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.