Nestled in amongst the upcoming sports titles, shooters and racing games at Microsoft's slightly underwhelming reveal of their latest console, the Xbox One last night was Quantum Break, a new title from Alan Wake and Max Payne developers Remedy Entertainment. Despite having been officially revealed last night, though, we're still a bit in the dark in terms of what the game's about and, most importantly, how it plays.
The brief teaser trailer shown at the Xbox One event begins with a live action clip of a mother and daughter discussing what makes the girl 'different', before shifting to a CG scene of a ship crashing spectacularly in to a bridge. From then on, we're teased with a succession of quick glimpses of game footage designed to give virtually nothing away. The game is intended to 'blur the line' between playing a game and watching TV, which, in the context of Quantum Break, will involve an official TV show which runs alongside the game. Rather than just being a tie-in, it seems that the choices you make in the game will affect the plot of the TV series, and in turn, as you play the game, a personalised 'director's cut' version of the show is created just for you. The idea is a novel one and certainly fits in with Microsoft's TV-centric plans for its new console, but without more details it's hard to get too excited at this stage.
In gameplay terms, from the tiny amount of in-game footage shown, it appears that Quantum Break will be a third person actioner, with our hero on a quest to save the future, while the press release from Remedy suggests that time manipulation will play a part, promising that 'as time breaks down, impossible, split second moments of destruction turn into epic stages of time powered action.' With the game being developed by the company that invented Bullet Time, you can have a pretty good guess what that'll entail - Matrix-style slow-mo sequences aplenty, or perhaps more like that episode of Futurama when Fry achieves heightened awareness after drinking 100 cups of coffee. Maybe that's just us though. Regardless of how the game plays, and how well the TV series aspect is implemented, the Xbox One's graphical grunt will at least ensure that Quantum Break will look suitably impressive. We just wish that a little more gameplay footage had been shown so we could form more of an opinion on the game.
In keeping with Microsoft's vague 'later this year' release for the Xbox One, we don't have a date for Quantum Break yet, but we can expect it to make an appearance at E3 this June. Hopefully we'll find out then if we'll be having fun while time flies.
