9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "This is what you need to know." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Time broke, a growing fracture leading to 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the end of time." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "And of course, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 time travels." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Jack!" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Going too fast for you?" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Quantum Break is the latest third-person 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 shooter from Remedy, the same studio that 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that brought us Max Payne way back in 2001, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and boy, does that lineage show. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Like that game, this one revolves around a 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 flashy gimmick that serves to differentiate 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 its gameplay a bit from that of other, more 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 straightforward third-person shooters. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And like Max Payne, as well as Remedy’s 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 2010 game Alan Wake, it stars a dude 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 who cannot stop narrating his story for us. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Sadly, Quantum Break’s story is just a mess. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because of reasons, time is fractured, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 stuttering with increasing frequency and 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 possibly approaching a point at which 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it just breaks down completely. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Different men have different ideas 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 about how to deal with this problem, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they fight with each other while 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 uttering standard lines of dialogue like 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 “It doesn’t have to end like this.” 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are very few clear rules established 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in Quantum Break about how time works. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It just behaves in whatever way it needs 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to behave to throw the characters into 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 another complication or to give the 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 main character new powers. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Things just happen because they’re 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 convenient for the story, so there’s 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 nothing clearly at stake. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You might argue that the quality of 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the story in a game like this isn’t all 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that important, but the thing is that 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Quantum Break really wants you to 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 care about its story. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You see, Quantum Break is one part game, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 one part live action TV show, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and a good chunk of your time is spent 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 watching the four live-action episodes 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that play out over the course of the game. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they’re just such generically bad TV, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 filled with cliché dialogue and cookie 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 cutter characters, right down to the comic 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 relief tech geek hacker type that seems 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to be a necessity these days in every 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 mediocre crime drama. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are a few fine actors here, including 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Lance Reddick, who proves he can bring 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 gravitas to even the goofiest material. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But the most that decent acting can do 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 here is serve as a smokescreen to distract 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 us from just how bad the story actually is. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Quantum Break is, at its core, a tale of 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 three men. You play as Jack Joyce, a man 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 who comes away from a time travel mishap 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 with the ability to manipulate time in specific ways. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It’s sort of like last year’s adventure game 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Life Is Strange, only instead of using its 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 concept to explore relationships and 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 serious, real-life issues like bullying and 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 suicide, Quantum Break just uses it as a 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 source for spectacle. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Jack’s brother Will is an eccentric genius, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the villain, Paul Serene, is a powerful 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 CEO of a massive corporation named Monarch. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Both Will and Paul’s characters are just 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 recycled archetypes without any new flavoring. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Quantum Break doesn’t even try to break from traditional male-dominated convention here. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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! 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Burke unleashes manly screams while strangling someone to death in a hospital as a bunch of people just stand around and watch! 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Burke has a pregnant wife who he would do anything—ANYTHING—to protect. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Games and other mainstream media often reinforce the false notion of women as fragile 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and men as protectors whose role and responsibility requires them to do anything to either protect or avenge their families 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 —Max Payne was definitely in this mold, too— 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but Burke is a particularly bland and formulaic take on this character type, and that’s really saying something. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In Quantum Break, men are the prime actors and doers. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The only female character who gets any real development is Beth Wilder, who helps Jack for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 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.