Life is Strange: Reunion

“Boring story, not worth the price.”

“If the story intrigues you, perhaps find a streamer to watch play this so at least you won't fall asleep during some of the most horribly boring story beats I have encountered so far.”

“The soundtrack was non-existent, I can't recall a single song I'm going to go and listen to.”

“The music transitions were abruptly stopped at times which felt awkward, but the soundtracks were really good!”

“The music also does not have that indie feel to it.”

“Let me name in detail some things you might expect in the current build: textures loading in after a scene has already begun, severe fps drops with no justification in a given scene, graphical artifacts especially when it comes to characters' hair and special effects, lighting issues, noticeable "cut" frames in cutscenes where the screen momentarily turns black to switch between animations, the rewind and its effects on the game world being less polished than ever, bizarre facial animations on less important dialogue, pixelated shadows on anything lower than hella high, and potentially messed up dialogue, choice and consequence strings (although in nothing major on my playthrough).”

“You cannot look at any part of this game, without seeing glitchy visuals, the world struggling to load every time the camera angle changes, full models failing, repetitive animations etc. this was clearly made in the cheapest possible way and i cannot recommend it in this state, or ever, since the story really is not worth playing.”

“It's clear that this game was pumped out as fast as possible, as there's a slew of graphical issues and poor animations, such as extremely exaggerated facial animations that make a lot of conversations incredibly uncomfortable and uncanny, as well as blatant asset reuse of de maps and spaces without much improvement.”

“The gameplay unfortunately lacks anything new and Max's use of powers is less interesting than the original, mostly feeling like a bonus dialogue finder that you rewind after asking a question. Understandably so, because the idea is trying not to cause a storm. I think there was room for more gameplay features focused around some of the other abilities more often.”

“This game felt much shorter than previous titles, maybe because it is not episodic and lacked some gameplay elements such as timed events, teleporting, and avoiding detection.”

“The rewind mechanic is broken and outside of very few sections, almost nothing in the game is designed around it.”

“The game is also a technical mess that is unoptimized and runs very poorly even on high-end PCs.”

“The optimization is atrocious, the environments feel more empty and pointless than ever, and the combining of both decisions in one has made those choices nearly meaningless.”

“Game will quite literally melt your PC because optimization is not a thing devs do anymore; it's like you have a microwave next to your legs and it looks like 10% better than the original Life is Strange released 11 years ago.”

“To start off, let us establish that Reunion is an unfinished (as I am writing this), poorly optimized, cheaply created game prone to glitches, with quite obvious budget cuts and content lacks, even when compared to previous entries in the series, although with slightly adjusted pricing.”

“Game crashed twice, face animation glitches, not to mention the background going in and out, hair creating black voids, literal sound errors when dialogue overlap, character's eyes pop out of their sockets, mouth animations open too much.”

“It runs way worse than Double Exposure despite way smaller areas, there's a lot of graphical glitches and the animation quality not only sunk but gets progressively worse the further you progress.”

“The college campus has zero atmosphere.”

“Everything they built on Double Exposure, all the atmosphere, the campus, the characters, lost all the magic in this game; it feels like an overtime of Double Exposure that overstayed its welcome.”

“Due to the game using a lot of power, the loading screens that appeared sometimes ruined the atmosphere just when I cried my eyes out.”

“This pathetic garbage is just nostalgia bait for a quick cash grab; soulless and meaningless game; I am convinced this is just AI slop.”

“They could have brought back Warren, or combined LIS2; however, we got whatever this was, a forced ship and a sudden 360 on the previous characters and specifically male romance options. As always Deck Nine has made a cash grabbing game which is - in my mind - a massive flop and a hot pile of cringe one-liner garbage.”

“Was it that expensive to have Max's voice actor just go "it's just a building"? It only further highlights how rushed and cash grabby this was because you didn't even bother to do a second pass.”

“I can't say that this is a choice game since it shows little to no replayability.”

“There's nothing meaningful about this game, there's no replayability and outside of the two original characters there's no other character that stands out.”

“The only big negative is that there is very little replay value.”

“The fact that Max has some really solid character development at the end of Double Exposure, where instead of running from her powers and problems she embraces them and shares her true self with her friends, only for them to experience 'storm amnesia' in this game felt rather lazy. I was truly looking forward to the conversations that led from the end of Double Exposure in this one.”

“Nearly every interaction serves the main plot, leaving little space for the kind of subtle character development that defined earlier entries.”

“Much of the character development that occurred throughout Double Exposure was discarded over the course of Reunion, and some plot points that were planted for this conclusion had little to no effect on the story.”

“You will need a second life for grinding.”

“It takes a while to get into gear with some sections slightly tedious (frankly let the students screw up their own assignment), and others a 'rewind time until you get the correct answer' approach but it all comes together in the third act with a decent payoff and a nice weighty decision to round it all off.”

“The Abraxas storyline in this game was so tedious and annoying that I legitimately wanted to watch paint dry instead.”