Well I've played all of the Life is Strange games now and I still think this series peaked with the first entry. I get why people don't like these games. The writing can be cringey sounding like out of touch older millenials or gen x people thinking they know what kids today sound like. The gameplay is shallow where you just walk around and press a button to make decisions in conversations and MAYBE solve a very simple puzzle. I can't really explain it well myself, but I kind of enjoy these aspects of the games. I'd probably rank this between 1 and Before the Storm (I didn't really care for 2 all that much and Captain Spirit barely counts). It addresses several of my problems with 2 and gets about as close to 1's quality as any game after has gotten.
One of my biggest problems with 2 was that you felt like the sidekick to the main character of the story. It made things less fun when you weren't playing as the person with the power. While Alex's power doesn't do as much as psychic abilities or allow you as much freedom as rewinding time, I liked it. Really it's just used for the story and the only gameplay use is to find collectibles. However I always took every chance to read every optional emotion that doesn't have anything to do with completion. It gave lots of insight to the people of Haven and helped flesh the world out a bit.
The variety of characters was nice. I did feel that Ryan didn't get much use with Steph taking up most of the screentime between the two, but that could also be because of the choices I made (yes I went with the lesbian route cause Life is Strange is a gay series where everyone in these games are super gay and I love it). Duckie is probably my favorite charcter since he's just this random old guy who likes to make people smile with his stories and believes in the best of everyone. Made me so happy when I could take the time to help him with a problem later in the game.
The music, as expected, is really nice. I'm typing this while having the credits play in the background and I just love the soundtrack to these games. It's usually from bands I've never heard of, but I was surprised to actually recognize some songs in this one. This kind of goes with the whole series as I basically have all of their soundtracks on my Spotify playlist and get a joy out of listening to them. I liked having moments where I could just relax for a moment to listen to the music.
The Life is Strange games are 200% not for everyone and I'd really struggle to recommend them to people. I'm never going to say they're high art or amazing at storytelling cause they're not. They're just games I like playing and I hope to see another entry someday unless the devs want to do something else.
One of my biggest problems with 2 was that you felt like the sidekick to the main character of the story. It made things less fun when you weren't playing as the person with the power. While Alex's power doesn't do as much as psychic abilities or allow you as much freedom as rewinding time, I liked it. Really it's just used for the story and the only gameplay use is to find collectibles. However I always took every chance to read every optional emotion that doesn't have anything to do with completion. It gave lots of insight to the people of Haven and helped flesh the world out a bit.
The variety of characters was nice. I did feel that Ryan didn't get much use with Steph taking up most of the screentime between the two, but that could also be because of the choices I made (yes I went with the lesbian route cause Life is Strange is a gay series where everyone in these games are super gay and I love it). Duckie is probably my favorite charcter since he's just this random old guy who likes to make people smile with his stories and believes in the best of everyone. Made me so happy when I could take the time to help him with a problem later in the game.
The music, as expected, is really nice. I'm typing this while having the credits play in the background and I just love the soundtrack to these games. It's usually from bands I've never heard of, but I was surprised to actually recognize some songs in this one. This kind of goes with the whole series as I basically have all of their soundtracks on my Spotify playlist and get a joy out of listening to them. I liked having moments where I could just relax for a moment to listen to the music.
The Life is Strange games are 200% not for everyone and I'd really struggle to recommend them to people. I'm never going to say they're high art or amazing at storytelling cause they're not. They're just games I like playing and I hope to see another entry someday unless the devs want to do something else.