Life is Strange 2 Episode 1, The LGA Review (Spoiler Free)

Welcome to the very first game review from Lit Gaming Arena. We are delighted to be bringing you a review of a series we have very much enjoyed in the past and are big fans of. This review is a collaboration between Adam Devine and Kat Grimes. We have both played the game separately and we got together to bring you our opinions and review. We hope you enjoy!

Following a local catastrophe, Sean Diaz and his younger brother Daniel are forced to go on the run together. Life is Strange 2’s first episode, entitled, “Roads” is very fittingly named. It revolves around two brothers as they go on not only a physical journey together but on a journey of understanding as they learn about their place in the world as Latin Americans living in America in 2016. The story shows us two young boys who have to face hardship and unwarranted prejudices that people so young could never truly be prepared for. The Diaz brothers must pull together to weather the coming storm. We don’t want to give too much away from the story for this article because this is a non-spoiler review but you can check back tomorrow for our spoiler review.

Now as we’ve said we do really enjoy this series. Every game has to have some drawbacks and in Life is Strange 2 our biggest issue has to be collectibles. In a game that is available on consoles, achievements and trophies tend to be a pretty big deal and in this game almost all achievements come from finding little collectibles scattered throughout the game’s maps. So while we were able to find 3 of the 6 available collectibles with ease, the 3 that we failed to find we believe were too difficult to locate. The second to last collectible in the game we believe could not be found unless you got very lucky and happened to interact with a certain object in the exact right way, and another collectible was in a very big map that was too large for finding just one collectible, while another very small map in the game had 3 collectibles all to itself. The other collectible could theoretically be found we do find it interesting that according to the achievement statistics on Xbox most people appeared to miss it as well with 25% of gamers finding it compared to 40 to 49% for other collectibles in game. Only 6% of people managed to find all collectibles according to these statistics, and while this does only apply to Xbox I’m sure other platforms would show similar results.

Another issue we had in this game was that text could sometimes be very hard to read in a living room environment with a TV across the room from you. While we don’t believe this would be a problem on PC with the monitor directly in front of you, it is an issue for anyone with difficulties seeing because there is no option to increase text size. While this issue doesn’t always pop up, it is a huge issue with the in-game backpack. Usually in Life is Strange when you look at a document or any piece of text it will darken the background and use a very light colored font that was nice and easy to read, but in the backpack when you are looking at items the game presents you with very tiny text that is in a dark colored font on a very dark gray paper. We think Dontnod could easily fix this in future released of the game just by increasing the size of the text and using a lighter texture for the paper. You can decide for yourself if this is an issue by looking at the screenshot below.

Gameplay in Life is Strange revolves around highlighting things with the camera as you walk through the world exploring. It’s very simple and has been the go to gameplay style from the very beginning. However, in this particular episode we noticed that a lot of objects were very hard to highlight. This was usually due to them being right next to another object that you could interact with, forcing you to get your camera into the weirdest angles just to get a few lines of dialogue. It could really do with an improvement in the future because it can take a good few extra seconds to find the right angle which we found very frustrating.

While we found no major bugs in the game that prevented us from accessing certain areas or finishing the story, Adam did have one weird bug where in a large open area of the map Daniel would run very far away from him back to the beginning of the map and he then had to wait for him to run all the way back to continue on with the story. One bug, however, is a very low number considering the tight schedule game developers can be put under.

The game also features a map that is much larger than what we have ever seen previously in Life is Strange, with plenty of exploration and interactions to be found all over. However, the other maps in the game do tend to be quite small in comparison. If we have learned anything from The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, however, it’s that you don’t need a large map to tell a story. That entire game lasted around two hours and all took place inside one house!

The soundtrack of Life is Strange 2 is very similar to that of the original game. Dontnod brought back the games original composer for the job and he did a really good job at making subtle but meaningful changes to the sound. It does a good job at bringing nostalgia to fans of the original game. It is nice to hear it again after having a break from those sounds in Before the Storm, which had a very different, although also very good, soundtrack composed by the band Daughter. It is a bit difficult to tell some of the songs apart from their original counterpart unless you’re looking at which game is playing but that isn’t really a bad thing since music has never been an issue for Life is Strange. You can also find some great licensed songs in Life is Strange and for a list of all the songs in this episode you can check here.

So here is our verdict on Life is Strange 2, Episode 1. If you’re already a fan of the series we would highly recommend you buy it. You’re going to enjoy it so much because it improves on the formula of Life is Strange while bringing you to a new refreshing location with different characters. If you’re not already a fan of the series we would recommend playing the previous Life is Strange games before playing this one. You can try the first episode of Life is Strange completely free and you can also play The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, which is directly tied in with this game for free. If you’re a fan of bingeing a show after a season has ended, we would recommend doing the same here and waiting until all episodes are available before buying. If you are not a fan of slow-paced, story-focused games, then this probably isn’t for you. You might find the story engaging enough to stick with it, but we can’t guarantee anything. Once again if that applies to you, there is always the first episode of the original game which is free.