Quantum Break

Ao contrário de Alan Wake, o jogo anterior da Remedy Entertainment, Quantum Break acerta (muito) no combate, mas tem arestas em praticamente todos os seus outros quesitos mais fundamentais. Os confrontos com inimigos são como uma dança de poderes temporais que criam uma "power fantasy" muito satisfatória. A variedade de inimigos também é boa para um jogo desse tipo.

Agora, a história. É divertida e suficiente, mas fica aquém da importância que o próprio jogo dá a ela - por exemplo, com o seriado live-action, uma ideia legal não tão bem executada. Tem alguns furos feios no roteiro e a maioria dos personagens é dolorosamente unidimensional. Isso não seria um problema na maior parte dos casos mas, de novo, Quantum Break faz questão de ressaltar sua narrativa.

Entre outros pontos menos positivos, as sessões de plataforma são mal feitas e a trilha sonora e o design de mundo são esquecíveis na melhor das hipóteses.

Quantum Break is one of those games that's been on my backlog for years, and when I mean years I mean almost 8 years. Didn't have anyway to play it when it came out and by the time I did I had pretty much lost interest. However, my old love of Max Payne and my newer love of Control eventually brought me back here and boy what a weird game. On one hand it's the typical Remedy experience, tight gunplay, unique abilities, and a pretty interesting universe. However, Quantum Break is much messier then any of Remedy's other shooters and it's very clear how Control improved on so much.

To start off, I want to praise how many cool abilities this game gives you. Multiple different time powers which you can switch between, freezing one spot, protecting yourself, dashing away and using bullet time feels pretty cool. However, the game is way too easy (played on hard) for the need to even use these in an interesting way 90% of the time. When you do have to it's really fun, but most of the time it just feels like you're dashing and wiping out wave after wave. It also doesn't help these are easily the least satisfying weapons Remedy has ever made (although the heavy pistol is pretty tight). There's some polish missing with these systems as well. I often felt like I'd get stuck in the environment and wasn't as flexible as I felt I should have been. Also not being able to switch a weapon when you run out of ammo feels like a weird issue to have in the year 2016. Overall, this game's gunplay has the potential to be really engaging, but often falls flat due to how easy and messy it is.

I'd also like to note you do spend a fair time walking around, but most of that time you're at least talking about time so it tends to be interesting. My real gripe during this downtime is the amount of pointless collectibles this game has. I'd have no problem if it was a few documents (which are the most boring documents Remedy has ever placed in a game), but having a useless and boring upgrade system just felt lazy. 75% of the upgrades barely do anything and the one's that do aren't even crazy good. I never felt excited to upgrade my character.

The story is weird too here. I thought the time travel stuff was really well done, a whole time travel story based around not being able to change anything was really cool. There's a real nihilism here about the past not being able to be changed and I really loved that. The time travel stuff alone was peak remedy writing and it really kept me invested in the game. However, every character except for Paul really feels like a blank slate. I genuinely couldn't care about anyone which sucked because of how much emphasis this story places on characters. Even worse is the TV show integrated into the game (which didn't even work for me I had to watch the cutscenes on YouTube) which honestly felt like a mistake to watch as it added almost nothing to the game. Horrible acting, action, CGI, no interesting cinematography, etc. I think this integration could work but they should have made a good TV show first before trying to force this idea. The last thing I want to mention story wise is the choices the game throws at you. They have almost no effect on the game which intentionally or not corelates with the themes of not being able to change anything. If this is intentional I actually for once love the false sense of a choice. If not then this is just a lazy feature to really try to sell this TV feature for some reason.

One final thing I want to praise is the idea of stutters, their visuals, and the idea of the End of Time. All of this is actually really cool and helps separate it from other time travel stories. I usually don't care for cinematic sections but loved every second spent in a stutter (and loved it even more during gameplay even though it wasn't utilized enough). Sadly you never fight those stutter monsters or whatever which is a shame because they built them up to be really cool.

Quantum Break is messy but it's still a good time. If you didn't like Control you're gonna hate this game. If you haven't played Control, go play Control. In fact, play all the other Remedy shooters first. There's a lot to love about this game but you have to deal with some terrible AAA decisions.

Remedy Entertainment is a pretty awesome developer making stuff like Max Payne 1 and 2.
So going into Quantum Break I was hoping it would be more of that.
Well unfortunately I'm not sure if I am the intended audience for this title.

The most obvious thing to note is that this is almost more of a story than it is a game. I would say 75% of it is cutscenes and dialogue and even a teleivison show after every chapter, and 25% of it is actual gameplay.

I will briefly comment about the story;

1) The premise is not that interesting to me, cliche time travel stuff which allows many childish liberties with fictional storywriting

2) It is totally nonsensical at times. It is like a child making up random plot devices on the spot in fantasy land, allowing just about anything to happen.

3) I never was that invested in it because its just so nonsensical and fantastical. Quite the opposite, I was just left bored and at times finding it really cheesy, especially the acting and forced romance stuff.

4) I didn't want to watch a real life television show after every chapter, but I figured this is the way the developer intends you to experience this, so I will go ahead.

5) However, some of the characters and writing are kind of interesting such as the Martin Hatch guy and the main villain, but they don't really appear in the game that much, only in the TV show (lol)


So that is the 75% chunk of the game, the story, cutscenes, dialogue, and tv show.

