Quantum Break developed by Remedy, released in 2016. When I saw the gameplay trailer for this at E3, I genuinely thought this was going to be one of the best games to hit the Xbox One. Sadly that wasn't the case. The game even suffered a delay, I'd hate to have seem what it would've been like, had it released on schedule. As well as the game, we have a TV show, five episodes long that plays in between the chapters of the game. It features the cast of the game and some people appear a lot more in the show than the game.
We play as Jack Joyce, better known as Shawn Ashmore who played Iceman in the Xmen film series. After a disastrous time machine experiment fails, Jack is gifted powers that allows him to manipulate time. Time fractures and will soon break if Jack is unable to fix the fracture. Jack's brother, Will, played by Dominic Monaghan, better known as Merry Brandybuck from Lord of the Rings, built the time machine. Jack's friend, Paul, played by Aidan Gillen better known as Little Finger from Game of Thrones, expands on Will's time machine and asks Jack to be there for a demonstration. When it fails, both Jack and Paul are gifted time powers. Paul believes time can't be fixed, leading the two time powered friends to now become enemies.
The story is really short, five chapters long that can easily be done in a few hours, the TV episodes are full twenty minute segments, though I enjoyed watching them, I could see how they could frustrate a player who just wanted to play the game. Some people featured heavily in the show, but practically didn't feature in the game, this was stupid because it felt like the game and show were following different people that just linked up, rather than following one story.
The cast is great, I knew most of them and they gave brilliant performances. Even the people I didn't know gave a great performance. The graphics are fantastic and the life-like appearances are scarily good. It's far too linear though, it doesn't feel like you're allowed to do anything except the story, it just felt so restricted. There's parts where you get to play as Paul, which I thought was really cool, but all you do is walk to an area, where you then get to make a choice that affected the story. I didn't understand why I got to make a decision as the bad guy, when I played as the good guy. I also felt that the choices weren't really that important, it all leads to the same ending, is that really giving you a choice?
You get some cool powers though. You can get a time sheild, time stop is a blast, which freezes an enemy and then let's you shoot bullets towards him and when it unfreezes, the bullets hit. There's time rush, which allows you to run in a slowed down world, you can takedown an enemy or run from falling debris with this. Time vision allows you to see enemies through wall, looks like heat vision. Time dodge allows you to quickly move away from enemies and their gunfire. What was really disapointing was that there was no power that completed stopped time, only when a time fracture occurred that happened. Even Timeshift let you freeze time. Jack was a just a normal guy, next he's some expert marksman? They should have let you briefly stop time and than be able to steal the enemies weapons or even subdue them when they were frozen. There should be some sort of stealth, freeze time and then sneak past the enemies, this would've fitted so much better I think.
The gun play is far from the best, but this is the only time when it really feels like a game, when you in action using your powers and guns. The platforming is really average and clunky, and the time fractures are a pain trying to get through some sequence. It's a cover-shooter that has no cover system! Jack sort of crouches behind things, but you can't move around in cover and you can't blind fire, I didn't enjoy the gun fights much at all. Something cool though, was when you killed the last enemy in the area, it did a slow motion kill so you always knew when it was clear. The pistol had unlimited ammo, but often when the clip was empty, it would automatically switch me to my rifle without me realising, it was so annoying seeing as it had ammo why it didn't just auto reload. What made it more annoying was when your rifle was completely empty, it didn't automatically switch to your pistol, oh no, no, no, that would be too convient for us now wouldn't it? There's also some enemies that can move around in the time fracture, they are also able to time dodge and can give you a more interesting fight.
There's a lot of exposition in this game, I love when games have it, but when main characters are talking, important parts of the story, if you pick up a collectable during, Jack will start talking about the collectable and the exposition continues! So Jack is speaking in two conversations at the same time and I'm now missing important parts of the story. Thanks, great job. The collectable dialogue should interrupt the story chatter and then let it continue after. In the first half of the game, there was this horrible, blurry, haze going on around characters when they were moving, it was genuinely making me feel sick and giving me a headache. Thankfully, it just seemed to be around in the first act. The loading was ridiculously long and the checkpoints felt bad. Sometimes I died and I go back to an earlier battle and die at the same but, only then for the checkpoint to load me in after that fight, the checkpoints weren't even the same. I even skipped a cutscene I already watched, after a checkpoint with caused the game to crash. Another thing I found really annoying was the time fractures. Every time Jack was about to die or some hazard was taking place, there was a convenient fractured that allowed you to escape. The hard difficulty wasn't too bad really, you could get overwhelmed in parts but the powers made it easy to persevere. The final battle had to be done in one go, but as long as you didn't play too brave, you wouldn't have had much of an issue.
Apparently, this started off as a sequel to Alan Wake, which I honestly would've much preferred. This isn't a bad game, but it's just too linear and lacking gameplay. The gameplay it has isn't even great. But the graphics, cast and performances are truly fantastic. I don't think it needed the TV show, they could've just done shorter cutscenes instead. I really liked the way they set up the sequel, whether it gets one we will have to see. I did quite enjoy this game, even if it sounds like I didn't, I was just massively let down with the final result. I mean, not being able to freeze time in a game with time manipulation powers, c'maaaan.
7.2/10
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