Quantum Break

I had heard a lot of good things about Quantum Break and was also blessed by having a friend who owned it and was in no rush to play it. I borrowed it and played through the game in about a week and I think it is probably the most fun I’ve had with a game in a while.

Quantum Break follows the story of Jack (because no other name can be used for a male protagonist these days) Joyce and Paul Serene (Littlefinger from Game of Thrones) as they get caught up with a time travel experiment. Essentially Paul gets a time machine to work but when testing it he causes a fracture in time. Jack then goes on a mission to stop Paul and fix the fracture caused by their experiment. I won’t say anymore about the story but it was very enjoyable despite some of the flaws with the time travelling.

The story also worked on another level as it made the majority of the characters likeable. Jack does have some in-game one-liners which he continuously pulls out but this didn’t annoy me half as much as in other games but this is part of the gameplay rather than the actual story element.

Gameplay wise, it’s a cover based shooter where Jack will take cover by standing next to something he can take cover behind without you initialising the cover-taking. It’s a bit weird as sometimes I felt like the game wanted me to take bullets to the face by not taking cover when I thought it should. Aside from bang, bang, shooty fun, you also have a collection of time distorting powers which you can use against your enemies. This adds a unique twist to the combat.

The one criticism I have of the gameplay is that the cursor is really hard to see. It’s a third person shooter so if you can’t see the cursor then there is little hope in being able to aim at dudes from the off. It took me a little getting used to but I found that the cursor became more visible the more I played the game.

Alongside the main game, there is a series of TV episodes which work as an accompaniment. I did find this quite funny though as the main actors from the game (Aiden Gillen, Dominic Monaghan and Shawn Ashmore) only make cameo appearances and most of the work is left to the lesser known names. Interestingly, IMDb lists it as having four episodes with no end date which implies there could be a sequel.

The game is graphically brilliant. I even had someone comment that they thought I was watching something instead of playing a game so there is a serious credit to how good it looks.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 42 Achievements

The game has 42 achievements, 15 of which are obtained from playing the game from start to finish. There is a difficulty based achievement for getting through the entire game on hard and this did have me raising my eyebrows at the beginning. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t shoot for toffee but while I was trying to get used to the aiming mechanics, I didn’t actually die despite Jack taking more bullets that a Thai hooker takes cocks.

All the way through the game this continued until I got to some snipers which actually required me to be careful and I started wondering how many bullets can Jack take on easy mode? This became apparent when I got to the final fight of the game. The last fight is a joke. All cover goes out of the window and you basically have to run around taking bullets and shooting guys whenever you can. If you stand still, you will die from what I can only describe as an area effect spell. Essentially you have to not do what you’ve been doing for the entire game and run around being shot at instead of using cover. If Jack couldn’t take bullets the way he does throughout the rest of the game, this fight would be next to impossible.

There are multiple choice moments at the end of each in-game act where you the choice you make depends on which achievement you unlock. These aren’t really missable though as you can do Chapter replay and the chapters which the choices are really short.

There are also loads of collectibles throughout the game. These can be put into three categories. There are media items which add to the story if you choose to read them all; quantum ripples which cause small changes to the episodes if you find them in the act preceding the episode; and Chronon Sources which allow you to upgrade all of your powers. There is an achievement for fully upgrading all of your powers which means you need to collect all of these.

There are seven achievements associated with repeating certain actions mostly associated with using your time powers a certain amount of times. The hardest ones though are for destroying 15 Chronon harnesses and for using environmental objects to blow up enemies. I did manage to get both of these while doing a collectibles playthough which was a relief as I normally need to grind out stuff like environmental kills.

And that’s pretty much it, the last achievement I got was for collecting all of the media items and this is where the game has a little wobble. Some people have reported that this achievement does not unlock when it should and the tracker gets stuck at 100%. You can see this happened to me as my profile shows me fully completing Quantum Break 2 minutes before I unlocked this one. Bizarrely, the work around involves opening Quantum Break’s achievement page inside the Xbox menus so you don’t have actually have to be in the game to get the achievement. It’s almost like an in-joke.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Quantum Break is a really solid game that offers something slightly new to the gaming industry. It seems to do everything right as well providing a healthy balance between story and gameplay. Even the achievements are fairly balanced where someone striving for 100% percent completion will still have fond memories after finishing it.