Quantum Break is a cinematic third-person shooter game that incorporates science fiction. It was developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft, available on Xbox and Windows 10.

Game website: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/quantum-break

The Lens of the Elemental Tetrad

• Story
  • The plot centers on the character Jack Joyce who gained the power of manipulating time during an explosion of a time machine. Time fractures start to occur which signals the end of time. Jack’s friend, Paul Serene would like to sell his time technology and make profits out of it without fixing the fractures. Jack, however, is keen to fix the fractures and turns against Paul.
  • The concept is rather interesting among cinematic games since the power to control time has always been fascinated by humans.
• Aesthetics
  • This game has beautiful and futuristic graphics. During time fractures in the game, everything freezes in the world and space ripples around the character.
• Mechanics
  • The mechanics are rather simple in this game. Players are able to freeze an area of space-time and distort space-time to battle the enemies.
  • It is essentially a third-person shooter game with very few weapon types including only assault rifles, pistols, mini-machine guns and shotguns. Even with the ability to manipulate time, the main weapon that the character use to kill his enemies are guns.
• Technology
  • The game utilizes a new in-house engine called the Northlight Engine.To represent the idea of “broken time” and have a detailed destruction system, the team created lots of environments which put the player character in the midst of destruction, utilizing technologies ranging from geometric distortion waves to Thinking Particles. [1]

battle during time fracture

The Lens of Action

• There are two main operational actions in the game. Firstly, in order to find the correct path, the player need to cross a series of obstacles, sometimes with the need to utilize his time power (e.g. to freeze time to stop something from collapsing on him). Secondly, the player need to kill enemies with guns and his time power.
• I feel that the actions are quite simplistic and become boring after playing for some time. The combats with enemies are rather easy even without using his time power.

The Lens of Meaningful Choices

• The plot contains four junctions where players can make choices which will lead to different game plot.
• However the two different plots that results from the player’s choices only differ slightly. Different choices will lead to the same ending and the different plots are not meaningful to the progress of the game.

The Lens of Surprise

• After each chapter, there will be a short film which connects the plots between two chapters. The plots also transit smoothly from gameplay to screenplay.
• All the characters in the game are models after real charaters in the screenplay. The combinations of computer graphics and films adds some elements of surprise to the game.

The real characters in screenplay

The Lens of Time

• The total game play is about 4 – 5 hours. I personally feel like the game is too short and lacks of elements that attracts players to replay the game.
• Unlike games like TitanFall and Destiny, this game does not support multi-player.
• The plot is simple and short and I personally do not see the point of replaying the game just to get familiarized with the plot.

[1]: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Break