Quantum Break is about what happens when three young dudes get together and, for old time’s sake, bring about the collapse of the space-time continuum.

Jack Joyce arrives at a university laboratory to find his wild-eyed genius best friend Paul Serene, standing next to a machine shaped like a giant ring doughnut. Serene raves about the technical possibilities of time travel while playing down all that annoying stuff about the massive consequences to the very fabric of the cosmos.



With him is Jack’s troubled brother Will, who came up with the whole idea but now thinks it might be a bit dangerous and sort of regrets it. Paul doesn’t care about that. Instead, he asks for Jack’s help to switch the thing on and Jack is all, “yeah, sure, we’re friends, after all”, even when the computer suggests there’s a “slight anomaly” (have none of these guys even played Half-Life?). Predictably, everything explodes. Paul is chucked forward a few years, Jack gets super powers. Earth is basically screwed.

Remedy used 26 facial scanning and motion capture cameras to ensure the realism of the game’s characters. The company ended up collecting over 128 terabytes of facial data Photograph: Remedy Entertainment

Based just outside the centre of Helsinki, Remedy Entertainment is known for two things: its noirish narrative approach to design, and its long development times. It has been working on this game for at least three years – though it feels longer, probably because Microsoft teased the project extremely early in its development during the ill-fated announcement of Xbox One in May 2013. Back then, Quantum Break looked like a groundbreaking transmedia project, combining blockbusting action adventure game with an interactive TV series. It still looks like that – although not quite in the form some people imagined.

The player takes on the role of Joyce, the everyman hero thrust into the centre of the drama. Time is falling apart and only he can find and operate his brother’s counter measure – The Lifeboat Protocol. To do so, he has to evade Serene, who returns from the future as the megalomaniacal chief executive of sinister corporation Monarch Solutions, and is, for some reason, quite happy about time ending.

As the game starts you need to escape from the university campus, based in a fictitious north-eastern US town, but then you find yourself in an abandoned dockside industrial estate where all the early time experiments took place. There are locations to search, emails to read, hidden items to uncover – all of which reveal more about the complex time-spanning plot. But this is not a cerebral narrative adventure in the style of Alan Wake (which, incidentally, will come free with this game as a digital download) – it is a big action game, seemingly based around expansive set-piece shootouts with a variety of Monarch heavies. And that’s where Jack’s new abilities come in.

The way your time-bending powers actually manifest in the game will be familiar to those who have experienced bullet-time mechanics in the past. During shootouts you get a range of options, each with a cool-down period to prevent overuse. There’s Time Dash which lets you strafe at super speed away from an enemy’s line of fire; you can combine this with Aim on the left trigger to target an opponent as soon as you come out of the move, making for a swift, super-efficient counter attack. Holding the button for a few seconds longer gets you a Time Rush, which gives you more control over movement while in slowed time, letting you relocate with more intricacy.

Then there’s Time Stop which pauses time around a targeted enemy, allowing you to line up multiple shots before the clock starts ticking again. This is especially fun as your bullets gain power while held in stasis, making for some rather spectacular takedowns. Hold the same button a few seconds longer and you get Time Blast which produces a shockwave that damages or kills enemies in its path. Added to these are Time Shield, which provides momentary protection against incoming bullets and melee attacks, and Time Vision, a version of Batman’s detective mode, overlaying your view of the world with key items and objectives.

The time stop ability places enemies in a stasis bubble, allowing you to get in several free shots Photograph: Pr

With all this in place, what you get is a combat system that puts the emphasis on planning, evasion and balletic grace. Each environment is littered with cover objects which you seamlessly crouch behind a la, Gears of War; you can clamber on top of crates and vehicles; and you can target explosive barrels to do more damage. The key is in stringing together your time moves in order to dance through enemy soldiers – even as they make decent attempts to flank you, while shouting orders and observations to each other. And as you explore, you discover “chronon sources”, which let you upgrade your powers.

This mass of interlocking chronological systems takes a little while to master, but, once you’re in, big locations like the university lawn and the dockside wasteland become enjoyable playgrounds of destructive force. Although there are obvious comparisons with Gears of War, the experience is perhaps closest to classic Japanese brawlers such as Devil May Cry, except here the complexity is in timing and movement not in processing melee combos.

In the classic shooter design structure, just as you’re getting comfortable with your moves, you start encountering enemies who aren’t so vulnerable, such as the heavily armoured tank guys with shotguns who ruthlessly pursue you around the dockside, and can get a one-shot kill from up close. Later, you meet Monarch’s strikers who wear chronon backpacks allowing them to shift and distort time, just like Joyce. They disappear and reappear around the map, making them tough unpredictable opponents.

The striker enemies are able to leap about in time, just like Joyce. It makes them tough to pick off Photograph: Remedy Entertainment

This is solid, third-person shooter fare, not as fluid and pulverising as Gears, not as stylish and demanding as, say, Vanquish – but certainly exciting and adaptive. The downside, perhaps, is the familiar range of weapons – assault rifles, submachine guns and shotguns – so it seems your enjoyment will rely on how engrossing you find it to manipulate the space around your enemies, and defeat them through time dashes, stops and blasts. We’ll have to see if anything exciting gets added to that well-worn arsenal.

Throughout levels there are also Time Stutters, environmental bubbles where time has stopped, or where events are rewinding or speeding up. Early on, this just means a few floating objects to avoid – it also lets you take the guns out of enemy hands.

