Kidding aside, Quantum Break is a long time coming. I first ‘saw’ it at E3 in 2013 and the hype-train was pulling out of the station immediately. There was a lot to look forward to — it was being made by Remedy, one of a handful of studios who gets my attention. It was also bound for next-gen, and anyone can get excited about that.
Fast forward to present day and I’ve been fortunate to have received a review code to the full game and have even had time to play through it nearly twice. With eight different Junctions, Quantum Break has multiple paths that the player can utilize to steer the story, which makes replaying it more enticing than a typical third person action adventure game. The story is certainly deep and complex enough that multiple playthroughs might even be considered required if you’re really wanting to get the complete picture, but I will say that after one play through, I felt the story was complete enough that I felt satisfied with the pacing and outcome.
Story, characters, and atmosphere are an obvious major component of the Quantum Break experience. To that end, Remedy has done an above average job to be sure; but there are issues. How deep these issues are to you will vary naturally, but I’ll elaborate to a point and avoid spoilers. But first, stories about time, time travel, stopping time, or the end of time as it may be, those are inherently interesting and cool, I think about anyone would agree with that. Time is the most enduring mystery of the universe, and using concepts of time for stories will likely never cease to amaze. Anyway, Remedy presents a cool and unique story about time here, which I appreciated. However, while intriguing at first, I found early on and ultimately throughout that I was struggling to really become invested. It’s a cliched thing to say I know, but ultimately the fact is, if a game or book or whatever can’t earn your investment and it’s relying heavily on that to deliver an experience, the potency of said experience takes a hit.
So what’s here is well above the quality you’ll typically get in a game, but there are tropes and head-scratching things and loopholes that the leave the quality of the experience somewhat tempered. Anyone who takes just a moment to sit back to think about these story holes is bound to come up with several red flags, but again how much this all means to you is up to the individual. Perhaps my hopes were too high for Quantum Break, but between the shortcomings in combat mechanics that I’ll get into later and story elements that had too many holes to ignore, I couldn’t bring myself to gain a deep appreciation of Quantum Break’s total package.
Throughout each Act and the Parts within, there are Narrative Objects the player can find to gain a more complete understanding of the events happening in the city of Riverport. These objects are usually posters or emails found on unlocked computers and they’re pretty easy to find thanks to cues in the HUD, and I think the most any Part has are 18. Anyway, the Narrative Objects act as both an obvious collectible and a way for Remedy to give the player a lot more inside info to Monarch’s operations, more backstory in other words. Thing is, many of of these Objects are emails, and every one of these save for maybe a half dozen (out of several dozen) are super long. I can be a long-winded guy in emails in my effort to preemptively answer questions and stomp out ambiguity. And, for every game I have even an inkling of interest in, I try to become immersed in it even if it means reading a lot of text. I’ll admit defeat at this endeavor with Quantum Break after some time, though — the emails shared between (mostly) Monarch employees are ridiculously long. The concept of tl;dr or executive summary does not apply here, and I found myself skimming these super fast after a while. Sometimes Jack will offer a voiced internal monologue summarizing it for you, but not often enough.
Why even mention this seemingly subjective and pedantic observation? Well, it’s just to wrap up the point earlier about the story. I looked at the inclusion of so much verbose, optional info about the Quantum Break universe as Remedy either being insecure about their story, and thus taking great pains to explain things in these emails and other Objects, or, so confident in what they created that they were “easily” able to write up so much additional background details. The reality is probably somewhere in between, or perhaps more so option two, but a takeaway from this was that I reached a point fairly early on that those long emails became too long to bother with.
As far as characters go, Jack Joyce is fairly typical, and you might feel a touch of ‘Nathan Drake syndrome’ in that you have a pretty standard, likeable dude that seems to have no qualms with mowing down literally hundreds of other humans in the name of self defense (I guess). This is not an uncommon dichotomy in gaming, so make of that what you will, but I felt it worth mentioning that Jack’s violent actions have no negative consequences or any hint of remorse, which for me left him being very much a videogame character and a generic, flat one at that. The supporting cast includes Paul Serene who players take control of for about half of the game, trading chapters or Parts with Jack. When playing as Paul, you’re literally seeing the story from the other side of the conflict, a view very rarely offered in games so seamlessly, so it’s pretty cool. Paul’s segments are just story-driven, so no combat gameplay is involved, but you do reach a point to where you must decide which time Junction to take. I liked that you can get a roughly thirty second video/graphic collage view into your choice before you make it, and a lot of times these choices are difficult to make quickly, you have to give them considerable thought. Afterwards, a Community screen shows what percentage of players chose your path, and then the game’s path changes according to what you picked.
