Life Is Strange 2: Complete Season

The Good
* Choices ultimately matter

• Some nice visuals and music

• A risky followup to the first game
  
  The Bad
  * The explorations of political themes lack nuance and complexity

• Less overall excitement, intrigue, and emotional impact compared to its predecessor

• Money mechanic is under-utilized

• Technical bugs throughout
  
  The Bottom Line
  In 2015, a small, possibly down-on-their-luck French developer by the name of Dontnod Entertainment burst onto the gaming scene with the choice-based adventure game Life is Strange. A refreshing antidote to many games of the time, it featured well-drawn characters, a twist-filled and suspenseful storyline and an overall more grounded setting with just a touch of comic-book surrealism. Dontnod handed the game’s prequel, Before the Storm over to the American Deck Nine games while they worked on the sequel themselves. Four years later, we come to Life is Strange 2, their official follow-up to the 2015 game. This game follows an all new story and characters but is set in the same universe after the events of the original game. Initially released In September of 2018, the remaining episodes came out over the course of 2019 with the final being released in December.

  The main protagonist this time around is Sean Diaz, an ordinary high school kid living in Seattle who has a bit too much interest in drugs and sex at such a young age. He loves his younger brother Daniel but feels like he can be a burden sometimes when he just wants to go out and have fun with his friends. His mother left his family at a very young age, and Daniel never got a chance to know her. The brothers will need each other after their father from Mexico ends up dead in a violent altercation with the police, irrevocably altering the course of their lives. Now on the run from the law, Sean and Daniel end up on a fraught road trip down the West Coast of the United States, in the hopes of reaching Mexico, and what is assumed to be a better life. And as this wouldn’t be a Life is Strange game without some supernatural stuff, along the way, Daniel will discover and develop the use of his telekinetic powers with the help and encouragement of Sean.

  While the first Life is Strange followed the structure of a mystery story, the sequel takes the form of a road trip. You’ll spend time visiting a much larger variety of locations as opposed to seeing the same handful over the course of the game. This is likely the reason for the game’s protracted development cycle compared to the first, as each episode requires its own assets and settings.

  This is quite possibly one of the most openly political games I’ve ever played. While the first and its prequel definitely had their partisan moments, they were ultimately a universal story about friendship (or love), growing up, and living with the consequences of yours and others’ actions. Here, though, the game is much more politically pointed. It’s initially set just days before the most divisive president in US history was elected and touches on “timely” and provocative topics such as police brutality, racism, immigration and border patrols, cannabis farming and legalization, religious cults and fundamentalism. Characters who are clearly meant to represent both conservative and liberal types populate the script, and the game doesn’t always shoot for nuance or complexity when depicting both sides. Some, though not all, of its characters and situations can come across as unrealistic and unbelievable. Some scenes seem to be included just to make a political point or make the player feel very uncomfortable. And as a result of this anger at the state of the union, it doesn’t have the same warmth or magic of the original Life is Strange. Indeed, its shooting for something quite different despite carrying the same name. Ultimately, Life is Strange 2’s subversive themes are depressing, even nihilistic in ways that seem too much even for a Life is Strange game.

  As part of the road trip, you’ll have to make decisions to spend money on food, souvenirs, and camping supplies, while also keeping Daniel happy and content. A new mechanic involves Sean having to decide what to purchase in stores and vending machines while not breaking the bank. While the Diaz brothers’ survival is determined solely by the narrative, it does initially add another wrinkle in terms of the consequences to consider when picking various options, though this largely goes away after episode 2, making it seem under-utilized.

  Another feature is the ability to hold conversations with other characters while exploring and interacting with the environment. This makes conversation flow a bit more naturally, as you don’t have to be interrupted by cutscenes while trying to complete a task.

  While you control Sean, Daniel will wander independently of the player, at times pointing out various items in the environment that he is interested in interacting with. Many of these items allow the player to have Daniel to interact with them, and these are highlighted with blue arrows in the game.

