As someone who likes Remedy, stories about time travel, and a majority of the cast for Quantum Break, I'm not sure how to feel about this story. On one hand I really enjoy the plot and characters, but at the same time the story is kind of convoluted and told rather sloppily. I think one of the biggest issues is the pacing. It's either moving too fast or not fast enough because of the bouncing between the game and TV show. It also doesn't help that during the game cutscenes there's a lot of framerate drops, taking me out of the immersion of the story it's trying to tell.
The concept of having a tv show that flows beside a game, lacing story elements in between, sounds like an amazing and revolutionary idea especially when the narrative revolves around time and parallel realities. If Quantum Break has shown me anything though is that it's not as amazing as I'd hoped. If you skip the tv show because you'd much rather just play the game than you're missing out on a large portion of the story and you're left not really knowing how the characters got where they're at, doing what they're doing, or why. It also left me wondering why couldn't all the narrative for the tv show just be in the video game in the first place, why separate it? I think casual gamers will like this experience more than I did, which I feel it is aimed more towards anyway.
I will say most of actors like Shawn Ashmore, Courtney Hope, Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan and Lance Reddick did outstanding jobs playing the characters in both the TV show and video game. Unfortunately some of the side characters in the show were a little annoying and I thought the acting was a kind of bad. It left me not really all that invested in their motives or struggles with characters such as Liam and Emily Burke.
Another issue with the plot and something Remedy does often, is how they choose to end their stories. Alan Wake and Control both end with ambiguity, or a sense of the story never really finding any closure and Quantum Break also suffers from this. Strangely, I really liked the ending, but it also left me feeling frustrated that we may never see a sequel.
If there is one thing Remedy excels at it's world design and much like Control, the world of Quantum Break is gorgeous. Remedy did a stellar job with the photo realism of their character models and sometimes I'd forget that I was playing a video game because of how life like the characters and world seemed. If I were to rate the game by just it's graphics alone than I'd say Remedy easily knocks it out of the ball park.
Even though the world is beautiful, the game is very linear which isn't really a problem in this game because there are plenty of files to read and things to see. Also Jack offers a lot of thoughts or opinions on the things he interacts with which adds a lot of story and depth for the characters. However, when playing the game it doesn't feel like exploration is encouraged. When the game is left idle for even a few minutes I was harassed by Jack or accompanying NPCs to rush to the next objective rather than to take my time in seeing what the game had to offer or just to search for collectibles which was really irritating.
The gameplay mechanics and combat are designed around the theme of the game like Jack having the ability to stop time to shield himself from bullets, being able to freeze enemies in place, and using abilities like rewinding time to solve puzzles. The combat is your typical third person shooter and shares designs from that of Uncharted. You have to pick up weapons outside of your handgun from fallen enemies and refill your ammo from backpacks found throughout the game. This game also shares another feature with Uncharted which I find to be annoying, is that this game has no health meter on the screen. The way you know you're taking damage is by the screen changing colors, the redder your screen gets the closer you are to game over. A word of warning for anyone that chooses to play this game, the final boss is terrible so you might want to look up a guide or video because the game doesn't give a whole lot of hints on what you need to do.
Throughout this game there are cinematic moments of gameplay called time stutters and while both graphically and developmentally impressive I found these segments to be very frustrating at times because you have to use your quantum powers to move objects out of the way to be able to proceed and the game doesn't give you a lot of reaction time even on easy. So needless to say I found myself dying quite often in these parts because I wasn't quick enough to move Jack through.
One of the most interesting part of this game is the moral choices the game gives you at the end of each act. What makes this so interesting is that these decisions aren't made by Jack, but the antagonist. I thought this was such a fascinating idea from a story telling prospective and surprised other games haven't done something similar. These choices affect both the show and game by changing scenes, dialogue, and what files you find in the upcoming acts afterwards. This adds for a lot of replayability, but sadly, even with these decisions it doesn't change the over all ending of the game. So it kinda makes having multiple choices feel kind of pointless. But than again maybe that goes along with the whole theme of the story...
Overall:
I found Quantum Break to be a good game, not great, but good. I had a lot of fun with the gameplay outside of the terrible final boss fight. I really liked the cinematography, most of the characters, and story, even if it was kinda hard to follow at times. I think having a TV show in between gameplay was an intriguing idea, but unfortunately one that really didn't pan out and I think it threw off the flow of the game. For anyone that has Gamepass, I'd highly recommend giving the game a chance and I hope in the future Remedy will make a sequel to Quantum Break because I feel there is still a lot of story left to tell.
