Quantum Broken ?
Quantum Break
Playtime - 8hs 48 mins
Completion - 97%
Is it a game or is it a TV show?
As it happens it is a bit of both.
The lastest game from Remedy is a paradox in more ways than one. It is a third-person cover shooter Where you play as Jack Joyce (Shawn Ashmore - Xmen) who gets caught up in a time travel adventure where you are trying to stop the “END OF ALL TIME”.
While visiting your brothers old friend you decide to help him out with a science experiment. Of course it goes wrong and *Kablooey* time is fractured and you seem to have developed some new time powers.
The game part is pretty standard cover shooter mechanic, but the time powers allow you to do a lot of cool things with the word time slapped on the front of it. Things like Time dodge (short sprint to avoid bullets), Time Stop (freeze an enemy in a time bubble and shoot it a lot so they get hit with them all at once when it unfreezes), Time Blast (basically an explosion of time ???), Time shield (blocks bullets), Time Vision (basically Detective Vision from Batman)....oh you get the idea.
So combining these powers with the range of weapons you get can make for some fun combat, if a tad easy. On normal level this game is a cake walk.
The TV part.. well at the end of each act there is a short interlude where you play as the bad guy. This ends in a binary choice of how he is gong to respond to what you have been doing in the main game parts. It then is followed by 20-25 mins of a TV show which you just sit and watch. It is an interesting idea, but it breaks up the game play more than a Kojima game. It does flesh out a couple of throwaway side characters as the main actors barely appear in it, but in the end it has no bearing on the storyline. There are some minor things you do in the game that lead to slight changes in the show, but blink and you will miss the mention of that item you interacted with being talked about.
Pros
* I give them credit for trying something new with the TV show aspect.
* The combat and powers can be fun to use, but I wish they could be combined more.
* The graphics are great.
* I do enjoy a good time story and this one was ok. Gets a bit timmey whimmey head hurts occassionally.
* Acting is generally decent with a number of the actors being faces I had seen before.
* Puzzles were ok but could have done with some more.
Cons
* Movement is a bit swimmey. There is a slowness and awkwardness to the character movement that can be frustrating.
* The cover mechanics and shooting are very hit and miss. There is no cover lock, it is automatic. Stand near cover and he auto moves ito position. Then stands up like an idiot to shoot. No blind fire at all…weird. Guns also lock onto target, but frequently taget the wrong thing or just plain miss.
* The platform sequences are hideous.
* Combat is waaay too easy on normal level.
* TV show is streamed so make sure your connection is fast enough otherwise you will have to download about 75 GB of video. (mine was ok for the most part)
Overall it’s not a complete disaster, but neither does it completely work. Neither the game nor the TV show stands out for me and it ends up all being a bit middle of the road.
3/5
