Quantum Break Review - An Ambitious But Ultimately Exhausting Experience

Sadly, whilst the team continue to manufacture gunfights that will genuinely command your jaw hit the floor in adoration, they're more preoccupied with fleshing out the motivations of everyone around you who isn't the main character. You'll spend more time reading emails between various figures that only show up in the TV show than you will firing bullets, and although in typical action movie fashion, the final act houses a fantastic Matrix/Max Payne-style 'lobby scene', the work put into realising these sequences feels like a missed opportunity, as there simply aren't enough excuses to get your gun off.

Outside the story-based stuff, the time powers you have on offer here are fantastic. You can trap guys in 'time bubbles', instantly 'time-dodge' in any direction, sprint as fast as time itself and then warp back into reality to deliver a haymaker that would make Conor McGregor wince. Once you get a feel for how fast you can pull these abilities off - and they're given to you in quick succession very early on - fight sequences are pyrotechnic extravaganzas of visual effects.

Bodies hang in suspended animation before resuming their trajectory and slamming to the ground, your 'time shield' will allow you to catch your breath and heal, watching in awe as hundreds of bullets ping-pong off around the room. You'll freeze enemies and unload a clip into their face, the bullets gathering right in one place before the world kicks back in they all impact at once. Every final kill in a given section has a slick camera-spin that hangs for just long enough so you can wince pleasurably, the entire exchange ending with a visual victory punch that hits home every time.

I make a big deal of this, because you'll miss it when you're forced to do such arbitrary and thoroughly last-gen things such as finding a switch for a gate that's out of power, or partaking in awkward platforming sections where instant death is an invisible wall-break away. Also, for the love of all that is holy, can we stop with the 'now your character must turn sideways to get through this narrow gap' animations? When you have a story predicated on narrative propulsion and someone discovering they can bend the laws of time and space, that discovery and excitability is hampered by actions that feel decidedly 'video gamey', and not in a good way.

Lastly, Remedy have included an upgrade tree for your powers, but it's severely under-utilised to the degree of being pointless. A specific collectible can be built up and spent on expanding damage or how long a power will stay active, but as each refreshes fast and fights are over relatively fast, I forgot it was even in there after a few hours - especially seeing as its buried in a menu next to optional diary entries. Remember how arbitrary Bioshock Infinite's weapon upgrades were overall? It's that.

Thankfully, as a technical showcase, performance across the board is incredibly solid. Even when you're deploying powers in unison and the game has to handle physics models for various bodies, projectiles and pieces of scenery, it never asks to stop and catch up. Quantum Break is right up there with Halo 5 as a powerhouse for what the Xbox One can do when it's firing on all cylinders, but there are a couple of things that must be addressed.

Firstly, the facial animation. On the one hand, it's the finest motion-capture work we've seen since L.A. Noire or Halo's 4 and 5, but on the other, in-game transitions for faces are non-existent. Characters can go from full smiles or all sorts of expressional emotions, straight back to 'standard looking forward face' in an instant, almost like at the end of any dialogue exchange, their face 'resets' for the next one. It's not game-breaking by any means, but you'll notice it, and you really shouldn't considering the calibre of the tech otherwise on display.

Second is a strange, dreamlike blur filter that's applied to everything, an inclusion I assumed was hinting at some kind of "It was all a dream!" ending reveal, but is instead just distracting, especially in lowly lit areas, as characters appear to 'drift' around. The same thing was in Alan Wake to a lesser degree, and is perhaps a Remedy trademark, but for that game's "Who are you, really?" setup, it worked a treat. Here it's a super minor thing, as overall Quantum Break is a joy to see in motion, but worth pointing out all the same.

Lastly, the deciding factor. Do you like carefree action, cheesy dialogue and over-the-top plots, or will they turn you off? Remedy try and please both sides, and ultimately it just doesn't work...