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.