Pros:
+beautiful graphics and cinematography
+fun combat and gameplay mechanics that involve time
+multiple choices add replayability
+good story despite being confusing at times
Cons:
-horrible final boss fight
-game feels poorly paced because of TV show
-little reaction time during stutter segments
The concept of having a tv show that flows beside a game, lacing story elements in between, sounds like an amazing and revolutionary idea especially when the narrative revolves around time and parallel realities. If Quantum Break has shown me anything though is that it's not as amazing as I'd hoped. If you skip the tv show because you'd much rather just play the game than you're missing out on a large portion of the story and you're left not really knowing how the characters got where they're at, doing what they're doing, or why. It also left me wondering why couldn't all the narrative for the tv show just be in the video game in the first place, why separate it? I think casual gamers will like this experience more than I did, which I feel it is aimed more towards anyway.
I will say most of actors like Shawn Ashmore, Courtney Hope, Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan and Lance Reddick did outstanding jobs playing the characters in both the TV show and video game. Unfortunately some of the side characters in the show were a little annoying and I thought the acting was a kind of bad. It left me not really all that invested in their motives or struggles with characters such as Liam and Emily Burke.
Another issue with the plot and something Remedy does often, is how they choose to end their stories. Alan Wake and Control both end with ambiguity, or a sense of the story never really finding any closure and Quantum Break also suffers from this. Strangely, I really liked the ending, but it also left me feeling frustrated that we may never see a sequel.
If there is one thing Remedy excels at it's world design and much like Control, the world of Quantum Break is gorgeous. Remedy did a stellar job with the photo realism of their character models and sometimes I'd forget that I was playing a video game because of how life like the characters and world seemed. If I were to rate the game by just it's graphics alone than I'd say Remedy easily knocks it out of the ball park.
Even though the world is beautiful, the game is very linear which isn't really a problem in this game because there are plenty of files to read and things to see. Also Jack offers a lot of thoughts or opinions on the things he interacts with which adds a lot of story and depth for the characters. However, when playing the game it doesn't feel like exploration is encouraged. When the game is left idle for even a few minutes I was harassed by Jack or accompanying NPCs to rush to the next objective rather than to take my time in seeing what the game had to offer or just to search for collectibles which was really irritating.
The gameplay mechanics and combat are designed around the theme of the game like Jack having the ability to stop time to shield himself from bullets, being able to freeze enemies in place, and using abilities like rewinding time to solve puzzles. The combat is your typical third person shooter and shares designs from that of Uncharted. You have to pick up weapons outside of your handgun from fallen enemies and refill your ammo from backpacks found throughout the game. This game also shares another feature with Uncharted which I find to be annoying, is that this game has no health meter on the screen. The way you know you're taking damage is by the screen changing colors, the redder your screen gets the closer you are to game over. A word of warning for anyone that chooses to play this game, the final boss is terrible so you might want to look up a guide or video because the game doesn't give a whole lot of hints on what you need to do.
Throughout this game there are cinematic moments of gameplay called time stutters and while both graphically and developmentally impressive I found these segments to be very frustrating at times because you have to use your quantum powers to move objects out of the way to be able to proceed and the game doesn't give you a lot of reaction time even on easy. So needless to say I found myself dying quite often in these parts because I wasn't quick enough to move Jack through.
One of the most interesting part of this game is the moral choices the game gives you at the end of each act. What makes this so interesting is that these decisions aren't made by Jack, but the antagonist. I thought this was such a fascinating idea from a story telling prospective and surprised other games haven't done something similar. These choices affect both the show and game by changing scenes, dialogue, and what files you find in the upcoming acts afterwards. This adds for a lot of replayability, but sadly, even with these decisions it doesn't change the over all ending of the game. So it kinda makes having multiple choices feel kind of pointless. But than again maybe that goes along with the whole theme of the story...
Overall:
I found Quantum Break to be a good game, not great, but good. I had a lot of fun with the gameplay outside of the terrible final boss fight. I really liked the cinematography, most of the characters, and story, even if it was kinda hard to follow at times. I think having a TV show in between gameplay was an intriguing idea, but unfortunately one that really didn't pan out and I think it threw off the flow of the game. For anyone that has Gamepass, I'd highly recommend giving the game a chance and I hope in the future Remedy will make a sequel to Quantum Break because I feel there is still a lot of story left to tell.
Pros:
+beautiful graphics and cinematography
+fun combat and gameplay mechanics that involve time
+multiple choices add replayability
+good story despite being confusing at times
Cons:
-horrible final boss fight
-game feels poorly paced because of TV show
-little reaction time during stutter segments