I played the first episode of Life is Strange and I seriously enjoyed it. It looks and runs beautifully, and the story is pretty interesting so far.

I think the time rewinding mechanic is fantastic, and it definitely makes the consequence-decisions harder when you know that while you can rewind time, both answers will result in unforeseen circumstances. You can't just pick the one that won't lead to bad times ahead, and I love that.

Some of the dialogue is a bit funny, but then I found out the dev team is French, so you can excuse it for French writers trying to write American teenagers, but other than that I honestly can't say there isn't anything I don't like about it. I really can't wait to see where the story leads.

I've also been playing Dying Light. It finally came out on disc over here, so me and a few friends have been co-oping it and I have to say I'm really impressed. While it has the obvious Dead Island foundations, I can definitely see why Techland wanted this to be a new IP, as opposed to Dead Island 2. The combat feels a lot tighter than before, and the parkour elements work really well to allow you to traverse the city. Even though the game has a lot of greys and browns, it still looks fantastic, and some of the lighting from fires or lights at night look simply gorgeous.

Speaking of which, the night time parts really are something special. Every zombie game claims that zombies at night are much stronger, and usually it just means they hit harder, but fuck me, the Volatile zombies that come out at night in Dying Light are fucking scary. There's a quest very early on where you need to get to a supply drop, the sun is setting and all the while we were making our way towards it, my friends and I were all legitimately worrying about it getting later. Then after you deal with the drop, it's suddenly night, and what proceeds is some of the most tense and adrenaline-fuelled gameplay that I've experience in a long time. The long run back to the Tower, running and climbing over cars/zombies, it was quite pulse-pounding, and then just standing behind the UV lights back at the Tower (they don't like UV) was such a relief. All through the advertising, Dying Light was very firm that this was the selling point. 'Good Night, Good Luck', 'Hunter by day, hunter by night' and so on, were all used to describe this day/night gameplay change and they hit the nail on the head, and it makes what is a very bland genre feel fresh again.

Finally, I 100% the achievements for Sunset Overdrive, and going back to it really reminded me of just how fun this game is. I hope it has sold well enough for Insomniac/Microsoft to consider a sequel down the line, while I'm not usually one to demand sequels, I feel like Sunset City/the Sunset Universe has a lot more to give. It would seem a shame to only get one game out of such a fun and colourful universe, and one that feels solid to move around in using the traversal techniques. I feel like this game is simply a must-have for XB1 owners, whether you're thinking about getting one in the future or you already have one now. Akin to something like Uncharted/TLoU for the Playstations, it's a great example of an exclusive that stands out from them crowd and deserves to do well.