Life is Strange (Xbox ONE)

Life is Strange is an episodic game from Square Enix that focuses on the life of Maxine Caldwell as she experiences life at Blackwell Academy, an arts school for the criminally insane, wierdos who think taking pictures makes them the coolest people in the world and presumably a bunch of normal people who don’t feature in the game.

The story starts when Max (short for Maxine) finds out that she can rewind time for some reason. Kind of like the Butterfly Effect. She witnesses a shooting and rewinds time to undo the event. This sets in course a series of events that will change the face of the small insular world of Blackwell Academy as we know it.

It’s a game where the choices you make determine the outcome of certain aspects of the game. All I will say is that it’s worth playing and if you want to find out about the story I won’t ruin it here. However I will say this.

SquareEnix is a Japanese company and Blackwell Academy and the inhabitants of the surrounding area are American. Therefore, they have a very bizarre way of interacting with each other and a lot of the conversation revolves around being nice to people or being not so nice to people and quite often this leads to Max delivering some very fake dialogue. Fake to the point where I don’t buy in to what she is saying so I don’t think the other characters would either.

Other than that though, the game is well structured but a little slow in places. They do get the time travel aspect right though which is a very tricky thing to do.

The music in the game is massively popular with fans but from my perspective, it is a-typical of the depressing teenage years angst that seems to try to copy the OC. I found it depressing and overdone but I find that with most modern music so it’s probably a taste thing more than anything else.

Graphically it’s very pretty and a lot of work has gone into the facial expressions and vocal delivery. This makes sense considering it is a story driven, character focussed game and it’s nice to see developers focussing on the areas that make their game good.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 60 Achievements

There are five episodes in Life is Strange. I’m not going to consider the other four episodes as DLC and this seems to upset people that they have to pay for something over and above the first episode but there we go, to each their own.

There are 12 achievements per episode and thanks to ‘Collection Mode’ there is nothing that is missable. There are ten optional photos to take in each episode, each with an achievement (which makes sense as Max is a photography student) along with another for completing the episode and another for getting all of the optional photos.

Sometimes I would complain about the lack of variety in the achievements but for a story driven game with lots of different outcomes from your decisions, I think they have got this one right as it would take forever to cover all of the outcomes. That said, one of two achievements for different endings wouldn’t have hurt.

Downloadable Content – N/A (and whine all you like about it)

Life is Strange is a relaxing story-based game perfect for achievement hunters and casual gamers alike. There is some replay value once you’ve played it through just to see what different outcomes your decisions have, however personally I won’t be exploring these as I usually find the diversity is limited and overall, disappointing.

Pneuma: Breath of Life (Xbox ONE)

This was another offering from Games with Gold that also turned out to be a really quick completion. The game itself is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for the gamer within a game who has issues. I found the game to be underdeveloped, up its own ass and frankly annoying, all of which I will cover in the following paragraphs.

The game is undeveloped. There are six chapters in total which see you solve puzzles to progress. I’m citing ‘undeveloped’ as the key here because clearly their concept only gave them a few hours of casual content. And that’s without a guide to solve said puzzles. It’s short, too short even for my standards which is a shame because some of the puzzles were quite good. Others were fucktarded though so even 50% of the content they have isn’t worth the time it took to develop.

Up its own ass refers to the concept. I’ll all for innovative and original storytelling but to play a game as the subconscious of a gamer talking to itself about the world around it with the awareness of the fact the avatar is being controlled was just a step too far for my tastes. There’s breaking the fourth wall and then there is what Pneuma does – smashes the wall into little pieces and rams it down our throats.

On to the last subject – frankly annoying. As I’ve said, the ‘story’ is dictated to you by some guy who I can only imagine is the most annoying human being in existence. The narrative – and the content of the narrative for that that matter – is so chirpily delivered, that I found myself reaching towards the mute button after less than an hour of play time. The adjectives to really describe how irritating this narrative is have not been created yet so I won’t try and think of any new ones.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

There’s not much here to do either which is good I suppose considering the narrative comments I’ve made. Eight out of Eleven are obtained by completing the game – a task in itself.

