3/5 ★ – ThePigeon's review of Quantum Break.

TLDR: A very cool experience but I wish this game as better. I would like to preface that I played this from the Gamepass. While normally this would not have any effect on the game whatsoever, for some reason whoever decided to bring this game from DX11 to DX12 just fucked it up. The game has really really bad lighting issues. Making the game borderline unplayable at times, legit seizure inducing lighting. From my knowledge for Steam you can just change from DX12 to 11 through changing the local files but that is not the case for the game pass version. The lighting issues ruined set pieces, levels, encounters, and even in game cutscenes. Microsoft and Remdedy have already stated that issue won’t be fixed, so the game pass version ia stuck with piss poor performance. Ultimately, while I will try to make this post not influenced by the horrible performance of the game pass version. I think it’s inevitable. Quantum Break is Remedy’s expirement in doing half TV show, half video game narrative experience. While they weren’t the first people to do this concept, they did in my opinion did one of the best renditions of half show, half game. The decisions you make in the game, affect the show. From small things as little background Easter eggs during scenes, to straight up different content and scenes for major choices. The show itself is not bad, having a good set of actors that did good performances. The production was soap-opera quality but hey I am not complaining. The show while a big component, wasn’t the main component. The story of the game wasn’t bad either, I throughly enjoyed it, and the introduction to time and time travel was not hard to follow at all. My problem with the game however is the balance between actual gameplay and story. The gameplay of this game is awesome. Blinking around and slowing down time gives homage to bullet time from Max Payne. The encounter are cool too, but my only issue is that there is like only 3-4 different enemy types. I wish they had more, especially some potential enemies they hinted at the sequel could have been used in this game instead (since there is no sequel). With all this being said however, gameplay is good. My main problem, is that the balance between actual combat and story/expositon is brutal. For one, I think like total combat makes up for 1-2 hours of the game only. Despite this being a remedy game, gameplay takes A REAL back burner here. Most of the time in this game you are either watching a cutscene, following around the main characters as they talk, watching the show, or god forbid reading emails and text dumps. There is way too fucking much text in this game. This game ruined the way I read lore because at one point I skimmed through the text, it was that much. Lore is either inconsequential or reiterates what you see in the characters actions or cutscenes, usually adding little to no relevance in the text. This wouldn’t be an issue if this wasnt 80% of what I did during levels, it was way too much.