Savanna Wheat

I’ll cut to the chase first thing for those of you thinking about buying the game: If on a rainy day you’re looking for a simple, political and preachy, laid-back, picturesque player choice game that isn’t super serious, Life is Strange 2 is the game for you. But if you’re looking for a more involved, serious, and challenging player choice game, try Detroit: Become Human instead. Now, onto the rest: I’ll start out with the positive. Like the first game, I believe the game’s strong suit is character design (both appearance and personality wise). The characters truly feel multidimensional to me, and there’s a lot of subtle movements and inflections in voices that make the characters so much more unique and special. Each one is super memorable and it was really easy to get attached to each of them. Also, they did SUCH a good job establishing the vibe/tone. They totally got the “out in the elements” look down. The beautiful mountains, the morning dew, the glimmering lakes, the sun rises, it all RADIATES off of the screen, with a lot of help from the beautiful soundtrack, which is a perfect mix of sorrow and tranquility. The locations are all super well done, with all the little details that make them feel so much more real. However, despite these things that they totally hit the nail on the head with, there’s a couple of bugs in the game, classic things like a character glitching from one place to another, a character still doing a running animation when they’ve run into something, and parts of the body can suddenly go through things. This is fairly a minor issue however, and it doesn’t happen often at all throughout the game. Something more noticeable is the voice acting. It’s mediocre at best, but I think the real problem with the voices is the way that they went about recording lines. I don’t know what happened exactly, but it sounds to me like the voice actors weren’t given a whole script, it’s like they were just given a list of their lines, out of order, and they had to perform them with absolutely no context (I’ve noticed that it’s mainly Sean that sounds like this, which isn’t good considering he’s the main character). Its a little hard to describe, but it’s like they’re completely void of the situation or other’s emotions/attitude in conversation. Their voices and energy don’t change based on what the other says or how they say it, like in a normal conversation. Hell, sometimes when continuing a thought they don’t even match their OWN, from something they JUST said. Nothing about the voice acting feels cohesive and natural to me. It feels so fake. But the worst thing about this game, is that the player engagement is absolute GARBAGE. No matter what you pick, you end up where everyone else does...and it’s not like you have a lot of options anyway. Especially not heavily weighted ones. Lots of it is just sitting there watching the game play out before you. I feel like they put the choices in there just to make it seem like you’re playing it but really it’s a TV show that you’re just supposed to watch. That’s exactly what a “player choice game” should NOT BE. In conclusion, Life is Strange 2 is visually beautiful and has unique/charming characters, but has an issue with awkward voice acting and lack of player involvement. I think it would work way better as a series or a movie with real people.