QUANTUM BREAK
While almost every frame of QUANTUM BREAK could be considered a work of art, the game itself is — to be charitable — inconsistent: at its best, it’s an engaging diversion that made me say “whoa” more than once; at its worst, it’s a repetitive slog through a forgettable plot burdened with complex controls, hit-skip pacing, muddied clarity, and a pervasive air of missed opportunity.
For example: BREAK’s most glaring deficiency – and chief contributor to its slog-ness – lies in its reliance on that old standby, firearms of various size and utility, to dispatch the endless hordes of faceless, private mercenary / Blackwater antagonism. It would have been far more exciting – and more in keeping with the apparent overall goal to push the envelope – to have supercharged the functionality of Jack’s time distortion powers and used guns only as a last resort – if at all. As it stands, the combat system is a hodgepodge of typical third-person actioners and a glimmer of something new and exciting that never managed to coalesce into a meaningful experience, as though the gamemakers at Remedy couldn’t quite make the time powers work the way they wanted to and fell back on their considerable tried-and-true pedigree in third-person shoot-em-ups and flying lead to get the job done.
And then there’s the TV show.
Pushing ALAN WAKE’s successful execution of an episodic structure to its next level, BREAK’s live-action interstitials, despite featuring THE WIRE alums Aiden Gillan and Lance Reddick (though I was unable to suspend disbelief long enough to buy Shawn Ashmore as a convincing gun-slinging protagonist/avatar of enemy clearing / time-continuum-saving mayhem) never rose above the standard laid out by (most) Netflix straight-to-streaming sci-fi flicks similarly populated with half-realized characters and caricatures: for a game / experience that held time as its main plot point and the fracturing of it as the problem to be solved, the show threw the game’s pacing into tumult and served little purpose other than to deepen a world that could have been deepened more effectively by paying more attention to the game itself; in other words, by trying to be two things at once – a gamechanger and a game, a game and a show, a show and a game, whatever – and placing “cool” above the fundamentals of story, pacing, and character, BREAK missed the mark on both.
Despite the preponderance of bitching above, I’m glad I played it – when QUANTUM BREAK works, it WORKS… which makes the moments when it doesn’t all the more painful – and would recommend it to anyone solely on the basis that it represents a noble – if deeply flawed – effort at something new that, though it missed the mark by virtue of aiming so high, points towards an intriguing future beyond the endless parade of indistinguishable multiplayer killfests.
