Quantum Break is a third person shooter action-adventure game. It follows Jack, who arrives at a university to meet his old friend, Paul Serene. Paul had successfully researched time travel and he tells Jack that he has witnessed the end of time. Paul sees himself as having to stop this catastrophe from happening, however the actions that he takes are questionable. So now Jack must find a way to find out Paul’s secrets and stop him. The game is story heavy with gameplay taking a back seat. Most of the game has you walking around from one place to the next, watching story cutscenes. You can interact with certain objects with a lot of the optional collectibles being worldbuilding text and dialogue.
The other bulk of the gameplay is the shooting. This is a third person shooter, and it has decent shooting mechanics. Jack picks up weapons from other enemies and automatically ducks behind cover when he gets near them. After the time travel accident, Jack has a few powers based on time, although some of them function more as conventional abilities. He can cast a time bomb to blast away enemies. He can erect a time shield, protecting himself from bullets. There’s the time dodge, which feels like teleporting, and he also can slow down time for his enemies. Finally, there’s time vision, which basically highlights enemies and objects of interest in the environment.
There are varying enemy types, although ultimately, there aren’t too many unique ones so it can feel boring and repetitive by the end of the game. Some of the enemy types are more annoying than others, especially the heavily armored or the heavily armed ones. The enemies like to flank you. This is deliberate as the AI is designed to force the player to keep moving and not just to camp behind cover picking off the enemies one by one. This aspect forces you to use your powers to stay alive. While the gameplay is competent, it can also feel generic.
The time abilities that Jack has feature somewhat in the exploration with light puzzle elements. Jack can climb and jump as you’d expect, but just like his running speed, it is slow and painful. He lacks the finesse and parkouring abilities of other protagonists, so platforming isn’t that fun. The puzzles are basic and are little more than just heading to the object of interest to “rewind” time. Usually this allows Jack to get on a platform to reach a higher area. These platforming segments are uninspired. To be honest, as the focus is so much on the story, there aren’t enough opportunities to utilize your time abilities, so you aren’t familiar enough with the controls to intuitively know which abilities you need for that specific moment. You just know you need to use an ability to progress but then spend a few seconds figuring out which button to press.
The most unique aspect of the game is how it tells its story through both the game’s cutscenes, and a live action TV show. They’re integrated together such that after each act, you are supposed to make a choice. The two choices supposedly change the direction of the game’s story while also affecting which TV episode you will be watching next. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work properly in the PC version as there are perpetual errors with trying to stream the episode from the services. Thus, you’ll have to watch the episode on YouTube instead. These live action segments focus mostly on side characters so it can feel tangent to the main story. It is still cool to see the real actors, as you’ll compare them to their character models in the game.
The beginning of the game where it leads up to the time travel aspect was excellent… and then the story goes downhill from there. There was a lot of potential but instead of using the time travel elements in clever and unexpected ways, it ends up treading down a well-worn path instead. The middle parts were not great as the plot developments felt like big letdowns. There is a slight pick up towards the end where it touches upon the time travel elements again, but the bulk of the story is about the politics and relationships between the characters.
The game feels short with the story zipping past but lacking substance and meaning in its developments. Despite how brief the game is, taking only ten hours or so to finish, the final sections can feel like it is unnecessarily being padded out. It’s filled with gunfights that pad out the levels and can be annoying especially when the game wasn’t too heavy on combat in the first place. The final boss was okay, and the story ultimately ended up being average. It’s not a great ending either as it tries to be clever in incorporating the time travel elements, but it lost its thunder as it is something we have seen a few times before already.
The PC version, specifically the Game Pass version, is broken. There are massive graphical glitches, the worst of which are the light flares. Green and purple light stemming from reflections or light sources in the game will obscure most of the screen and render the game basically unplayable. It’s disappointing that such a broken state of a game was never patched. The Steam version got patched but not the Game Pass / Microsoft Store version, which is just ridiculous at this point.
Overall, Quantum Break is an average game. It has passable shooting mechanics, an average story, and subpar platforming. All this combines into something that you can see had a lot of potential and it did start out with plenty of promise, but ultimately quickly loses its shine. The characters fall flat, the integration of the game and live TV show episodes is a unique idea but that doesn’t work as well either since it focused mostly on offscreen characters, so it was hard to keep the player invested.