  Imposing your values on Daniel is a huge part of the game, as Daniel will often make decisions independently of the player depending on prior choices beforehand. In fact, half of the decision tallies at the end of each episode belong to Daniel. Do you want him to conform to the rules of normal society, or should he use his power to protect his brother? Is it okay to defend yourself, even if it means hurting others? Should violence be answered with more violence? Are the Diaz brothers ultimately the criminals that the media and the police have painted them as? This ultimately leads to at least 4 quite different endings despite having only two selectable choices to choose from at the final scene. Yes, your choices throughout the journey do in fact matter and affect the ending much more directly this time out. This is by far the biggest improvement over the original game, though its really the only one aside from the visuals.

  When it comes down to it, LiS 2 just isn’t as intriguing or compelling as the original. No doubt a lot of this has to do with taking the superpower out of the player’s hands, since video games are inherently designed as power fantasies. I think there could potentially be a fun game from this setup, and The Last Guardian did it well just a few years ago. But the questions are less about “what would I do with telekinesis” and more “how do I make sure this person uses their power properly”. Unlike the original, where Max would often quite openly utilize her time power since everyone else had no perception of it, here Daniel is asked to often hide the use of his power, making it play a far smaller role in the story. Plus, there don’t seem to be any consequences or blowback to using his power the way Max suffered in the original. I was hoping that Daniel would do certain things with his power that he ultimately never did, perhaps to try and keep the game’s tone grounded.

  It’s hard to really speak about this, but there are times when Life is Strange 2 is just flat-out boring. The pacing of the game is at times unbearably slow even for something that was deliberately designed that way, and feels like it takes ages to progress. The game just loves to bog you down with un-fun activities, including a minigame where you have to trim cannabis buds for about 10 minutes. Its enough to drive you crazy. While it’s debatable whether a game like Life is Strange needs to be traditionally “fun” as a video game, shouldn’t it at least be engaging and compelling throughout?

  While Life is Strange 2 has upgraded to using Unreal Engine 4 and no longer has to be developed with 7th generation consoles in mind, it doesn’t result in a hugely different looking game. Sure, the lighting and textures are overall sharper and the environments seem to have a bit more detail and life to them, including some nice particle effects for snow and plants which actually bend when characters walk through them. Otherwise, it hasn’t changed too much. Still its a fairly appealing and at times beautiful game apart from the bizarre plastic hair that some characters exhibit. The last episode in particular has some truly gorgeous vistas and scenery. The third episode had some strange optimization issues during nighttime campfire scenes where the frame rate would tank for no discernible reason. There are also lots of graphical glitches during the game, such as animation bugs, objects getting stuck in character’s hands, and missing character shadows. At times the technical polish on this game is really lacking, and you can perhaps sense the developers pushing to meet their already extended deadlines. though at least the lip-syncing animations are better this time around.

  Much as in the original, the game is soundtracked by numerous indie rock and rap artists, although they do seem to be a fair bit more recognizable this time out perhaps owing to the popularity and success of the first game. There is a slight Latin feel to the game’s incidental soundtrack, perhaps to represent Sean’s ethnicity. The voice acting for the two leads is quite good and at times affecting, but some of the side characters come across as outrageously cartoonish or rude. While this was a factor in the original, it has been taken to new extremes here no doubt because of the more angry, political tone of the narrative.

  One thing I should point out is that there is a free standalone episode/teaser that Dontnod released shortly before LiS2’s first episode called “The Adventures of Captain Spirit”. This episode ties in to the plot of the new game and your save from it will be imported into LiS2, so I highly recommend trying it out before you begin Life is Strange 2 proper.

  So then LiS 2, while an okay adventure game, ultimately doesn’t manage to land as well as the original or its prequel. Still, there’s a clear attempt to not simply regurgitate the original games here and actually do something different with the basic choice-and-consequence mechanics, which I can at least appreciate even if it doesn’t match the originals. In an era where most major publishers are afraid to declare any of their games “political” so as not to miss out on all-important sales for their expensive titles, some will undoubtedly find LiS 2’s heavy political subtext to be refreshing and daring, while others will just roll their eyes and find something less partisan to play. Regardless of whatever side of the fence you land on however, as a storytelling experience and adventure game this is easily the weakest of the three Life is Strange games released so far, and quite possibly the most disappointing game that this otherwise underrated developer has released. I hope they don’t end up going the way of Telltale Games by stretching themselves too thin. Looking ahead at their release schedule, with at least two more similar episodic adventures planned for 2020, I hope that this is just a bump in the road and that they can keep up the quality they exhibited with both Remember Me and the original Life is Strange.