Quantum Break Review

Nothing about Quantum Break is supposed to work. Microsoft and Remedy’s newest flagship exclusive for the Xbox One is a rare thing indeed. You take a solid — not great, just solid — third person shooter, you marry it to a decent enough sci-fi plot, you throw in some actors from The Wire, and you — and this is, of course, the weird part — insert a bunch of 21 minute long live action cutscene/TV episodes that respond to choices you make in the game. Throw in some screen-bending visual effects, a plot that manages to both be pretty straightforward and complete, constant nonsense, and you’ve got a bizarre setup that raises more than a few eyebrows. It’s not supposed to work.

And yet, somehow, it does. Quantum Break is, for some reason, great.

The game starts off on a bad foot: you’re thrown into the middle of a plot with what appear to be some fairly forgettable characters and a relatively unremarkable time machine business. Your character becomes a superhero almost instantly, and the game throws more mechanics at you than you can shake stick at. The whole time travel thing makes no sense, really, and all of your powers just feel like normal things that Remedy put “time” in front of, e.g. “time dodge.” Right, Remedy. Time dodge. Awesome.

It continues on like this through the entire first gameplay section: unremarkable and hard to follow. But you start to notice something about the time powers — they feel great. Nothing is all that hard, but dodging up to a guard, knocking him back and then unloading lends a certain cinematic flair that touches off the excellent visual presentation with grace. Things are utterly ridiculous, sure, but they’re falling into place in a way that’s hard to figure out.




source: Forbes