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Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals Review (PS4, PS5): Stuck in a Loop

It seemed like Alex was damned to wallow in limbo until the end of time. 2016’s Oxenfree had a dark…

Reviews Michael Leri 2 weeks ago

These Platinums mainly suffer because of how laborious it is to replay these types of titles, which often call for a few playthroughs. Running through games again to nab trophies isn’t a bad proposition — as shown by the Resident Evil 4 remake and the Dead Space remake — but it can be in this genre. Dialogue and cutscenes are often unskippable and walking speeds are usually incredibly slow. Having to crawl from story bit to story bit and listen to most of the same conversations again means trophy-related replays aren’t snappy. Even just going back to grab a single collectible can take far too much time.

Oxenfree 2 falls into this trap, too, since Riley’s movement speed is sluggish, and there’s no way to blaze past anything. Players have to hear about Jacob’s insecurities again and clamber up the same ropes with very little in the way of expediency. Trophy hunting would be significantly more tiresome if every game had these restrictions and forced players to hit credits at least a couple times.

Supermassive Games’ titles have had the same issue, not only contriving multiple trophies to encourage another run or two, but also getting players to sit through a lot of the same scenes. This approach doesn’t do this genre any favors since it points out how truly limited they often are. While The Dark Pictures Anthology and games like Oxenfree pride themselves on variability, second playthroughs often don’t differ too much. 

Oxenfree 2 has a few splintering points, but many of the choices players are presented with are in regards to how they talk to Jacob. Some lines are different, but that doesn’t distract much from how similar the rest of it is. Few games are truly that unique each time, and the trophy list shouldn’t make that even more clear.

Oxenfree 2 is also full of highly specific and missable trophies. It’s easy to forget to ping Evelyn after every transmitter, not tune into Maria’s radio station, or even pick the specific dialogue choices in two scenarios in order to unlock the “3 AM Food Friends” and “Merry Scary Christmas” trophies. Supermassive’s titles are rotten with these types of trophies, and they’re not much better here. Having to deduce how to trigger certain events or closely adhering to a guide is also not the most ideal way to play these games, especially when ignorance or a slip up can force yet another run.

Detroit: Become Human also has a few scene-dependent trophies and 1979: The Revolution calls for players to not miss a single quick-time event, but those games, unlike Oxenfree 2, at least has a chapter select feature to mitigate frustration. It’s not possible to skip around and mop up collectibles or grab the aforementioned missable trophies in this sequel for some puzzling reason. Not even the game’s final autosave lets players pick the other endings; those who don’t back up their save right before that choice are completely out of luck.

Trophy Talk: Street Fighter 6’s Trophy List Is Divided Up, But in the Wrong Way

People hate online trophies. Before the tired debates around auto-popping and 45-seconds Platinums, trophy hunters have long despised the multiplayer…

Features Michael Leri 2 months ago

There are some narrative adventure games with friendlier trophy lists, though. The Life is Strange series not only lets players skip around, but each entry also has a Collector Mode that strips out the story and makes collectibles easily accessible. Telltale Games, with a few exceptions, also takes the easy road and gives players the Platinum for reaching the end. Not every narrative-heavy title like this needs to be so simple, but they also show that a less prickly path is possible.

Games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, New Tales from the Borderlands, Heavy Rain, Last Stop, Beyond: Two Souls, and The Medium all suffer from many of the aforementioned issues, but Oxenfree 2 still is one of the most hostile to completionists when compared to many of its genre peers. Its glacial movement speed, inability to let players skip dialogue, nearly identical events, lack of chapter select, and very specific and highly missable trophies make it a true slog to complete. There’s even one completely bugged trophy on PS5 (which Night School Studio is aware of), but that’s not nearly its biggest problem. Its biggest problem is that it’s a multifaceted pain to complete that succinctly illustrates this genre’s trophy-related struggles.

The post Trophy Talk: Oxenfree 2 Highlights the Tedium of Narrative Adventure Platinums appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.

The Street Fighter 6 trophy list has three sections

Street Fighter 6’s three main modes are divided into three categories on the trophy list. But weirdly, the online modes are tied to the main one that contains the Platinum. This means that the multiplayer parts have the most trophies, and they are the hardest of the three. Players have to win a bunch of tournaments and multiple types of online matches to polish off that Platinum while progressing through World Tour only unlocks a scant six trophies. Fighting Ground, the suite of more straightforward and traditional modes, also only has six trophies.

This is backwards since the online trophies are harder, and they are the ones that are required for the Platinum, while the single-player trophies are far fewer in number, generally much easier, and, by and large, optional in regards to the Platinum. Even though the idea of sequestering each mode is interesting, the execution has made it more or less the opposite of what some have wanted for years.

