Not as good as Life is Strange and not made by DONTNOD (though maybe that's a good thing after they went off the rails), but very good, better than LIS2/Tell Me Why and made me like Chloe Price a lot more.
I absolutely loved Life is Strange, having it as one of my favorite games of all time. Unfortunately, the series split between DONTNOD doing a lot of activist-style content and then Deck Nine taking over to do more LIS1-related stories. While it means that both parties are making lesser-than-LIS games, this one is as close to the heights that LIS reached at the time of its publishing.
The Positives:
-They were able to maintain a lot of the same vibes of LIS with a new team, which was good.
-The Chloe-Rachel relationship is very nice.
-I like how you learn where a lot of Chloe's personality came from (though, to paraphrase the Drinker's review of Solo: A Star Wars Story, not everything needs a backstory/origin story and you don't have to know how everything came about) and get to see how she got to where she was in LIS.
-They did a decent job giving the game some gameplay when the core mechanic of the first game is impossible here. It even fit with the character, even though trash talking as a "super power" is pretty strange (pun intended).
-I felt something from the story, meaning they did it right.
The Negatives:
-Like Back to the Future, the time travel aspect of LIS makes it so much fun. You can't have that here for obvious reasons, so it's not as cool in that regard.
-The game obviously ends up where LIS is since it's a prequel, so it's more backstory than new developments. But you do get to meet Rachel Amber, which is nice.
-If you're looking for gameplay, this has a little less than LIS—there's only so much backtalking can do, and so it's more story-driven (which is fine with me, but others might not like it).
-I actually like Chloe better here than in LIS (because Max is offsetting her in the first game, so she is just annoying a lot of the time), but they give her the backtalk mechanic so she still has an edge to her. They do show her in between her old goodie self when she was friends with Max earlier and her rebellious self, but I expected a little more of the goodie side. We know from LIS what caused her to act out, so it's not out of character given what happened, but I still think it should've been a little more in between than it was. But I could be wrong since the trauma could've hit hard and caused her to be that way pretty quickly.
Overall, I like this second to the original LIS thus far in the series. I look forward to playing the others to see what happens, but I also know it's difficult given how the first game was so perfectly structured that making games around it has a high risk of screwing up the original by retconning or contradicting it. But this one was fun and gave me the feels at the end, so I think it's really good. I have some minor issues, but it's hard to compare anything to the wonderful game that is LIS. It's not fair, really, and I think that the only reason this isn't seen as better than the reception it gets is that LIS was so great. This was good, and I hope they can keep the quality up as long as they keep making sequels and related IP. Either way, I'll always have LIS in my memory.
