Quantum Break

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