Evolving its signature style of cinematic shoot-‘em-ups, the team at Remedy Entertainment have melded their strengths of gameplay and storytelling into a true story driven experience. Your decisions effects the outcome of not only the game, but also the live-action TV-style show accompanying it. Quantum Break consist of five episodes interspersed with four episodes of a live-action TV-style show.
Opening like many great sci-fi stories do, Quantum Break opens with a catastrophic accident in a research lab, one that creates a potentially world-ending fracture in time. Your hero is exposed to mass chrono particles, infecting them with the power to bend time at will.
In the hands of the games protagonist Jack Joyce, your satisfying suite of superpowers work in tandem with more traditional cover-based shooter mechanics taking the bullet time of Remedy’s original Max Payne games to a whole new level. Joyce can blink-teleport from one side of the room to the other, slowing down time long enough to blindside an enemy with a shotgun blast. You can momentarily suspend an enemy in a time bubble to unload a full submachine fun clip into them, and allow the bubble to burst so that two dozen headshots all happen at once.
Frequent stutters in time create eye-popping dioramas out of the destruction around you as time begins to collapse in on its self. Enemies cartwheel back from bullet impacts, freeze in mid-air and blood sprays from their exit wounds, crystalizing in the air like icicles of claret. Out-of-control time stutters cause parts of the environment to enter into an infinite replay of chaos, as they crash, rewind and crash again. This unique and wonderfully eerie environment is like wandering around inside a 3D screenshot of stylish carnage.
As you progress through chaotic time stutters, things start to spice up with the introduction of enemies that can now teleport like Joyce. Of course, no game is complete without the obligatory tank-like troops who turn up to soak up an obnoxious amount of bullets. For the most part, your tactics remain the same right up to and including the final confrontation. While there is a superficial upgrade system that incrementally improves Joyce’s existing powers, the introduction of the powers themselves could have been spread out over Quantum Break’s duration to offer a gradual sense of character progress, as later levels become somewhat repetitive.
Ultimately, Quantum Break’s story is what kept bringing me back. The tales of time travel and its unique spin on the idea serves up some meaty twists and turns without ever becoming too convoluted. Part of that is due to the way at the end of each gameplay act a “juncture” occurs, wherein you’re temporarily given control of the villain, Paul Serene. Serene has the ability to foresee the consequences of his actions, and thus you’re given a choice between two outcomes that will directly impact the subsequent episode of the live-action series and have later in-game ramifications. An example of this would be after the initial accident at the university you’re given the choice of creating a smear campaign to make Joyce look like a terrorist in the media or alternatively slaughtering the students protesting the closure of the campus library and making the public fear Serene’s Monarch Corporation.
While decisions in junctures only typically change a scene or two in the live-action episode that immediately follows, in the long run you get to directly influence the fate of a number of the supporting cast. To be clear, Quantum Break doesn’t remotely rival the sort of branching complexity of something like Until Dawn, and indeed no matter which combination of the choices you make along the way, you ultimately always arrive at the same conclusion. However, there is enough variation in dialogue, environmental detail and character involvement that embarking on a second playthrough and making different choices is well worth the effort.
So what of the four live-action segments themselves? Any fear is quickly quashed as Quantum Break features a level of production and performance that rivals the best original programming currently found on the big-name streaming services. Sitting and watching for 20-30 minutes at a time sounds like a long time to put your controller down, but it’s not nearly as disruptive as you may fear.
With the abundance of dramatic confrontations, high-speed car chases and shaky-cam scrapes, the hurried pacing of these segments kept me happily watching. Most importantly these segments successfully serve to humanise the villains. The only downside to Quantum Break’s live-action portion is the fact that the episodes are streamed online (Consoles owners can download it directly to their consoles but you’ll need an additional 75GB). This means you’re at the mercy of your home internet connection as far as the quality of the playback is concerned. Thankfully I didn’t experience any issues loading or run into any buffering of the content on a stable 30Mbps connection.