Today we review a video game: Quantum Break. Made by popular Game Developer Remedy and the first of its kind to feature a video game, live action TV show hybrid. Originally an Xbox One exclusive which from a business perspective made no sense. Why you would spend millions of dollars making a product and then deliberately limit the audience size always sounded counterproductive so I never got around to review it. Yet now that Microsoft has also learned that limiting your audience is not a good business strategy it’s also coming out for the PC so I will give it the review it deserves.
For a video game I’ll look at the characters, then the gameplay and since this is a unique case we look at the story as well.
Characters
Due to the branching story line I’ll stick to the main two characters.
Jack Joyce
Jack Joyce is the main character in this Remedy game who lives till the end and since Remedy has a bad habit of spoiling the story by having the protagonist narrate the whole game while speaking past tense I spoil that with no guilt.
He helps a friend out with an experiment and as a result gains time based super powers and gets caught up with an evil corporation that wants to either kill or capture him for some reason before the world comes to an end.
As a character he’s somewhat bland yet the cool time powers help make up for that fact at least it did for me.
Paul Serene
The main villain of the show uhh game, sorry its confusing at times with these genres colliding. He starts out as a friend that Jack is helping with a big science experiment involving time and it all goes horribly wrong. He comes back 17 years older and now in charge of the big corporation that now wants Jack dead or captured and has time based abilities of his own. At times you’ll be able to play as him and make decisions about where to take the story and the consequences of each decision will be shown to help you decide.
As a character he’s a lot easier to understand than Jack. His motivation is wanting to save the world from the doom of his experiment. Despite the heavy handed way he tries to go about it he is more of an antihero than a straight up villain. This makes him a lot easier to like and at times even I found myself rooting for him over Jack as he made a lot more logical sense. And the best kind of villain is the one that makes sense when he speaks Andrew Ryan of Bioshock proved that.
Gameplay
The game play is essentially Infamous done with far better graphics, third person shooter with super powers. Time powers in this case, a shield that stops bullets, the power to run really fast for a while and a power that stop enemies so you can unload bullets into them. Really if you’ve played Infamous or Singularity before this game nothing will be new to you but it does look nice and the powers aren’t all that hard to learn to use in difficult situations so the game play is a pass.
Story
The story to this game is essentially time experiment goes horribly wrong and now there’s a time hole opening up that’s threatening to end time as we know it freezing everything forever. Our two characters Jack Joyce and Paul Serene attempt to solve this problem in different ways that lead to them conflicting with each other.
What makes the story unique is there’s live action TV sequences that play once you’ve made a decision that causes the story to branch out. Mainly it’s about employees at Paul Serene’s company feeling conflicted about the things they’re doing and what the experiments are truly about. And during those sequences they do things that impact the game and allow you to understand the overall story better. It’s made even better by the fact that the games 3d models are made based off of the actual TV actors.
The story ends with a big sequel hook to the end of it yet I’ll leave that to you once you’ve actually played it.
Conclusion
This game was fun to play for me and interesting to see where the story would go when a different decision is made. Not too much of a replay value since you can download all the episodes though which is a bit of a letdown.
All in all it was a good game, not incredible but truly great and showing that Triple A games are showing new ideas and that’s always good for the consumer. For that I give it a 7.75 out of 10.
