Quantum Break Review - An Ambitious But Ultimately Exhausting Experience

Speaking of visual flourishes, we get onto stylistic choices and tone, and again there's a lot that's really going to divide people. Quantum Break really wants you to take its setup of breakthrough science fiction seriously, but it also wants to be a pulpy, fairly carefree action flick with one-liners and accepted use of the aforementioned "We've got no !*$% TIME!" lines. Such ideologies don't mesh well - just ask Batman V Superman and the "Is she with you?" scene.

This leads to a handful of outright weird dialogue, tone and plot hole problems such as each act ending with a smash-cut to a random licensed song. Nothing says "Take this plot revelation seriously" like a cut to black and then back up to Royal Blood thundering away. Again, Alan Wake had this, but as that game framed your own "What the f**k!?" plot reactions as that of Wake himself, the music complimented the assault on your senses, but here it just feels jarringly out of place given the otherwise serious tone.

However, most of the negative stuff stems from the time-travelling aspect being needlessly hard to follow for the majority. See, Joyce is narrating his past exploits from the present day. He's discussing the events of each scenario and the 'struggle to repair time' in retrospect, meaning you're forever balancing the notion of limitless, incident-repairing time travel with an endpoint you're going to reach no matter what. It makes for strangely forced story beats, as both Joyce and the person he's talking to incessantly need to remind you that your past actions have weight, saying things "went from bad to worse', or alluding to someone "not being who they say they were", all while not providing a solid foundation on who you are, or what's really going on.

Inception proved that a big budget production can mix entertainment with education, and despite Quantum Break's very name and the occasional scientific theorum getting dropped to remind you Remedy have looked all this up during development, we're given only the barest explanation for what's actually happening from beginning to end. Jack Joyce - despite being nothing of a scientist himself - never questions anything outside of a few 'Woah, cool, now I can do this? Neat!' lines, and even when other characters enquire as to his abilities, he shrugs it off as "Yeah, something happened, I don't know... DID I MENTION WE'VE GOT NO TIME?"

Remedy want you to just go with it, and you'll want to as well, but so much of the story's revelations hang on fully understanding exactly what's at stake, that ultimately it's exhausting trying to map everything out in your head, all the while more complications and possibilities present themselves. By stretching the events of the game over multiple time periods, having main characters appear in almost all of them and then referencing things that happened on an hour by hour basis within each, it ends up feeling needlessly convoluted, especially come the fifth act when you can see the full picture and realise there was a far easier way of teasing "What was really going on".

It's an experience that benefits from repeat viewings and playthroughs, to which you then have to ask yourself the question of if you're becoming accommodating of its flaws and learning to live with them, or if they were truly jarring for a reason. I'm going with the latter.

In the end, Quantum Break is one hell of an achievement by sheer definition of succeeding as something that has one foot in its base medium and the other in television. Its TV parts and world-building excel and are well put together on paper, but it's a shame you can't say the same about the storytelling and execution in the game itself.

From hilariously bad dialogue to a final boss that feels like you're battling visual effects overkill more than anything else, Quantum Break falls short of being that killer app the Xbox One so desperately, desperately needs.

Are you planning on picking up Quantum Break? Let us know in the comments what you've thought of the pre-release hype, and what your favourite Remedy game is!