What these stutter sequences are really about though, is adding a platforming element to exploration. Early on in Act Two you have to bring down a huge shipping container onto a pile of wooden crates to get past, but then we’re told that time has effected some objects differently, putting them in a permanent loop – hey presto, Joyce is able to rewind time, rebuild the crate wall, climb up it from the other side, jump some gaps and reach an exit. Some of the upcoming catastrophe set-pieces we’re promised will almost certainly involve Prince of Persia-esque leaping sequences between barrel rolling cars and vast chunks of exploding road surface. It’s also a way to extend the whole time mechanic beyond the slow-mo bullet play of Max Payne.

But Quantum Break isn’t just an action game. While Remedy Entertainment has always been interested in the structure and mechanics of the television serial, this game takes that a step further by including four 22-minute episodes of a TV show, which play out at key stages through the game. Cleverly, these aren’t simply used to further the plot, they’re specifically written to explore the narrative from the perspective of Serene and his shady corporation. And what we discover is that the apparently archetypal bad guy setup may not be quite so straightforward. Serene has seen something out there at the end of time, and Gillen’s performance is nuanced enough to make us believe that his intentions may not be entirely evil.

Lance Reddick and Aiden Gillen play the lead antagonists in the show Photograph: Microsoft/Remedy Entertainment

“We never wanted to create a flat, two-dimensional villain,” says creative director Sam Lake. “Thinking about the best modern TV, the bar is really high, many of the characters we love to follow are not heroes, they’re really flawed, they’re borderline bad guys. That was the inspiration for making the show about the enemy camp and what’s happening behind the scenes.

Before each of these episodes there’s a junction point where Serene can use his prophetic powers to choose between two possible avenues, and actually shape the future – except, of course, it’s the player who chooses for him. In the section we see, for example, Serene must decide whether to murder all the witnesses to the school explosion, thereby keeping the whole site locked and preventing a wider panic, or forcing them to take part in a major PR offensive to discredit and criminalise Joyce.

Again, this adds more complexity to the character. “The original Die Hard is something we talked about a lot,” says Lake. “In a good, satisfying action movie, the bad guy almost steals the show – he needs to be really interesting, a big personality. The best films usually shift the perspective now and again into the bad guy’s point of view. You see them making their moves, scheming – that’s the idea for those junction moments. We wanted a game version of those scenes.”

These junctions put the player in a very interesting position in terms of narrative, control and identity: do they choose the route they think is morally better, or that they think Serene himself would go for, or do they select what they believe could make the subsequent missions easier to complete? Lake sees this as a vital element of the game: “As a player you get to ask, am I now role-playing asl Serene? Am I trying to get into his mentality and figure out what’s best for him and Monarch? Or am I looking at this from the hero’s perspective and trying to understand the fragments of the future and think ‘well that seems like a bad outcome for Jack so I’ll chose the other thing’. It’s not black and white, and there is no wrong choice. Serene is a flawed character but he is convinced he has logic. Is he right? No comment.”

Once the decision is made, the subsequent episode reflects the player’s choice, with specific scenes revealing the myriad consequences. For each segment, then, the production team had to film multiple versions of those transitory moments – apparently there are around 40 variations as you travel through. If you select the PR route, an anti-Monarch protester named Amy Ferraro is blackmailed into blaming the university explosion on Joyce, but she’ll later help you out in the game. Choose the hardline route, however, and one of Serene’s heavies shoots her dead, and a different character comes to your assistance later.

The central story remains largely consistent, however: you still get to meet key characters, such as Monarch’s obnoxious hacker Charlie Wincot and the potentially more important Beth Wilder and Liam Burke, both of whom start out as employees of the Monarch security team until events make them question their roles.

What’s really impressive is the number of clever little interplays between the shows and the game. For example, in the first TV instalment Beth drives Joyce to an abandoned lock-up to try and rescue him, but encounters Burke. The two confront each other, guns drawn. The next thing we see is their guns disappearing – Joyce has clearly escaped. When we return to the game, we play as Joyce, leaping from the van, freezing time and disarming them. Later, there are scenic elements in the game that reflect your choices in the TV show: select the PR junction for example, and when you enter a control room in the docks area there’s a notice on the wall detailing the public relations plan. There are even hidden items around environments that unlock extra sequences in the next TV sequence.

Set pieces often involve the aftermath of major incidences, such as car and ship crashes Photograph: Remedy

Lake describes Quantum Break as “Remedy’s summer blockbuster movie” and that’s definitely what it feels like – a big, slightly silly, sci-fi popcorn flick, with lovely visuals and a neat line in meta-humour (there’s a superb Alan Wake easter egg in one of the university lecture theatres). Microsoft clearly called in Remedy because it needed the studio’s brilliance with narrative, but in the bid to make a mainstream thriller, the old idiosyncrasies have been ironed out. So far, Joyce seems kind of vanilla, maybe even boring. He’s no Wake and he’s certainly no Payne – the weird, psychological wonkiness of those guys is gone. And, hey, how about a female lead for a change? It seemed originally that Beth was going to be playable alongside Joyce; there may even have been early plans to have her as the main protagonist – but all that was jettisoned.

According to Lake it might yet happen. “There is strong potential for much more than one game. We spent a lot of time building the foundations. If there are more, I’m sure that other characters will rise into bigger roles. Beth, for example, is a really important character and she has an interesting backstory of her own – aspects of that are hinted at in this game.”

Really though, this is – like Max Payne – an interactive action flick which plays neat tricks with the dynamics of the shooting genre. If it works, it won’t be because of the admittedly brilliant integration of live action video, it will be because players enjoy whooshing around in time, shooting people. Remedy sure knows how to get that right.

Keith Stuart attended a press trip to Remedy Entertainment in Helsinki with other journalists. Transport and accommodation costs were met by Microsoft.