Quantum Break is an adventure shooting game with action-packed combat sequences. You explore and influence a world where the time has been distorted, make important decisions in intense narrative scenes. Play is punctuated with live action TV-style episodes at the end of each chapter to create an unusual and high production multimedia fusion of video games and television.

You play as Jack Joyce, a regular guy caught up in a dangerous experiment gone wrong, and are now imbued with powerful abilities that let you manipulate time. You use your time powers to evade enemy agents, engage in supercharged gunfights, and solve puzzles as you try to escape a secretive organisation and save time itself.

Play involves a mix of several dramatically different experiences. Sometimes you hunt for clues to the mystery of what has happened or use your time powers in clever ways to solve puzzles. Other times you take on fast-paced high stakes combat with a combination of time powers and shooting skills to clear an area and get past some enemies.

At the end of each chapter you make important narrative decisions, sometimes from the viewpoint of your opponents, that shape the story. Then, at the end of each chapter there is a non-interactive television-style episode that incorporates some of the decisions you’ve made and takes around 30 minutes. It is not required to watch these to progress, but they do contribute to the overall story of the game.

The result is a highly polished game that experiments with mixed media and the use of a well-known cast to do the motion capture and voice-acting as well as the live action show episodes.