Quantum Theory Review - PS3

Quantum Theory is irrefutably modeled on Epic’s Gears of War series and -- on the surface -- it matches a lot of the basic elements from those games. There’s a sprint mechanic complete with camera dip and fisheye effect, popping in and out of cover works the same way, weapon selections are the same, and the aim down sight view feels awfully familiar. It’s possible to have all of those elements and still dramatically miss the Gears benchmark, a game more about the subtle details than the big mechanical flourishes. Quantum Theory is a game of big flourishes with a stiff and awkward set of mechanics underneath that fundamentally ruin the player’s ability to engage in the world that’s been created.
 

How Dark Was My Tower

You’ll start the game as a duo of supernatural heroes fighting in a Nosferatu-infested tower that’s burst out of the ground and caused the locals to transform into zombies with space guns. The first level puts you in control of Syd, the ashtray-throated man with a shotgun, and Filena, a lithe pinup model in white armor, as they escape the collapsing tower they’ve just destroyed. Things go wrong on the escape, Filena seems to be infected in some strange way, and the two are mysteriously separated. From that point the story reverts to the beginning, showing how Syd first got into the tower and how it was that he came to partner with Filena.

The gameplay and controls will be familiar to anyone who’s puppeteered Marcus Fenix through the odd worm intestine and ruined parking lot. There are some crippling differences however. The most damaging flaw is in the aiming system, which manages to be both oversensitive and totally non-responsive. Moving around in the environment gives you a slow but reliable camera control. Switching into the over-the-shoulder view suddenly makes the aiming hypersensitive. Expect lots of wild and unwieldy swings of the reticule before you finally learn to work around the system’s incongruities. What’s so irritating about this is that there’s no corresponding level of sensitivity for fine aiming. If you just want to adjust the aim a few centimeters up or down, the analog stick is either unresponsive over far too sensitive.

There were moments where I had the stick pressed slightly in one direction or another and literally nothing happened on screen. Pressing it a little further then produced a wild and quick swing far past the point I’d wanted. There are options to change the aiming sensitivity and camera movement, but this only exacerbates the wildness of the camera swings. It’s an issue with how the camera has been coded to accelerate based on when and how you’re pressing the analog stick, and it’s hard to imagine a worse implementation than the one Quantum Theory presents.

To intensify the aim difficulties the enemy animations are erratic, with split-second jukes and sidesteps. They demand exactly the kind of fine-tune aim correction the system is least-equipped to handle. The result is that shootouts feel overlong, with the drama comes from trying to keep the camera from freaking out rather than feeling more deeply absorbed in the actual set pieces. I was playing against the mechanics instead of drawn into the fictive importance of what I was doing through them.

I Now Pronounce You, Mr. and Mrs. Bungle

Quantum Theory is a thoroughly derivative game, but it’s not quite the hollow piece of shovelware you might think. There are some blips of creative life in its core design, they just feel marginal and underdeveloped. The heart of the game is its shooting experience and this is a mechanical catastrophe. It’s not exactly broken, it’s just misconceived on every possible level. It feels like operating a camera dolly on ice more than it does a person with a machinegun in their hands. Quantum Theory definitely could have been worse, uglier, buggier, and had less care put into its set pieces. On the other hand, the decent parts of the game are so fundamentally constricted by the core mechanics that the whole thing feels like a bungle job of the first magnitude.