Written by Christopher Falcon, co-written and edited by Alexandria Digre.
First-person shooters are quickly becoming something like a tale as old as time. Its premise is simple; pick up a gun, aim, and fire at opposing players. There have been tons of ways that try to reinvent the wheel, such as Titanfall combining a first-person shooter with giant mech fighting, and Overwatch giving its characters different weapons, classes, and abilities.
Quantum League is one such attempt to reinvent the wheel, as its premise is based around time loops in an enclosed environment. So, how does it play, and how does its mechanics try to add a new spin on the original FPS formula? Let’s discuss our Quantum League First Impressions.
Shot Through Time
Quantum League’s main selling point is the fact that every fifteen seconds, the game rewinds to the beginning of the round for you to take another path through the level. After three rotations, the player (or team) that fulfills the map objective will score. First to score two points wins. In the event of a draw (neither player nor team has completed the map objective), the time loop resets back to stage 1.
Getting killed isn’t the end of the world. If you keep recording actions after being killed, it presents an opportunity to fix it in two ways. One, you could find a health pack and resync yourself to the timeline, giving you the remaining time to record actions. Alternatively, on a future rotation, you can go out of your way to kill a player that killed your first rotation.
At the beginning of every rotation, players can choose between an SMG, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle, and a laser pistol. I’m going to level with you on this one. If you’re playing 2v2 matches, just pick an SMG and have your partner pick a sniper rifle. If you both can aim, then congratulations, you have the most broken composition in the game.
The Match Types
Quantum League, to my knowledge, has three different match types. Those three types are capturing a central control point, capturing all five objective markers of a map (and only one map seems to support this mode as of the time of publication), and killing as many clones as possible.
These three objectives are pretty superfluous, to be honest. What makes you have a better chance of winning is to kill their clones and rush to objective. The sooner the traffic is gone, the sooner you can get to completing the map objective. To be honest, the most hectic mode is the one where you kill all clones, as it takes place in a shipyard and has lots of cover to play around with.
Capturing all five objectives has only one map attached to it, which is unfortunate. The game mode could be either more exciting or more balanced if it were on maps of varying sizes. It would also add more variety to that game mode, because playing on the same map can get pretty same-y after a while.
Gaps In The Timeline
We found that during our Quantum League first impressions, gameplay can get pretty repetitive at points due to all of these parts factoring in. Lots of rounds I’ve played have ended in one of three ways; the enemy team camping the health packs and then going to objective; me going to try to flank or go to objective and a sniper kills me from the enemy spawn; or getting rushed by four SMGs and dying within ten seconds.
The maps further exacerbate the first outcome. Most of the health packs are in areas that have a ton of cover surrounding it. Sometimes, you’ll have to kill a player two or three times JUST to make sure they stay dead for the round, which gets old quite fast. Another point of contention is the fact that SMGs seem to be the only very good weapon.
Gun Troubles
Grenade Launchers straight up don’t work more often than not, because of how their blast radius behaves. You don’t get many opportunities to be using a shotgun, either, since everyone’s chewing through your health from mid or long-range. The worst offender is the laser pistol. By god, this is one of the worst guns I’ve used in an FPS to date. It fires a laser that does damage as long as it’s touching an enemy. The problem area is that it has less range than a shotgun, which stifles its usability immensely.
However, most of these issues can be solved with some fine-tuning to tools like gun ranges, health pack healing amounts, or other means. What can’t be fixed by changing some code is the rather abysmal player base. I don’t know if it was because Quantum League was advertised enough or if there was a design decision in the past, but it’s rather unclear what the cause is. This becomes more puzzling when you realize that most of the game’s Steam reviews are positive receptions.
Closing Thoughts
Quantum League is a game with a lot of promise but somewhat lackluster execution. We will be giving our full thoughts on the game in our upcoming review, so stay tuned for that. But first impressions have not been good as the game feels a bit held back by its lack of players.
With some fine-tuning to the game mechanics and more players, Quantum League can become a serious e-sports title. It has all the makings for a title that challenges both your reflexes and brain. The game could also benefit from some of the game phases being longer on some maps, as some of them are 20 seconds depending on the map size. You can check it out on Steam for $8 if you want to give it a shot.
What did you think about our Quantum League First Impressions? Did you like the game? What improvements do you think can be made to the title? Are you looking to purchase it yourself? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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