Life is Strange 2: step forward or two back?
Life is Strange 2 combines one thing with the original: both games are half quests, half interactive films. Yes, in fact, the actions of the games occur in one universe, but this is expressed only in a pair of references. What you need to understand first of all – Life is Strange 2 is not like the first part. She should not, but many fans of the first part will buy the second and will be unhappy that they did not have the same experience that they had when passing the first part.
The main characters are the brothers Sean and Daniel Diaz. It is ahead to play for Sean, he is an ordinary teenager 16 years old with ordinary teenage interests and problems. His younger brother is only 9. As a result of tragic events, the brothers are forced to flee to Mexico, hiding from the police. In view of this plot tie, the game ceased to be a simulator of a lamp town in an American outback, turning into an adventure Road-Muy.
Perhaps all the troubles come from here. It seems that such a setting can help to reveal the player’s selection system and a non-linear plot, because the journey of the brothers can flow differently, and it would be interesting to choose the best way yourself. But this is not in the game. It is clear that in a huge game consisting of five episodes, it is impossible to branch the plot hard. For everything just do not keep track! But it was possible to make branches within the framework of one episode with a “bottle neck” in the form of a change of episodes, where, with each passage, the player comes to approximately the same. Yes, there are places in the game that will play a little differently, depending on the decisions you have taken, but this is a rarity that is found only a couple of times.
As a result, influence, by non UK casinos accepting UK players and large, we can only on our younger brother, raising him/scoring him/pamper him/mocking him, or even all at once! This is perhaps the best that is in the game, the system of education is fresh and interesting. You will constantly think: “What will Daniel say about this? But is it exactly better for us both?»Often you have to choose between the well -being of the brother and his upbringing. Relations with his brother influence many little things in dialogs and his actions, this makes Daniel a living character, to whom you are attached. But this does not work perfectly. Due to the fact that the general plot moves along the rails, the main decisions of the younger brother will still be the same. Because of this, I sometimes wondered from some actions of Daniel, who did not fit with the relationship that I tried to build with him.
What will we do besides upbringing? Travel. The Diaz brothers are going to cross all of America, how much time will it take for it? There are a lot, so weeks and even months take place between episodes. After the pace “One day is one episode” of the first part, it seems that events are in incredibly in a hurry and do not show us much. It is understandable, the game is not a film, and if you show any location, then show completely, with all the details, because the player wants to study. Because of this, the impression of the elasticity of the plot is created.
The brothers are traveling together, so secondary characters appear for a short while and look flat, due to the fact that they simply do not have enough time to open up. Almost any character can be described by a couple of words, the opinion of them is formed immediately after the first dialogue and then does not change. In the original Life is Strange, we initially have the same pile of the most ordinary characters that seem to us cliche, but they had five more episodes in which we made it possible to look at them from different sides. From different sides! The trouble of the characters of Life is Strange 2 in their one -sidedness, this is either an evil uncle who prevents the heroes in their mission, or the kindest good man who can sacrifice himself for the sake of poor brothers.
The game is excessively politicized, and this is expressed in characters. The developers shout to our person: “Look, poor emigrants, poor informals, poor representatives of sexual minorities! They are all so infringed on how bad they are.”And the main character, despite the player’s opinion, supports such a view of the world, but how, when every” evil “character he he met is a racist who oppresses Sean in view of his Mexican roots.
The genre of games with elections darts from side to side, experimenting with a format, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It cannot be said that Life is Strange 2 is an unsuccessful experiment in this regard, it develops well the ideas of choice and its consequences, but in terms of the liveliness and naturalness of this choice is inferior to the first part. Unlike the original, there are almost no solutions that you need to rack your head for a long time. This time the choice reflects your passage style, and the often selected option will seem the only true. In the first part, each decision made was given hard. It is also worth noting that now we have more endings, which are affected by your decisions adopted throughout the game. Someone might like it, but I am rather for quality than for the number.
That in the end we have? We can say that the game has become much more dynamic, the plot is constantly in the movement that occurs around the Diaz brothers captures the player. This is a good story that is well told, but the most important thing is that the game has become a useful experience for the interactive movie genre, where something new is very rare. The game has become a big dangers with an adventure with a mass of various locations, but whether it should be sacrificed for the sake of this integrity of history, characters and atmosphere?