Quantum Break review

Game Info
Platform Xbox One
Publisher Microsoft Studios
Developer Remedy Entertainment
Release Date Q2 2015

If nothing else, Quantum Break demonstrates that Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment's priorities remain constant.

Remedy has always displayed a flair for putting its own distinct, and often bizarre, spin on genres —€” from the hard-boiled detective dreamscapes of Max Payne to the Dark Half-era Stephen King overtones of a terrifying Pacific Northwest in Alan Wake. Neither game was perfect, each with its own idiosyncracies, but they were driven by a clear vision. Now, six years after Alan Wake and with even more pressure behind the studio for a flagship first-party game for Microsoft's Xbox One, Remedy has managed something surprising: to stay a little weird.

Weird, in this case, doesn't get in the way of good —€” or even great. Despite a development period that saw Quantum Break seemingly pulled toward two very different storytelling mediums, Remedy has found a remarkably successful marriage of on-demand television and narrative-driven action game — albeit one with some confusing quirks.

I'm surprised to say that Quantum Break's TV show element actually works

Quantum Break tells the story of Jack Joyce, the wayward brother of a physics genius who has discovered the workings of quantum theory and, in the process, threatened the fabric of time itself. There's a greater conspiracy afoot involving family friend Paul Serene and the mysterious — of course — Monarch Corporation, and Jack is thrust into the middle of it all as he tries to pick up the pieces and save existence.

Time travel stories are a tricky thing, and most collapse under the simplest scrutiny. Remedy's narrative operates from a simple, stabilizing premise: The past cannot be changed, but the future isn't set. By sticking to this concept, and mercilessly driving it home, Remedy pulls off the Looney Tunes rule pretty well —€” if you just keep running and don't look down, everything will be fine.

The way Quantum Break handles story is, easily, the most interesting, successful thing about it. It's not that combat is bad —€” though its success is a little more uneven —€” but Remedy accomplishes something no one has really tried, much less successfully executed on: The studio has integrated the game of Quantum Break with a fully live-action episodic component.

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This is no half-measure: Four out of five of Quantum Break's in-game acts are followed by half-hour live-action episodes using the same actors cast within the game proper. Other narrative-heavy games that take the reins from the player for minutes or even hours at a time have often jokingly been criticized with the suggestion that their creators should "go make a movie" —€” I'm looking at you, Mr. Kojima —€” but Remedy has actually done it.

Even more surprisingly ... it's pretty good?

There's a question mark there because I'm still surprised to be saying it.

Remedy demonstrated with Alan Wake that it was capable of telling a good, offbeat story, but Quantum Break is a more focused, successful effort in every way (and one full of Alan Wake Easter eggs, to boot). The acting ranges from competent to good, with Lance Reddick (of Fringe and The Wire) and Aidan Gillen (also of The Wire, and Game of Thrones) pulling more than their antagonistic weight. Even the production values are largely fine; only once or twice did I wince at some effects shots that would feel at home on the Syfy network.

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But more impressive than the basic TV production competence on display is the way that the game element of Quantum Break —€” and its inherent narrative divergence based on the decisions you make —€” so smoothly works in tandem with the live-action component. This presents itself in two main ways, one small and one large. Time ripple points can be found in each act that allow Jack to slightly alter the future. You'll know these moments by a symbol that displays on the screen when you activate them. That symbol also appears in each episode of the show, over a new scene that's added when you find a ripple point.

The bigger changes arise from shorter playable sequences that bookend Jack's gameplay and episodes of the show. These junction points turn the tables, placing you instead in the shoes of villain Paul Serene and giving you a choice of action that can cause major differences in the state of the world for Jack, and in turn create major narrative shifts in each episode of the show.

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These present an interesting conceit that I've never seen in any choice-driven game. You're making decisions as a villain, and are given the option to see the direct consequences of your actions —€” but the events that unfold after that are impossible to know. Some characters may vanish from the story entirely, or take on new roles or sides depending on these choices. They also managed to humanize Paul in a way that the game otherwise doesn't accomplish, adding a tragic spin to the story.

