Review by: Michael Barnes

Quantum Theory is a pitiful game. The new third-person shooter from Tecmo Koei can’t seem to catch a break from anybody. Reviews have been ruthlessly harsh and word-of-mouth would probably be as savage if anyone out there in gamer land were playing it. Between the bad press and its virtually empty online multiplayer lobbies, this poor game appears destined to go down as one of those unloved titles that will inevitably find its way to the closeout bin, looking up at you with puppy dog eyes and begging somebody- anybody- to take it home and play it.

It’s definitely not a good game, but I still found it oddly compelling in the same way that a really bad movie that you wind up watching all the way to the end. It’s the kind of game that you play through and wonder what it was that kept you going through a host of glaringly obvious technical problems, unspeakably horrendous controls, and embarrassingly bad dialogue. Gamers of lesser fortitude and higher expectations may not make it past the first couple of hours.

The story is actually kind of cool, a bizarre sort of business about a living, mutating tower suffering from a kind of erosive decay that our protagonists Syd and Filena must navigate to the top, stop-and-popping their way through hordes of bad guys. The tower perceives the characters as a kind of virus, and a loudspeaker announcement from time to time indicates what remedial action the tower is taking, which is a neat way of characterizing the edifice.

Syd is an exiled “Gillskin” that operates as a kind of creepy tower-buster and Filena is a rival “Nosferatu” (no relation), so there’s a kind of antagonistic yet mutually dependent relationship that develops over the course of the game. Despite poor writing, it actually becomes kind of interesting as it is revealed that the characters are working at cross purposes. Syd can also pick up Filena and throw her directly at enemies. X-Men comics readers will be instantly reminded of the Colossus/Wolverine “Fastball Special” maneuver.

Gameplay is a clunky, graceless appropriation of almost every element of Epic’s Gears of War games, right down to almost identical cover prompts. You will never read a review of this game that does not reference Gears of War, because it is simply impossible to evaluate the game without acknowledging its looming shadow. It is abundantly clear that Team Tachyon was willfully attempting to imitate Gears, but simply didn’t get many elements right. The interesting tactical situations, flanking, and occasional chainsaw massacre in its parent game are here waylaid by sloppy and cumbersome controls, terrible enemy AI, and an almost unusable melee mechanic.

Guns are big, chunky, and often sound more like a nailgun than anything called a “Gravedigger” or “Revenant”. Despite their fancy appellations, the guns are pretty standard shooter fare- shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers, and so forth. Just like in Gears, you’ll duck and cover, peeking out to take a few aimed shots or doing a little pray-and-spray blind firing over cover. Enemies do the same, but the animation is so poor it often looks like they’re just sliding out from cover like targets in a shooting gallery. There isn’t a whole lot of variety in what you’ll be shooting at, either.