Aside from completing the game, there are three additional puzzles to solve each with their own achievement. The most frustrating of these is the one which requires you to look at five paintings in order. This is annoying because it required you to replay chapters to do so. It feels like it’s only in the game to get you to play the game a little bit more than if you just set out to complete it. But can you really blame them when they have such little content to begin with?

Downloadable Content – N/A

As you can tell, I’m not a fan of Pneuma but I have seen some favourable reviews so it might be down to personal taste. Also I’ve seen some people describe the narrative as funny. To each their own I guess but I’m assuming they must have been able to enable subtitles to stick it out.

Lifeless Planet: Premier Edition (Xbox ONE)

Now the clue was really in the title with this one, but apparently I’m on a self destruction mission and need to play all of the most depressing games out there in a row. Lifeless Planet follows the story of the nameless American astronaut as he gets stranded on a... Lifeless Planet. The opening section of the game sees him search for the rest of his crew.

The sound effects and environments are as expected with the game title... lifeless. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing in this instance as it is completely in keeping with the theme of the game. It’s gun-metal grey and rust brown for a reason. Or in this case, faded yellow sand colour and dead plant brown but you get you drift.

The gameplay is where a game like this can really come alive. Unfortunately though it remains very lifeless. You walk around the game environment trying to solve puzzles involving rocks, lasers, the claaaaaaaaw and weird radiating power sources. You have a jetpack to assist you in making some jumps but you will spend most of the game slowly walking across desolate landscape after desolate landscape with no real way of knowing you are heading in the right direction.

I can’t tell you any more about the story without ruining what is a magical experience so I will leave it at that. However I will say this. I found the story aspect of the game to be the most enjoyable and it certainly made walking across the Lifeless Planet worth it.

The one thing that really fucked me off though, and I will cover this more in the achievement section, is the lazy development during the certain parts of the game. At one point I was casually walking through the environment after making a spectacular jump and then just disappeared through the floor my death. Not amused.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Another relatively small achievement hall here but a few are worth mentioning. There are only three unmissable ones from playing the game from start to finish meaning that you have to go out of your way for the completion. Just how far out the way is the question though.

The achievements are structured in such a way that you will need to do two playthroughs to get the most out of the game. The reason for this is that there are achievements for dying in various ways... and another for completing the game without dying at all. You can now see why my earlier falling through the floor fucked me off. What a complete waste of time it would have been to have got that far with a flawless run and have the game screw me in the ass. Thankfully it didn’t happen on my flawless run.

To cover off the death achievements you have to get killed by something mysterious, catch on fire and fall down. There is another achievement for dying in every possible way but the others are secret. There’s not many though so shouldn’t prove too troublesome.

After you have successfully died, there is the small matter of collectibles. You have to gather 15 science samples from the environment. Most of these science samples are actually rocks from planet earth which doesn’t seem to indicate a lot of science in my opinion. There is another for collecting twenty documents along the way and you should get this through natural progression.

Now on to some of the most serious ones, which incidentally includes the first achievement I unlocked. At some point you will come across an abandoned town and to get the first pain in the ass achievement, you have to spend 15 minutes there. Doing fuck all. Just standing around. You can’t even pick your nose as you are in a spacesuit.

This brings me on nicely to the last achievement I unlocked, at the same time as completing the game without dying. You have to complete the game in under four hours. During my first playthough I started wandering if this was even possible but after doing a complete run through of all the platforming sections I was able to nail this at my first attempt.

There is another achievement for playing the game for ten hours but this gets covered from the two playthroughs. I overshot considerably as well because I spent a lot of my first playthough dicking around.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I stated earlier it’s an enjoyable story but the gameplay is so ridiculously repetitive and samey that it made the second playthrough not fun despite the fact it was a speed run. I won’t revisit it and I don’t think it’s one for achievement hunters but it’s definitely worth a run through for the story.