Time travel meets Jack Reacher.

I want to preface this by saying I played on PC Gamepass and it ran like absolute ass for some reason (Alan Wake 2 ran well on my set up for reference) so my judgment might be clouded. But even with that in mind, I think a lot of my problems aren't necessarily with the gameplay. Gunplay in this one can be really fun, and messing around with the time powers zipping around and using time powers is fun. But this suffers the fate of being an early eight generation game with a lot of ambition on its plate. Every interesting decision is really undermined by how undercooked everything is. When you aren't doing pretty decent third person shooter arena fights, you're going at a snails pace as characters in the game say "Hmmm, I wonder if theres an entrance round here."

The timeloop is well fleshed out, but its really hard to care about that when most of the characters are very one note, only elevated by mostly decent performances. With Aidan Gillen (I'm CIA) and Lance Reddick (Rest in Peace) picking up slack. Anytime they were on screen I perked up, but the writing in this one feels so flaccid in this one. Not helped by the fact that the optional written text/audio in emails and radio is mindnumbling long in this one. Anytime I bothered to read it felt like I was completely distracting from game flow. And that is to say nothing of the well-shot but ultimately very uninteresting television aspect of the series (of which it wouldn't load properly on PC Gamepass, this was a Microsoft funded project).

I think there are cool things in this game, but a lot of them can be found in other Remedy works before and after. Might be worth your time if you think it'd be up your alley, but I'm glad Remedy has made more interesting works after this one.

Reviewed on Mar 26, 2024


1 Comment


15 days ago

This is pretty spot on what my thoughts are for this game. Really great narrative ideas, inventive mechanics and impressive visuals, but all of it contained within an extremelly by the numbers, generic mid-2010's triple A packaging. One of the reasons the best Remedy games are great is exactly because of how out-of-the-box and delightfully weird they're willing to be, which makes me see Quantum Break as a game with a huge wasted potential.