A shooter with a tiny bit of difference and going against the grain of the linear shooters that make the big bucks in the gaming industry. That’s what Remedy is setting out to create with Quantum Break, and at Gamescom today they showed off the first gameplay footage during Microsoft’s conference.
Quantum Break follows the story of Jack Joyce, a man who was caught in the blast of a failed time manipulation experiment performed by a company called Monarch Solutions. As failed crazy scientific experiments tend to do in games (and comics… and… well, everything), the incident has given him superhuman abilities - namely the ability to manipulate time.
Obviously, this has earned him a few enemies within the company, so you’ll spend your time controlling Jack as he attempts to escape death at the hands of these men.
In the footage shown, we saw Jack make his way up some stairs towards a bridge, only for a lorry to suddenly crash and careen over the edge towards him. Luckily, just as it it’s about to hit, time freezes and the lorry remains suspended in mid-air, sparks and all. Jack’s new abilities make him immune to these moments of frozen time (Remedy is calling them “stutters”), allowing him to move around unaffected by what’s going on. You’re able to dodge otherwise deadly obstacles while listening to the pleas of the innocent. But Monarch also have the technology to enter the stutters, demonstrated when some large armored soldiers spawn and attempt to kill Jack as he tried to escape the stutter.
Combat looks to be a fairly traditional cover-based third-person shooter, given some added variety and tactical depth by Jack’s powers. He’s able to freeze time and move as fast as a blur. This means instead of getting shot in the face, you get the option to scoot up alongside the enemy as a blur and given him a good bashing before he even aimed the gun at you, or freeze bullets and increase their impact against the enemies. In the case of the demo shown at the conference, this means getting behind the enemies and opening fire at the rather predictable weak spot on their back. For all their evil genius, you’d think corporations in games would have learned by now to not leave obvious vulnerable points on their otherwise amazing suits of hulking mega armor.
The use of Jack’s powers means that combat looks to fall somewhere between the Biotic-filled firefights of Mass Effect and the slow-mo gunplay of Max Payne (only without with the penchant for diving through the air at every opportunity).
Not as linear as a normal shooting game, Quantum Break should attract both hardcore FPS players and those who want a bit more quirkiness to their gaming, particularly taking into account the tie-in TV series currently in the works.
Charlotte Smith
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