Of course, you also play Quantum Break. And in that regard, it's successful, but not without some more confusing moments than even a time travel story would suggest.

At first glance, Quantum Break is a third-person shooter, and, honestly, not an impressive one. It ignores the standard cover mechanics of similar-looking games, opting instead for a sort of "automagic" implementation. When Jack gets near a cover object, he'll, well, take cover, without any additional input from you, and you can fire blindly around or over it, or pop out to aim with the left trigger.

On paper this all sounds fine, but in practice I found the whole arrangement a little squirrely. Jack doesn't stick to things the way it feels like he should, and it took a fair bit of adjustment before I had the hang of it. This isn't helped by weapons that just aren't very satisfying to fire. In the normal, time-functional world, guns lack weight and punch, and the first time I got in a firefight in Quantum Break, I was worried about the game.

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This worry thinned and eventually receded as Quantum Break handed out its various time-centric abilities, superpowers Jack gains as a byproduct of the time accident that sets the entire game in motion. Jack can throw a wave of time that freezes enemies caught in it; do a dash that will, in turn, slow time when you aim your weapon during the move; create a shield of frozen time to catch bullets; and more. When I stopped treating Remedy's levels like tactical, plodding cover-based engagements and approached them as active, arcade-style fights, I started having a lot more fun. Abilities are made to be combined —€” a quick dash followed by a time field that knocks enemies back is one particularly nice example —€” and these moments compensate for otherwise weak shooting.

This also introduces a sense of reward to the more involved encounters, especially later on, when soldiers immune to Jack's abilities start appearing. I felt the need to be creative to push forward, but progress isn't the only spoil of victory in Quantum Break —€” the world going chronologically upside down is also a byproduct.

During gunfights, your time powers are flashy and impressive, but it's during more pronounced "stutters" — ripples in time and space that freeze and even rewind or speed up events —€” that things really ramp up. I don't want to spoil these moments any more than Quantum Break's trailers already have, but navigating Jack through a collapsing, exploding dockyard crane and pier is one of the coolest moments I've had in a game this console generation, and things really just escalate from there.

It's not all loud explosions and crumbling buildings. Some platforming puzzles require Jack to reverse time and act on the world in a precise way to move forward, and though these sequences are never difficult, they always look cool. And this sort of feels like Quantum Break's motto. Aside from a couple of more-obnoxious-than-hard fights, including a bad, poorly checkpointed end battle, Quantum Break seems happy to let you move through its world and see what there is to see, to feel like a time god without forgetting that you can't actually fix everything.

Ironically, a Remedy staple simultaneously sabotages that feeling and doubles down on it. Quantum Break has one of the most love-it-and-hate-it implementations of collectibles I've ever experienced.

There are dozens of bits of intel, emails, books and other detritus scattered around the world, and the in-game HUD tells you exactly how many you've found whenever you pick one up. This drove me into a rage immediately —€” the first part of the first act had 18 collectibles alone, and I felt a huge amount of pressure, whether via my own neuroses or diabolical game-design signposting, to find as many as I could. I resented the hell out of this ... until I didn't.

I'm not sure what changed, honestly, but at a point somewhere in Act Two, I looked forward to finding more and more of the collectibles, and felt like I was getting to know and explore the world of Quantum Break more because of it. Quantum Break is full of little details that often hint at events and history that the game never explicitly details, and that sense that there was much more going on than Jack understood was motivating. I managed to find 97 percent of them on my first playthrough, and now I'm thinking of going back to get the rest.

Wrap Up:

Quantum Break is a surprising success

Remedy's touch and style is all over Quantum Break, which is a strength and, at a few points, a weakness as well. But it's more than that, a real transmedia experiment — I know how it sounds — that succeeds in ways that other games don't even try. There's some wonky shooting and a few cringe-worthy story cliches present. But ineffective cover systems and narrative fridges notwithstanding, Quantum Break feels like the first action game taking real lessons from the Netflix binge-watch era, and in that respect, it's a surprising success.

Quantum Break was reviewed on Xbox One using a pre-release "retail" downloadable copy provided by Microsoft. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here

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