Story and characters are at least half of the battle, but the other half would belong to, well, combat itself. Playing Quantum Break reminded me a lot of FEAR — you have this paramilitary organization in Monarch who have a seemingly unlimited amount of tactical dudes that look and behave the same, and they’re dealing with a character (Jack) who has time-control abilities and knows how to handle guns with the best of them. Combat features a half dozen time abilities including Time Vision which acts as a radar for finding nearby enemies, explosive props, or ammo supplies, Time Dodge to help you zip around from point to point, Time Shield to form a protective bubble, and so on. Nice thing is, each of these Time abilities have their own separate cooldown timers so combining them is both possible and highly encouraged, and yeah the end results can be quite cool to see and perform. I thought the Time abilities were introduced at good intervals, you’ll have them all by roughly the halfway point of the game, and they absolutely enhance the combat gameplay. The upgrades of said time abilities are a little less impressive, but when I had upgrade points to spend (by finding hidden Chronon Particles), it was rarely easy to decide which one I wanted amongst at least a couple of good choices.
Time abilities are great, but the heart of the combat is gunplay — Jack can hold three types of guns including a pistol, shotgun, and machine gun, and there are about three variations of each. Despite getting grenades thrown at him from Monarch grunts, Jack cannot use grenades himself, but you do have infinite pistol ammo, which I found to be really odd. There is also no stealth play here; you can get the drop on enemies sometimes, and indeed this action is all cover-based, but as far as sneaking up and doing melee kills or silenced weapons and the like? Nada. Melee is not even on the menu, although if you get close enough to a Monarch soldier they will smack you with their guns, but Jack is left to shoulder ram them with Time Dodge or shoot his guns. I was surprised at this limitation and the amount of obvious red explosive barrels and propane canisters — which pop up in the strangest of places such as high security labs and next to trained snipers — this design choice just had me shaking my head. Shootable objects that explode are one of the most egregious examples of a gameplay design mechanic that just needs to go on hiatus for some number of years. I, perhaps unfairly, expected more from Quantum Break in this regard, too.
Combat on the whole is fun though, and also very forgiving when playing on Normal, for better or worse. I died more times getting smashed by a door puzzle than in combat, but note that an ‘easy’ game is not necessarily a bad one, or course. If you’ve got a decent cover-based, third person action background, and you like Achievements, I would recommend playing on Hard from the start with this one. Anyway, regardless of difficulty setting, the platforming puzzles you encounter won’t change, and these see Jack having to manipulate time to make a path accessible. This might be done by holding Y when prompted to reverse time for a certain object to restore it to a state that Jack can use to climb on, or you might have to shoot a support hook to cause a heavy object to fall to the ground and then reverse time to move said object back into place for a few seconds while you use it to jump over to the next platform. Other areas allow you to view short glimpses of the past, and hear conversations between characters. The puzzles are well placed and intuitive enough to understand immediately, maybe a little more creativity here would be nice. Then again, the game’s story is presented as such as being on a strict timeline, so I suppose you could say Remedy didn’t want players to have to struggle much and spend a lot of virtual clock stuck in combat or puzzles. Jack is also quick to remind players, verbally, of where he needs to go and what to do (which is a little annoying but forgivable).
Less forgivable or at least far more shocking anyway are the graphics. Again — maybe my hopes or expectations for this game were too high — but wow, it’s hard not to marvel at the conundrum Quantum Break on Xbox One presents players. The game runs at 720p, I believe at 30fps, and there is a persistent, fullscreen grain that begins before the title screen even appears and sticks. Load times are long, and once loaded, it often takes several seconds for the scene to fully populate at resolution. Draw distance is largely kept in check by the level design anyway, and dead enemy bodies disappear rapidly, I would imagine to recoup system resources. I had a few framerate chokes, some clipping, and I almost got stuck in between a wall and an object at one point, but these issues were the exception. The rule on the other hand was the grain, the 720p, and the framerate. I’m not a videophile, nor a stickler for resolution and even perfect frame rates, but that fullscreen grain is irritating, especially for a game of this caliber. I felt the same way about The Evil Within, but that was last gen. It’s flatly disappointing that the Xbox One cannot, at the time of this writing anyway, provide a more visually arresting experience. Now, that’s not to say that the artwork, animations, lighting, and other details in the gameworld are bad, for the most part all of this looks good, great even, underneath the grain anyway. But the technical visual presentation on Xbox is serviceable at worst but only great in certain scenes (mainly the prolonged time-stutter scenes).
The apparent requirement to be online to play is concerning for me as well. In making sure that the grain was not due to my TV, I actually moved my Xbox to three different TVs (all with the same outcome). At one stop, I didn’t connect to the internet at first, and the game won’t even launch without it. The reasoning I think is solely due to the Quantum Break episodes you get to watch in between acts. These are HD streams that are live-action, filling in details of the story. The acting is pretty good and the streams worked smoothly, these are well worth watching once anyway. But to force a player to be tethered online to play, just to watch these, is not cool. Apologies in advance if my understanding of this scenario are incomplete, but this is what I experienced once during my review.
With that, let’s head on to the summary…
