Developer: DONTNOD Entertainment
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: PS4, Xbox One, Mac, Linux, PC
Tested on: PC
Life is Strange 2: Episode 4 – Review
After another three months wait Life is Strange 2: Episode 4 is finally here! Last episode we ended off on a pretty big cliff-hanger, so a lot of fans must have been excited to finally see how the story continues. Episode 4 is called Faith and this time it seems you’ll have quite some quality time with Sean. Not to worry, you’ll still have enough moments with the little adorable rascal Daniel in this Episode. After playing, testing and enjoying Episodes 1-3, we were for sure excited to see what Episode 4 had to show us. Be aware that this is a review for Episode 4 of Life is Strange 2 so spoilers are possible, if you want to read previous Life is Strange 2 reviews you can do so by clicking one of these: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3.
Story
Sean and Daniel have been out on the road for a while. They have been running away from everything after their dad died. Since there was a misunderstanding, Sean and Daniel are now also wanted by the police and not just to explain what happened to their dad. This actually causes them to keep running since Sean is scared he’ll get split up with Daniel. The plan is to go to Puerto Lobos where their dad had a little bit of land.
Spoilers up ahead!
After the seriously failed plan to steal money from the weed farm, Daniel had used his explosive powers leaving many injured including his brother Sean. As we come into episode 4, we see Sean having a dream about his brother. As he wakes up, he realises he is still in the hospital after having had a glass shard in his eye. It turns out Sean had been in a coma for a couple of months. He now has to live with only one eye and nearly no depth perception. Sean is actually in police custody and to be transferred to juvenile hall after he heals up. As he hears that there are no leads yet on the missing Daniel, he decides that he has to escape before he is truly stuck. Finding Daniel is priority number one for Sean. Sadly, when he does find Daniel after a long and difficult journey, Daniel seems to have bonded with the wrong people.
Graphics
The graphics of Episode 4 are still good looking. However, it seems like there were quite a lot of animation bugs present this episode. A whole lot of clothing pieces clipping through characters or objects. Hair that seemed to be unnatural and glitching out. As well as lip-syncing even fully stopping for a couple of seconds during an important scene. It is quite sad that these issues weren’t noticed by the developers or the testers. Clothes clipping can be looked over but hair really glitching out and even lip-syncing fully stopping stands out so much that it lowers the enjoyment of the game. What doesn’t help is that the mouths fully stopped moving right when the camera was really close, so it wasn’t like you had to look closely to see the issue.
Sound
Music in Life is Strange is still pretty great and works well with the storytelling. There are again a few moments where you can just sit down and enjoy the surroundings with nice relaxing background music. The voice actors again did a great job portraying their characters. The few new faces that appeared this episode also had a fitting voice actor to portray their emotions.
Gameplay
Life is Strange 2 is an adventure game where you follow Sean and Daniel on their obligated road trip. This episode still uses the same mechanics as the first episode. It seems like you are mostly alone with Sean this time though. Episode 4 seems to be an episode where there is no added mechanics, unlike the other episodes which nearly all had something special. Since you are also alone with Sean there is no training Daniel or other events. This episode is more fully story-based with a lot of choices and searching for clues.
The choices you make this time also don’t seem to have a huge different outcome yet. You won’t see any difference in your choices yet and the ones you have to make for Sean when he is alone also aren’t going to influence Daniel. There are a lot of choices to do with feelings and Sean’s way to deal with people that wrong him/have wronged him in the past. There are still enough scenes with action in it, to not make it a “fully talking about feelings” episode.
Besides some of the issues we talked about above, it seems like the subtitles sometimes also stopped working. This might not be an issue to most but if you are used to subtitles and they suddenly stop for a few sentences in the middle of a conversation it can get quite confusing. This along with the other issues makes it feel like they might have rushed a bit to release the episode. Certainly, when the clipping, no mouth movement, and no subtitles happen all at the same time in an important part of the episode.
Conclusion
Life is Strange 2: Episode 4 is still graphically good looking however it seems like this episode there were quite a lot of issues still present. Hopefully, these issues will get fixed soon through an update since no mouth movement seems like a pretty bad issue to have happened in a close-up scene. This episode was also focused more on the story and didn’t have any other special mechanics besides the basic ones. There were some good backstory discoveries from both Sean and other characters. Even if this episode might have had some problems, we are still looking forward to the next episode.
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