Now I will comment on the remianing 25%. The actual gameplay:

Out of the 25% you have:

15% Combat.

- The combat consists of guns with really piss poor accuracy having to slowly tap the mouse button or your bullets go random. None of the guns are all that exciting to use and while they do handle differently, none of them feel fun.

- The enemies are varied, but honestly I found it annoying. There are weak military guys without helmets that you can easily headshot, and then you have huge bulky guys that take half a dozen magazines to kill or they zip and zoom around the screen like spiderman, teleporting all over the place. More annoying than anything.

- The visuals during the combat are just a fucking eyesore. You have these time abilites and everytime you use them it spams all sorts of tidal wave multicolored shit all over your screen, that ontop of constantly spamming V for 'Vision' button to highlight all the objects in the enviorment...it just becomes a cluttered mess of multicolored shit and half the time you can barely tell what the fuck is going on. It is not visually appealing to me.

- The controls are clunky and suck and can be super frustrating. Your character feels like hes walking around with bricks tied to his legs, constantly you will run into walls accidentally or try to jump somewhere and just smack into it instead.. it feels like shit to control.
Also you have like a dozen 'time abilites' but they are randomly mapped to all sorts of buttons, and it doesn't even say what buttons they are on screen, so most of the game I still didn't know how to fucking activate most of them, and they aren't fun to use anyway. The best one is the 'sprint' ability (lol) which just temporarily freezes your enemies/time. and the other one is 'dodge' ability which basically does the same thing but you zoom around the screen, which also controls like shit and you will constantly accidentally slam into a wall when you're desperately trying to not die, thus resulting in you dying.


That is pretty much all of the combat scenarios. It is also very easy and I never really died ever, except for:


the other 10% of gameplay:

- Wandering around the enviorment, looking around for prompts to 'rewind time' or do some platforming, or the worst of all certain scenarios where there are enviormental hazards and you have to fumble around with the controls to 'pause' them to progress past them, but it controls like shit and these are the only real times ive ever died.

-Walking around listening to dialogue, following NPCs, opening doors, looking for switches.


And that's about all Quantum Break has to offer. None of it is truly bad, but It did kind of feel like a slog to get through. Everytime I thought about playing this game, I realized an average session would look like me sitting there for 40 minutes before I even saw any gameplay or did any combat or anything of substance. Every session you boot up the game and usually sit there watching cutscenes or watching a TV show or something. It takes forever for anything to actually happen. The game is pretty boring. The combat isn't awful, but it isn't good either.

The best thing about the game is how polished it is as a Tripple A experience, it feels very hollywood and the graphics are pretty impressive except when the screen isn't being colored in visual spam.
Oh, and the entire game was super easy but the last boss was suddenly a massive frustrating pain in the ass and took me like 10 attempts so fuck that shit.

5/10

In theory this game has everything the player could want - an interesting concept, some choices that changes the story (at least a little), was made by an esteemed company, but unfortunately it disappointed me. It is rather boring and short (if you don't count movie cutscenes).

What's wrong with Quantum break? I would start with the story - although the idea of time travel is hardly original, I think the way it was presented is rather good, because it doesn't has many inconsistencies and sticks to the fact that the past can't be changed. Unfortunately main protagonist is rather uninteresting and the same can be told about every person he meets (main antagonist is really cliche modern Denethor), they have almost no depth and I didn't feel emotional connection to any of them.

Gameplay is pretty standard for a TPP game, although developers tried to make interesting by giving hero some special powers, but I don't think it really worked. Fighting in this game isn't a torture, but it also doesn't bring player much joy, it's ok, that's all.

The worst aspect of "Quantum Break" are the movie cutscenes. Yeah in theory this is a nice idea - you learn more about the game world, about what's going on in other places, while you were busy elsewhere. The problem is - that you don't care about those people just like you don't care about main protagonist. But in latter case at least you are controlling him, the movie is just playing. To be honest I think that main function of this long cutscenes is to prolong the game, which is, without them, really short.

Graphics and sounds are ok. Voice actors generally did a good job, visuals sometimes could be a little more detailed, but they are, again, generally well-made, but optimization sucks. I have rather high-end PC (R 1700+GTX 1080) and game sometimes lag. It didn't happen often, but, still, it shouldn't happen at all. The game is also huge (if we are talking about disk space) and let's say that its quality doesn't justify its size.

Is there anything special about this game? Well there are two things that was done right and both are tied to the ending - lack of the real happy ending (because there couldn't be) and the thing which I already mentioned - notion that during time travel you can't change past. Period. It's nothing new, but almost all movies or games that are touching this subject are breaking this rule, Quantum Break doesn't do that and it's good. To sum it all -Quantum Break isn't a bad game. It's just extremely disappointing and unsatisfying.

Unimaginative, brainlessly bland gameplay and egregious technical issues wrapped in boring B-movie Sci-fi drama.

2.0 stars / Poor

Its like 6 hours of movie and forced walking segments for 2 hours of actual gameplay. Which is a shame because the gameplay is some suberb tps that should have been more developed with more weapons and enemies. The story and show itself feel like a b movie at times, and while i do applaud their effort at marrying the two mediums together, it still doesnt quite work. Mainly because the overal plot isnt all that well written or compelling. Its a very solid game but its a step down from Alan Wake and the first two Max Payne games.