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.

Quantum Break - это игра, смело сочетающая элементы экшена от третьего лица и телесериала, что создает уникальный и захватывающий опыт. Повествование игры сосредоточено на манипуляции временем и вытекающих из этого последствиях.

Визуальное оформление игры впечатляет: внимание уделяется деталям как моделей персонажей, так и окружения.

Что касается геймплея, то Quantum Break представляет интересную механику манипулирования временем, которая добавляет стратегию в боевые сегменты. Сами перестрелки быстро надоедают из-за малого разнообразия как в оружии, так и в типах врагов.

Интеграция сериала может оставить смешанные чувства. Хотя концепция совмещения эпизодов с живыми актерами и игровым процессом весьма интересна, но в некоторых моментах ее исполнение оставляет желать лучшего. Иногда персонажи в сериале ведут себя настолько плохо, что их поступки и рассуждения кажутся довольно странными и глупыми.

По сути, Quantum Break - это игра, которая заслуживает похвалы за свои амбиции и попытки внести инновации в игровой и повествовательный жанры. Пусть она и не является безупречным шедевром, но предлагает своеобразный опыт, который наверняка понравится тем, кто ценит сочетание экшена, научной фантастики и нестандартного построения сюжета.

Quantum Break did some cool things, and I think it's safe to say that Remedy wouldn't have executed on the ideas of Control and Alan Wake 2 so well if it weren't for Quantum Break, but it's impossible to ignore that Quantum Break is not great. The story is messy and awkward. The game wasn't made for modern hardware, so it has many glitches and breaks. The gunplay is fine (I actually like the automatic cover mechanic's execution) but I somehow spent the entire game feeling sluggish and awkward in a way few other shooters have. Over all, a fine game.

Como suele ser habitual, Remedy no deja indiferente a nadie ya sea para bien o para mal y, por supuesto, este juego no iba a ser la excepción.

Quantum Break es una peli-juego en su máxima expresión. No sólo tiene numerosas cinemáticas sino que apuesta por una mezcla entre serie de TV y videojuego que, a mi parecer, no termina de cuajar debido a que la parte de acción real es: 1. bastante cutre, 2. no aporta nada el juego y 3. corta completamente el ritmo.

Dejando esto de lado, lo mejor es la historia de viajes en el tiempo, que sin llegar a ser nada demasiado loco, cumple y es interesante. Esta tiene un sistema de decisiones algo simple pero que encaja perfectamente con la narrativa del juego. Por su parte, el gameplay es bastante divertido y las habilidades del protagonista hacen que los tiroteos sean lo suficiente diversos para que no se hagan pesados.

No ha estado mal pero no ha cumplido expectativas.

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.

Mais uma vez Sam Lake com suas ideias ambiciosas, dessa vez, com trama sobre viagem no tempo.

Já preciso falar que o plot de viagem no tempo é ótimo, ele não segue o padrão de "você só vai pra outra linha do tempo", aqui foi explorado o lado de laço fechado e o que eu chamo de "evento canônico" mas que não é exatamente isso. Não importa o que você faça, o que está estabelecido no futuro não pode ser mudado, e sua tentativa de mudar pode ocasionar nesse evento. O roteiro elabora muito bem isso, você vê desde o começo o jogo é repleto de foreshadowings remetentes as idas e voltas no tempo que vão acontecendo ao longo da história. Mal restou pontas soltas sobre esse fator.
Agora o resto do jogo, ele segue o mesmo padrão dos outros dois que eu joguei da Remedy, parece que ela não quis sair do esquema de onda de inimigos que você vai derrotando, o que, como em Alan Wake, fica cansativo com o tempo. A gameplay aqui é melhor do que lá, até porque tem vários artifícios de controle temporal pra poder usar nas batalhas. Elas são meio OP na verdade, mal tive dificuldade no jogo. Sinto que a gameplay aqui ainda não foi tão acertada como em Control.
Outro ponto que eu senti pesar aqui foram os textos de documentos. Em Alan Wake e Control também tinham esse elemento que serve como uma contextualização de muita coisa da trama, mas aqui a maior parte dele são assuntos que você já sabe por narrativa e alguns textos são ENORMES, tira a paciência do jogador ter que parar o que você tá fazendo pra ler mais de 5 minutos de texto, enquanto nos outros jogos mal passava de 1.
Mesmo sendo conteúdo opcional, eu acho que tem formas de evitar isso e deixar mais dinâmico o processo.
Enfim, com isso de lado, posso também falar sobre a qualidade gráfica EXCEPCIONAL de Quantum Break, um jogo lançado a 8 anos que eu veria sendo lançado hoje com essa qualidade. As cutcenes parecem cenas da série, nível de realismo e expressão gigantes, deixam muito imersivo o jogo num geral.
A experiência jogo+série foi bem interessante, cheguei até a gostar mais de assistir os episódios pra falar a verdade, essa história cabe bem nesse formato.