the frantic gunfights of Max Payne, now augmented by magic abilities that make combat more dynamic, varied and flashy. I'm gonna guess that everyone who couldn't stand the repetitive flashlight pointing of Alan Wake stood up and clapped when they saw the first slo-mo close up of an enemy falling dead on the ground in Quantum Break. On the other hand, every couple of hours the gameplay is set on pause as you are presented with around 30 minutes of television. Now, having only played the game years after it came out, I was expecting this half of Quantum Break to be awful. A YouTube short series ballooned into an attempt at prestige funded by all the Microsoft product placement. But it turned to be just... solid tv? A surprisingly okay-acted and well-paced tv series with an occasional inspired visual moment. Something in-between FX's Fringe and a CW show. But then one evening after work as I was thinking about continuing the game I remembered that I stopped right at the end of an act, meaning I had about 40 minutes of "non-gameplay" to sit through. I wanted to spend an hour by doing a fun activity, but instead I knew I'd spend most of it getting to the fun activity itself. And it's not even that I dislike cutscenes or anything. God knows these JRPGs I play so much have a ton of them these days. But there's something about the pre-defined regularity of these interruptions, the schedule you're on that makes it all out of joint pacing-wise.

And it just got worse over time as the gameplay itself became unevenly paced. If you try to look for secrets and collectibles in these kinds of games (and with Remedy's work that's usually worth it), you have a lot of additional material to get your hands on. E-mail threads, notes, diaries, most of them surprisingly well-written and engrossing. Some of them optional, yet vital to one of the game's key mysteries. Reading through them is generally a good time, but sometimes you just notice how long the reading takes you. It's especially jarring during segments when you're supposed to go somewhere and an NPC keeps calling out to you as you're trying to focus on this random e-mail. And then at some point the game throws at you a quiet level for a change. Some walk and talks, some chill exploration, light platforming. And about a dozen of these collectibles to read through in a condensed space, making what should've been a short break between the action into another half-hour of lore consumption.

You see, all of these pieces out of context actually bring me enjoyment. I like the messy chaotic combat encounters, the small platforming puzzles and set-pieces, I'm impressed by the visuals and the on-point needle drops, engrossed in the world built with thousands of optional words of text, and seeing Lance Reddick walk away from an explosion in slo-mo is the kind of cheese I live for. And I'm sure each individual team was proud of their work and hoping that when it all comes together into the final product, it would end up brilliant. But apparently, there just was no clear vision of what that final product would be in practice, and instead of peak couch time activity we're left with this exhausting mixed media monstrosity. At least as we've since seen with Control, Remedy would find a less ambitious and more effective way to iterate on the same concepts.

It's unfortunate that this was stuck to the Xbox One last generation because it's a gem. Remedy improved their gameplay a lot. While it loses the atmosphere that Alan Wake had, it still has plenty of its own. Tons of really cool collectibles with actual meaning/lore/world-building, narrative choices that lead to different story beats and the really cool live-action tie-in's make this game really unique. Very cool to see Remedy grow game to game. Having played Control when it launched, it's clear to see the DNA that AW and QB instilled in it.

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.

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.