25.1 hours played
Written 10 days ago
It kills me to write a negative review for a Life us Strange game, but here I am. Full disclosure, I haven't finished the game (only the first chapter) so I will mainly be discussing technical issues I experienced. Maybe it's my computer, but I blame those technical problems for ruining the story a bit. It's a decent story so far, but I'm not nearly as invested as I was with the previous games.
First off, there are really long wait times between scenes, without any fun loading screen, so the first few times it happened, I began to think the game was crashing (which it did, *twice*, in one chapter, but I don't know whether they're related). This, alone, isn't a deal-breaker, but it does ruin the momentum of the story a bit when I have enough time to contemplate getting a snack from the kitchen. Ten to fifteen seconds every scene break should not be the norm.
Then there were the aforementioned game crashes. I won't go into too much detail, but considering the startup routine for the game is also very long, this isn't an insignificant problem, either. A minute or two with the music can be cool when starting up the game to get into the mood (though even then, it felt long for my first time booting it up), but in the middle of a chapter, when I am forced to boot up the game again, it's not so much fun.
Then, there were the visuals. You would think I would have nothing to complain about here. I've spent months deciding how deep of a sale I should wait for after reading a ton of reviews. The only thing that was consistent was that the visuals were stunning (not a selling point for me - as long as it's not noticably ugly, I will still get immersed into the story), but I started up the game and was shocked. Choosing as outfit, Max was blurry, so I could barely see what she, or the outfit looked like. Then, when I started the game, everything was so bright. There was very little dark to contrast the brightness.
I finally figured out that it was probably because Shadows had been turned off. I turned them on and was immediately hit with a huge lag. I didn't even make it back out of the menu before I turned it back off. I'd rather play with ugly visuals than a lag. But it begs the question, what's the point of putting so much time and money into the visuals if people can't appreciate it? I don't care much for visuals, but when it was supposed to be the best part of the game, I feel slighted. Especially when what I have is ugly and very distracting.
My computer isn't a high performance gaming computer, but it's not low performance, either. It's definitely faster than my laptop, and up until this point, I haven't had any issues with lag, even with MMOs, so I find it hard to believe that the problem lies solely with my computer. And quite frankly, a story-based game probably shouldn't require an expensive gaming computer in the first place. Admittedly, I'm not a tech-strong person, so there might be an easy solution to any and all of this, but considering I have spent months deliberating over this game, this was not a strong start. I intend to continue, but I'm not expecting much. I genuinely hope other people are having a better experience with this game, but considering the reviews, I won't hold my breath.