The Council Review

"Episode 4: Burning Bridges"

Campaign (Spoiler Free)

The fourth episode of The Council takes a nose dive in terms of quality being sporadic, yet still revealing some interesting plot points. It seriously got weird this time around as it starts with the random task of getting a dagger and then learning mysterious parts of your past. It's weird, and all over the place as the entire game is shifted. It's almost like there should be ten episodes and this is a starting point as nothing will be the same.

I'm not sure if this is a focus to get additional seasons, but damn does it get strange. There are new abilities, completely revamped plot points and the whole momentum has been shifted. The revelations were rather surprising and seemed completely random, furthermore the connections you now have were purely bizarre. I liked the shift in terms of fancy new ways to play, yet at the same time I was just confused the entire time through. It didn't help that a lot of this was just walking around with minimal interactions.

Gameplay

This isn't strictly cinematic as you do walk around and scavenge for supplies within the environment. You gather items to help in general conversation. Using your abilities creates a stress on the body and you need to balance how many points you use in each encounter. This is aided by the selection of a class and the abilities you get with it. The skill tree is open, but that initial start really can define your entire playthrough. The more you level these smaller points within the classes, the more dialogue you can get access to.

It also helps you to unlock further abilities to detect environmental aspects and even skip aspects of the game. The world is quite detailed being intimate as a setting, yet large in scale. It's all heavily detailed and for some reason the performance was slightly worse on Xbox One X this time around. The loading screens were instant and the characters were smooth. The voice acting felt hit or miss here and at times the mouth wouldn't move while audio was being spit out.

The Conclusion

The Council Episode 4: Burning Bridges is a very weird penultimate episode that doesn't make a whole lot of sense while being all over the place. It's rather confusing honestly and it just skips along with the characters seemingly being fine with what's happening. Your character is just cool with world shaking revelations and the voice acting was really weak during emotional points.

The performance wasn't great on Xbox One X once again, and this episode felt like just an awful lot of walking. I'm not sure I like where they've left things, yet the potential is interesting. I like the new power I now posses and the fresh knowledge, but it seems too late to receive this. I'm assuming there might be another season as the whole story has been completely shuffled and thrown all over the place.

Read our Life is Strange: Before the Storm Episode 1 Review
View our Episodic Games Hub

The Council Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 6.0