The Quiet Man Reviews
The Quiet Man has great live-action cutscenes, but the repetitive gameplay becomes tiresome.
The worst of pretentious story games and brainless beat-em-ups combined - with an insulting gimmick that's all its own.
A terrible idea poorly realised, with a mixture of pretentious, gimmicky storytelling and banal combat that is almost awe-inspiring in the full extent of its incompetence.
The Quiet Man isn't fun, interesting, or worthwhile in any way. No one should play it
The Quiet Man is an almost completely silent beat-em-up that combines badly staged live-action drama with a clunky, broken combat system.
"Roughly one week after launch" The Quiet Man is getting an update that will add audio into the mix, and thus, context. Maybe it'll be the most subversive, Molyneux-esque patch in the history of gaming. For now, Square Enix is charging $14.99 for a ticket to ride and I can safely say that you can miss this train.
There's nothing else quite like The Quiet Man, and there's a reason for that. The blend of FMV and interactive combat sequences fails on every level with an unfathomable plot that raises far more questions than it answers, and encounters that fail to explain themselves and do little to engage. The Quiet Man is the most baffling release of 2018, to the point where a post-mortem investigation into its sheer existence sounds so much more exciting than this bizarre and convoluted comedy sketch.
The Quiet Man should have stayed that way.
The Quiet Man turned out to be a complete failure with a messy concept, bugs and a set of banal live action scenes mixed up with a primitive gameplay. Everything is bad here - from the animation and the combat system to the plot, sound quality and direction.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about The Quiet Man is that it presents a world I want to know more about. I like the idea of a deaf vigilante-esque antihero doing his best to find the good in a world of darkness and violence, even if it means having to become a force of darkness and violence himself. However, in the case of The Quiet Man, that strong premise is squandered by lazy development decisions and incredibly odd artistic choices.
Everything is so bad in The Quiet Man, from its fumbled central idea and its terrible combat to a plot that ends in a morass of incomprehensible revelations, that it's something of a modern-day curio. The fact it comes from a major studio such as Square Enix, and has clearly had a substantial budget given its models and lighting, makes it all the more bizarre. Somewhere, at some point, there must have been the seed of a good idea. Whatever happened, the result is a tangle of failures that is best remembered as a bad dream.
We give The Quiet Man a point because it exists, and some people worked on it, but it is easily one of the biggest trainwrecks of the video games History. Gameplay is awful, narrative is awful... nothing can be saved, and no one would ever have the patience to play it once and then download the New Game Plus DLC that includes sounds to understand something. It's just too painful.
Review in French | Read full review
The Quiet Man cannot translate its ambition into a cohesive and fulfilling experience, finding trouble both from a gameplay and thematic perspective.
While it misses the mark in general and douses the hopes I had when I first saw the E3 2018 trailer, The Quiet Man does have some value. It’s reasonably priced despite its issues and brevity, and if you’re looking for something a little different, it’s worth a look, just keep your expectations considerably tempered.
The Quiet Man is an absolute disaster of ideas that don't work, bad design decisions, boring combat, ugly graphics, and attempting to use a real disability as a gimmick in a way that feels borderline insulting.
It's bold to dish out a product with so many obvious absentees of the most fundamental components to a video game, but The Quiet Man goes one step further in presenting itself as this artistically-flash, cinematically-deep experience it's all too proud of itself over without ever working for that accolade.
Overall, this is a weird game that shouldn't have been released. Even at around 15 dollars I feel ripped off. The plot is an incoherent mess and the combat is buggy and broken and worst of all, it's just not fun.
An attempt to immerse players in a soundless world fails to reconcile concept and execution, delivering a baffling story and uninspired gameplay in the process.
It's not without its issues, but these are the kinds of experiences that really stick in the mind, and I'd rather that that yet another stock-standard action game that neatly fits within structures that we've already seen dozens of times before.