Life is Strange: Double Exposure2024

Double Exposure exactly on the fine line between "okay" and "well don't have to". On the one hand it is great that Max returns and you get to know a lot of new and interesting characters, on the other hand the game experience is easily spoiled by lousy performance and story droppers. Max is now, more or less, in life and teaches art and photography at a fictional university. The ghosts of the past still hover over her and don’t want to let go of her, even though her new group of friends from other teachers (and students) are doing a lot to make her let go. Each person in the group gnaws at their own problems, be it Max's best friend Safi, who wants to publish a book but is rejected, or the receptionist Vinh, who does not quite know whether he is going up or down the career ladder. LiS 4 cuts many interesting stories, but does not continue any really satisfying, so that all characters end up with a medium-sized question mark as to how their CV will continue. The whole background is often mentioned but rarely executed so that the last 10 years of Max and the other people somehow remains only a side note, but often seems to be of great importance. You notice that the story wants to work towards another part (which appeared recently). Especially the most important part, the story, falls down at LiS:DO somehow. Pacing is all over the place. The ending comes out of nowhere and raises more questions than it answers. Before you have to plague yourself through partly very long sections, in which almost nothing worth mentioning happens. Also the places to which the game leads us, bring little variety into the overall picture. Basically, you are only at university and in a bar. All the characters know each other and have a distanced but somehow friendly relationship, which seems extremely set up so that the story makes sense in the whole. These strange dynamics disturb the storyline even more in my eyes. Max's new power to switch through two parallel worlds is interesting but has been chewed through too often in film and play in recent years and (once again) only opens up to advance the storyplots. A missed opportunity, especially since it turns out that there are apparently many people with powers in the universe of the game and the second power of the game, which has another character you meet, is much cooler than Max's but so on. Graphically, LiS:DO takes another big step compared to LiS True Colours, which already looked really good. The facial animations are really photorealistic and challenge great AAA productions in their accuracy. Really impressive. The game world is also quite detailed, but compared to the character models a bit drier and worse textured. Occasional texture loaders, clipping errors and pop-ins ruin the otherwise harmonious overall picture. Unfortunately, this graphical progress also brings its big bugs. The performance is the bottom drawer. Aside from a 60fps lock, the game, even on low settings, makes my (and many other) PCs sweat. Only with an accurate setting of the Nvidia 3d settings could I achieve stable 60fps on high settings without running the PC on 99% load. This should not happen in a game like LiS, because everything is already pre-rendered and relatively linear. 1440p 60fps would have to make every PC in 2024 loose and LiS should not be the gold standard. Away from it, the audio slipped frequently, so that it came to unsightly and loud crackling. Twice the game crashed with Unreal Engine error messages. All in all, LiS:DO is a good game but not comparable to all predecessors. The forces are quite barren, the story confusing and badly packaged and the performance hellishly bad. For 50€ it is still very expensive. In the sale, fans of the series can strike for 20€ or less, otherwise I would not recommend the game. Playing Part 1 and Before the Storm is required to understand many parts of the story. LiS:DO is a nostalgic game with a great atmosphere, but it falls short of my high expectations in terms of narrative and technology. Let’s see if the new offshoot (LiS Reunion) becomes more than just fanservice and concludes the series well.

Translated from German·Show original