"This is what you need to know."
"Time broke, a growing fracture leading to
the end of time."
"And of course,
time travels."
"Jack!"
"Going too fast for you?"
Quantum Break is the latest third-person
shooter from Remedy, the same studio that
that brought us Max Payne way back in 2001,
and boy, does that lineage show.
Like that game, this one revolves around a
flashy gimmick that serves to differentiate
its gameplay a bit from that of other, more
straightforward third-person shooters.
And like Max Payne, as well as Remedy’s
2010 game Alan Wake, it stars a dude
who cannot stop narrating his story for us.
Sadly, Quantum Break’s story is just a mess.
Because of reasons, time is fractured,
stuttering with increasing frequency and
possibly approaching a point at which
it just breaks down completely.
Different men have different ideas
about how to deal with this problem,
and they fight with each other while
uttering standard lines of dialogue like
“It doesn’t have to end like this.”
There are very few clear rules established
in Quantum Break about how time works.
It just behaves in whatever way it needs
to behave to throw the characters into
another complication or to give the
main character new powers.
Things just happen because they’re
convenient for the story, so there’s
nothing clearly at stake.
You might argue that the quality of
the story in a game like this isn’t all
that important, but the thing is that
Quantum Break really wants you to
care about its story.
You see, Quantum Break is one part game,
one part live action TV show,
and a good chunk of your time is spent
watching the four live-action episodes
that play out over the course of the game.
And they’re just such generically bad TV,
filled with cliché dialogue and cookie
cutter characters, right down to the comic
relief tech geek hacker type that seems
to be a necessity these days in every
mediocre crime drama.
There are a few fine actors here, including
Lance Reddick, who proves he can bring
gravitas to even the goofiest material.
But the most that decent acting can do
here is serve as a smokescreen to distract
us from just how bad the story actually is.
Quantum Break is, at its core, a tale of
three men. You play as Jack Joyce, a man
who comes away from a time travel mishap
with the ability to manipulate time in specific ways.
It’s sort of like last year’s adventure game
Life Is Strange, only instead of using its
concept to explore relationships and
serious, real-life issues like bullying and
suicide, Quantum Break just uses it as a
source for spectacle.
Jack’s brother Will is an eccentric genius,
and the villain, Paul Serene, is a powerful
CEO of a massive corporation named Monarch.
Both Will and Paul’s characters are just
recycled archetypes without any new flavoring.
Quantum Break doesn’t even try to break
from traditional male-dominated convention here.
The TV show portion of this game also
spends a lot of time on a supporting character
named Liam Burke. Burke gets into weird
escalator kick fights!
Burke unleashes manly screams while
strangling someone to death in a hospital
as a bunch of people just stand around and watch!
Burke has a pregnant wife who he would
do anything—ANYTHING—to protect.
Games and other mainstream media often
reinforce the false notion of women as fragile
and men as protectors whose role and
responsibility requires them to do anything
to either protect or avenge their families
—Max Payne was definitely in this mold, too—
but Burke is a particularly bland and
formulaic take on this character type,
and that’s really saying something.
In Quantum Break, men are the prime actors
and doers. Men are the ones with vision and
ambition, who set things in motion and who
then do whatever they can to make things
go their way. The only female character
who gets any real development is Beth Wilder,
who helps Jack for reasons that aren’t
immediately clear. In one of the game’s
only moments that even come close to generating
actual interest in its characters, we do
eventually get to know Beth’s history and
her motivations. Her main purpose here,
though, is to serve as a love interest for
Jack, and she’s ultimately more important
for the emotional impact she has on him
than she is as an individual in her own right.
It’s also worth noting that like most of
the enemies, Beth works security for the
Monarch corporation. She must be the only
woman on a team otherwise made up of
hundreds of men, because there are no
female combatants in the game.
As for the combat, there’s a certain novelty
for a little while to the spectacle of
Quantum Break’s action.
Seeing environments shatter in slow motion
and seeing people get stuck in time looks pretty cool.
But that’s all it does. Quantum Break’s
structure feels overly familiar and predictable,
from the heavy enemies it introduces with
the weak points on their backs to the
checkpoints near the end in which it throws
so many enemies at you that you just
want it all to be over.
It’s unfortunate that Quantum Break’s
ambition to tell video game stories in a
new way is wasted on a story that doesn’t
do anything new.
The game doesn’t seem to care if it makes
any sense or if its story actually tries to say anything.
All it cares about is being “awesome” in
the most insubstantial way possible,
in the sense that it’s “awesome” to watch
a locomotive crash again and again and again.
There’s nothing underneath. Maybe, maybe
in 2001 when Max Payne came out, a flashy
gimmick was enough to make the mere act
of filling hundreds of dudes with bullets
more than a hollow exercise. But not now.
We’re not actually stuck in time. But playing
Quantum Break, it sure feels like we are.