Quantum Break Review - The First 2 - Rerez

There are tons of video games out there that take hours and hours to complete. Sometimes these games will take weeks or months and guys I don't have that much time to play games. What I've been noticing lately is within the first two hours I can usually tell if the game is worth continuing. So that's the whole premise of this series. Welcome to the First 2.

Quantum Break, I have to say that I was pretty excited about this game when I heard that Remedy was going to be behind it. You know, the guys that made Max Payne. And I'm a huge fan of the Max Payne series. Okay not really the whole series mostly one and two because three is just a drunken episode in Brazil. I really like Remedy and the way that they make games. So it was without any hesitation that I knew I had to play this game. The game starts up with you playing as Jack Joyce a guy that's been called in by his friend Paul Serene to check out this crazy science experiment that he was doing and things kind of go haywire. One thing I want to mention right at the top is that Paul Serene and Jack Joyce and a bunch of other people in this game are played by real actors. They put a lot of effort into getting the model work just right so every actor you see in this game from Dominic Monaghan to Lance Reddick look exactly like they do in real life. Which is really important a little bit down the line but let's not get to that point. Let's just start off with the beginning of the game. See any good game that's dealing with the narrative has to get you really driven and invested in the characters, into what's going on, and this game does have a kind of slowish start. You're walking through this school and you're seeing all these papers, talking to people here and there maybe and you're kind of getting rolled into the universe and figuring out what's going on. I kind of like that though because it sets up this whole narrative and world building thing kind of right at the beginning. But as soon as you meet Paul Serene that's when the whole game kind of goes into this really cool way of getting all sci-fi and techy and it's really interesting.

Paul is eager to show you this really cool science experiment that he's got going on in the basement of this school building. As soon as you see what his big project is capable of it's pretty amazing. Now I don't want to spoil the plot of this game because I think that's kind of mean but just for people that don't know what they're getting into think Back to the Future plus Primer plus Max Payne. That's kind of what you've got going on here. There's a sense of loss, a sense of driven accomplishments, those things you want to do. The game feels and plays a lot like the Max Payne games. But I have to say it's not the same kind of gameplay. Where Max Payne used bullet time a heck of a lot this game used a couple of different time bending features like time bubbles, speed jump and a bunch of other things and they really work well. When you get to using them. Sometimes it feels a little bit too hectic. But within the first two hours you kind of get this experience for what this character is capable of and it's really fun to see exactly what more you can do. In fact I want to continue playing the game just to see exactly what this character is capable of in future events that happen in the game. Now those time travel abilities could just be considered gimmicks but at its core it's a very solid shooter which I think is very important. When I think Max Payne sure I think bullet time but the gun combat was really well done all the same. And this game has a couple of things to make the gun combat kind of work a little bit better. One thing I've kind of started to dislike about modern shooters is the whole cover mechanic. You know hide behind this brick wall so that you don't get shot and that kind of stuff. You always have to walk up to a wall, push a button and dip below it or whatever the heck and I just don't like that. The game does a couple of things to kind of alleviate the pressure of hiding behind walls by just automatically doing it for you. When you walk close to something your character just knows instinctively to duck down which I really appreciated. Now all the gun combat stuff I'm talking about happens within the first hour and 30 minutes or so but it's the last 30 minutes of my two hours of gameplay where I saw something pretty special.

Now I've played a whole bunch of games that have had cutscenes before but I have to say I think this game does cutscenes like no one else has ever attempted before and it's pretty phenomenal. The cutscenes in this game feel like a television show and I mean one to one like something you have seen on TV. There's stunts, really good visual effects, really good writing, some fantastic acting and everything about it felt really high quality. Which was shocking because I was expecting the cutscenes to kind of be a little bit lacking but they put tons and tons of effort into it. And they did certain things in the cutscenes that are not really normal things you would expect to see from games of this nature. See usually cutscenes in games kind of happen in a very fast-paced way to get you through events so that you can start playing the game again. But these cutscenes don't feel at all the same. They've got tons and tons of time put into them in fact I was kind of surprised by just the amount of detail that went into these things. There's this security officer character who has to deal with his wife at one point. The way he talks to his wife and interacts with her is something that you would see from a really well-written drama. It has these amazing details, things that you just don't normally see in a video game and it gives you this greater understanding for what these characters’ values are. And I think in modern video games we tend to exclude that and not really focus on it which is pretty surprising. These cutscenes are not in any way a waste of time they kind of add to the narrative and the structure of everything and really make you feel like you're involved in something a little bit more than a simple bang bang, shoot-'em-up game.

Now this is where my question lies to you as a gamer. Do you care more about a lot of really complex gameplay or do you care about story structure? See if you care about the gameplay well you're probably not going to like this game because it's a lot more focused on the whole aspect of the universe it's building rather than the actual gameplay itself. But that doesn't mean that the gameplay doesn't have its own redeemable qualities it's really fun. If you're a big fan of Max Payne you're absolutely going to love this game but a word of warning if you're going to play this game for the gameplay alone you're kind of missing the point. This game is really focused around the whole concept of its story and that's kind of its whole flow. There's no multiplayer, no time trials, nothing like that. Although there are some really cool aspects of the game that kind of changed the story as you go along giving you completely different cutscenes and kind of world altering events that really make you want to go play the game again just to see exactly how far and how much you can change the story. And since there’s no multiplayer that's pretty much exactly where the replayability lies in this game going back and seeing how you can alter the story further. So after the first two hours would I continue playing the game? You bet your ass. I want to see how the story ends and then I want to go all the way back to the beginning of the game and see how I can alter that story and change it. I mean just the prospects alone of being able to change and alter this story by that much are pretty exciting. The only faults this game probably has is that there's going to be people out there that probably don't want to sit down and watch these really long cutscenes and maybe they want a little bit more gameplay and a little bit less narrative driven story. Which unfortunately you're not going to be getting from this. So as you probably guess I recommend this game but that's only the first two hours. The rest is up to you.