Life is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection

Life is Strange Arcadia Bay Collection allows a new generation of gamers to experience one of the 2010's best adventure games. Just don't expect the labelled 'remaster' to provide much of an added sheen.

Life is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection is a fairly good porting, not extraordinary nor particularly exciting in terms of contents, but surely interesting for the new dimension that it brings: the experience of this coming-of-age narration in portability.

Having the opportunity to get this collection for Nintendo Switch, and being able to live out the story of Max and Chloe anytime and anywhere is highly recommended. However, we believe that Square Enix was able to even further polish and improve the game by taking advantage of the unique possibilities that the console has to offer.

These are OK ports, sure, but they could have been a lot better: With barely passable graphical quality and mediocre performance, these ports surprisingly fall behind those of another game published by Square Enix on the Switch - NieR:Automata - a high speed character action game. Now that's a twist.

Life is Strange Arcadia Bay Collection features two great games, but the visuals leave a little to be desired. The story of Max and Chloe still hits you hard, but overall, it's let down by various texture and animation issues.

The games contained in the Arcadia Bay Collection are still excellent, but the updates made here make these the objectively worse versions. The motion capture updates to Life is Strange look fantastic, but are hard to see through more realistic textures that look out of place compared to the water color style of the original. If you can, stick with the original games on PC, but if you’re a console player this is an acceptable way to experience these incredible stories if you can look past the issues.

Even if you only play Life Is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection in handheld mode and you've never played either game elsewhere, this offering isn't great. At $40 for a slightly worse version of two older titles, I can't recommend the Arcadia Bay Collection in its current state. It may be worth a pickup at a steep sale, but even then, if you can play it on another platform, do yourself a favor and do that. Both games are still enjoyable narrative adventures with some cool moments, but the Switch iteration simply doesn't do justice to the original releases.

Life is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection is a mediocre remaster and Switch port of two great games in the series. While the saga still holds up narratively, the gameplay experience is unfortunately greatly hindered by several issues.

At the end of the day, it’s tough to recommend Life is Strange: The Arcadia Bay Collection as it is near launch. It’s easily the worst-possible way to experience two classic games and not in small ways. The dramatic drop-off in texture quality and abundance of texture pop-in hurts the experience, as do long loading times. The foundation of what made the games so great is still present, but hampered. In hindsight, having it titled as the Arcadia Bay Collection was a tip-off that this wouldn’t be the exact same as the Remastered Collection that hit other consoles. This is a downgraded version of the experience in every way except voice acting and should only be played by those who must have it available on the go.