Life is Strange 2 Review (kmudry2)
TLDR VERSION:
3 out of 10. Largely a painfully slow and boring interactive story game that is sloppily written along with mostly uninteresting characters. IMO, the devs should have instead focused on better pacing, along with telling a gripping story using characters that we'd actually care about. What we received as players was padding out the game length (about 25 hrs for me) with dull conversations and looking at completely banal everyday objects in people's homes ("Look, here's grandma's shopping list, maybe she'll buy us ice cream this week!") I'm not joking, it really is that bad for the overwhelming majority of the game. IMO, it's not worth buying or playing Life is Strange 2 when there are so many better options out there in the same genre for the same price.
Just a PSA, if you're unfamiliar with this niche gaming genre (interactive story games), there is very little actual gameplay involved. It's largely like watching a serial television series and you get to pick some basic dialogue options and make a few big choices along the way.
Yet, almost every time something interesting finally happened in any of the 5 episodes (and that was usually only 1-2 times per entire multi-hour episode), and it looked like the story would finally get moving, the writers somehow found a way to near immediately bring it right back down to dull and boring, almost every single time. It's a negative talent for writing at that point....
Also, I'd say about 75% of the main characters are written as clearly depressed adult losers who can't figure out even the most basic aspects of life (working = money = food & shelter = your life won't totally suck, DUH!!). The few others are largely portrayed as completely over the top violent race--ists. So there's plenty of cringeworthy w0ka-cola characters/dialogue/situations here, if that is your cup of tea. All I want in a story game is well-crafted story, played out by interesting characters, regardless of all the writers personal political ideologies they want to try and feed you, and this game delivered on neither. It is rounded out by a cast of voice actors that were either flat-out miscast, or just weren't very talented. Lots of over-acting, under-acting, just flat out boring or fake sounding voice acting. Graphics are about average for this genre and price range. So not much to write home about on any of those glaring game issues....
I picked up the game for $10 on sale, and it was still not worth it, nor the time it took to complete. I found it increasingly difficult to make it through all 5 chapters, continually hoping that it would ultimately get better. It did not, except until maybe the very end. Too little and too late at that point.
If you are looking for much better games in this same interactive story genre, I highly recommend any of the following over Life is Strange 2: The Wolf Among Us, Tales from Borderlands (the first one), The Walking Dead multi-game telltale series, Batman telltale series (2 sets of games), Until Dawn, Mass Effect Legendary Edition (incredible story over 3 huge games and has real gameplay).
If you still want to try LIS 2, I believe they give away the entire 1st episode for free. I highly recommend you play that the entire way through first. If after that you think it is up your alley, then maybe this game is for you. If like me, you played through episode 1 and were largely underwhelmed and bored, but when FINALLY something cool happened at the very end and you think "This will definitely be better in episode 2".......nope it doesn't get better, so hopefully this review can save you the time and money to try something else.