Trophy Talk: The Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Platinum Isn’t Too Grindy

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is much bigger than its predecessor and that can spell trouble for trophy hunters. More space…

Features Michael Leri 3 months ago

Multiplayer also doesn’t need as much of the hook that trophies provide since playing against other people in a fighting game is nearly endlessly replayable (more so for a fighting game as great as Street Fighter 6). The appeal of getting better is the driving factor behind the grind, not the trophies. Games should all be intrinsically rewarding, obviously, but a quality trophy list can add some extrinsic rewards to fill in the parts where the intrinsic rewards aren’t as long-lasting as they could be. 

Single-player modes in fighting games are inherently less replayable (and not always as rewarding as multiplayer), and they could use those incentives and trophies. World Tour has plenty of missions to complete and a ton of Masters to level up, but there’s very little that pushes players to engage with it all. Capcom has heavily advertised World Tour as a main feature, yet its small and forgettable trophy list makes it seem like hardly more than an arcade ladder and doesn’t push players to explore. Swapping the position of World Tour and the online Battle Hub in the trophy list would give more replayability to the less replayable mode and make the Platinum more accessible while still giving online warriors a small carrot to chase.

Street Fighter 6’s trophies have the annoying, overly long, and sometimes vague descriptions that Capcom has done multiple times, but, even with some inverted priorities, it is still the best and most even Street Fighter trophy list so far. While tournaments have yet to play out, almost every trophy is attainable and doesn’t require the maddening grind that the other Street Fighter games have. There’s no need to achieve a high rank online, beat a ladder on the hardest setting, hit high levels, finish hundreds of matches using certain moves, beat hundreds of opponents, or win 10 online matches in a row. Capcom took some unorthodox steps to split this trophy list in bold ways, and it’s an example other developers should follow. But hopefully those future teams know what trophies to prioritize and attach to the Platinum.

The post Trophy Talk: Street Fighter 6’s Trophy List Is Divided Up, But in the Wrong Way appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.

Is the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Platinum trophy difficult?

There are only two small sticking points with this Platinum. The “You’ve Got A Friend” trophy that unlocks after directing each companion to attack 10 times is easy enough, but it’s missable since it’s not possible to use every companion after the credits roll. The game generally isn’t hard enough to require this sort of extra assistance, so it can be easy to overlook this ability and miss out on the related trophy.

The trophy that will take significantly more time, however, is the “Splurgle” trophy that calls for players to unlock every item in Doma’s shop on Koboh. It deviously doesn’t outright say it, but it demands all 100 Priorite Shards. Priorite Shards show up on the map after getting a certain upgrade, which makes this significantly less tiresome since doing this without such assistance would be a nightmare. The only troubling shard is the notorious one hidden in a fickle pile of Nekko poop.

However, the map doesn’t differentiate between Priorite Shards, Jehda Scrolls, and Datadiscs, so players have to get lucky or intuit what collectible the vague “Treasure” marker is referring to. Jehda Scrolls are only on Jehda and Datadiscs are only in Jedi-relevant areas like Meditation Chambers, meaning it’s not as random as it could be. Most Priorite Shards are locked to Koboh, and that narrows the search, too. “Most” is the operative word here since a handful are spread across other planets, a tricky caveat that is not implied in its menu.

Respawn Entertainment will ideally add some better collectible counters down the road, but it has much bigger issues on its plate. The game still suffers from a gluttony of technical issues and slowdown across platforms, and that should be a priority. There have been reports of a few glitchy trophies (like the “Perk of the Job” trophy), but these hiccups are relatively tame when compared to other 2023 games like Atomic Heart and Before Your Eyes that launched with notoriously buggy trophies.

While grander in scope, this is all less annoying than Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for multiple reasons. Fallen Order lacked fast travel, which made getting around and grabbing every last doodad a laborious chore. In Survivor, players can see where a collectible is and generally warp pretty close to it.

Is it a grind to get the Platinum trophy in Jedi: Survivor?

Survivor also doesn’t require players to literally grab everything. Scans, cosmetics, Datadiscs, Jehda Scrolls, seeds, stim canisters, and Force echoes are all mostly optional, and the list only asks players to kill every bounty and find every fish, both of which are listed in the menu. Only legendary enemies are not listed in the menu, but it’s not too hard to remember which alien beast you’ve slayed. This is in stark contrast with Fallen Order that made players track down every last object; something that was, again, made even worse by the lack of fast travel.

Popping the Star Wars Jedi: Surivor Platinum takes roughly the same amount of time in both games, but the philosophy of only requiring players find a portion of everything is much less harrowing. It’s a strategy that leads to less burnout and is generally more enjoyable than searching every nook and cranny, especially since looking for the last few pieces of any collectible can be crushingly tedious.

Jedi: Survivor’s remaining trophies are rather simple, straightforward, or even funny, like the one that has players dropkicking an enemy while wearing a mullet. It’s not a perfect trophy list, but Respawn’s restraint in not turning this into a collect-a-thon Platinum that takes 80 hours is commendable because it could have very easily been that. Being a Jedi requires patience, but thankfully the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Platinum trophy doesn’t require an overwhelming amount of it.

The post Trophy Talk: The Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Platinum Isn’t Too Grindy appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.