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.
+ 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.