Life is Strange: Double Exposure Review (SMUGZ)
This game focuses on Max's trauma from the original. As I would have hoped it definitely has a darker tone to it than the likes of True Colours, it does also improve on True Colours a lot too.
Only Chapter 1 & 2 is available right now so I'll update this review once the full game is out and I've finished it, but in the meantime here are my thoughts so far. The story is good and gripping, definitely the best plot we've seen since the original, without getting into spoilers you'll be exploring max's trauma and of course uncovering a new mystery, unlike True Colours this mystery actually feels important, and it's looking like it's going to have quite a lot of twists as we go through too. It does start pretty slow with Chapter 1, it takes it's time introducing characters and showing off the campus (which isn't a bad thing), and then things start to pick up in Chapter 2. Overall I'm hooked and very excited to see where this story goes.
The choices are also better here (I think), one of my major complaints about True Colours was the lack of real choices, nothing you did mattered and the game was pretty linear. Here I have already made several choices that have come back to bite me in the ass with certain characters. As usual I doubt this will have an affect on the overall plot, but it definitely does highly affect relationships with characters which is great. A certain character is currently very angry with me and no longer trusts me, I'm curious to see how this plays out.
The music so far is great, the menu music is a bit of a weird choice but everything else fits very well, I especially like the background music when you're walking around in a certain timeline, it's a vibe.
Visually of course this game looks fantastic too, again great use of colours between the timelines and the animations here are top notch, it's definitely Deck Nine's strong suit. The characters look great and their facial expressions say a lot.
Now let's talk about some of the issues. First of all performance is a bit off. I can get it running smoothly at 60fps 1440p with everything maxed out except for shadows (medium) and reflections (medium), honestly though I haven't noticed a change in fidelity when changing these settings. It's not a huge issue since it runs well and looks good with those settings turned down, but still I don't think it's the type of game that should need that much power, but idk. There's also no DLSS available which is pretty lame.
The other issue is bugs, there's nothing game breaking here or anything too serious, infact I've only encountered one bug in my 9 hours that's happened on two separate occasions, and that's with doors. For some reason Door's will just float in the air, it's weird but it doesn't break anything. This only ever happens with an interactable door and again, it's only happened to me twice.
Finally it's a minor issue but it's pretty big to me. PLEASE BRING BACK EPISODIC FORMATTING! I don't mean waiting months between each episode, but the way chapters work currently is "Start Chapter, thrown into the game, get to a climax, chapter end here are your choices". I really miss the old episodic feel where you'd get a view of where each character was at the end of the episode, and where the story is currently going over a musical montage. Then the next episode would start with a cinematic intro and then you'd be back into it, it's a small thing but I always thought that was really cool and I really hope D9 bring that back in the future, I miss it.
Overall I think this is looking promising. An interesting narrative with interesting choices in an interesting setting, pretty much exactly what I wanted from this game.