Trepang2 Review

Trepang2 tells the story of an amnesiac escaped soldier, Subject 106, with supernatural abilities with revenge on his mind. Our protagonist is helped by a mysterious heavily guarded blacksite to escape. As you progress through the story, you’ll finally get your memories back all the while discovering unsettling mysteries.

Trepang2 is pedal to medal first person shooter, or FPS, where players will run, jump, slide and shoot their way through a bevy of enemies. While first you’re going up against human soldiers, you’ll quickly come across unnerving and unsettling creations. Players can carry two weapons at a time; dead soldiers will drop weapons you can swap out if you run out of bullets.

While the core mechanic is shooting your way through this bloodbath, our protagonist has two interesting and very useful, versatile skills. You can either temporarily slow down time akin to Max Payne giving you a chance to line up your shots and you can also become temporarily invisible to creep up on enemies. Sliding also has a offensive aspect to it. You can slide on enemies to knock them down; and it’s quite useful against shielded enemies. You also have access to throwables such as grenades, fire grenades and tomahawks(!) of all things.

Another fun mechanic is the ability to grab enemies as meat shields. Once you have an enemy in your grasp, you can snap their neck, thrown them or hide a grenade on them and kick them towards a group of enemies. While this sounds pretty barebone, there are sequences where you’ll need to grab enemies for puzzle solving. If you’re struggling, the dev has put a few cheats at your disposal that can be enabled/disabled. As complete certain objectives such as completing the game or completing specific levels on a specific difficulty level, you’ll unlock new ones and modifiyers that will make the game more challenging like you can’t reload or disabling cloaking skill.

As you explore each level, you’ll be able to pick up weapon parts allowing you to upgrade weapons when finding upgrade areas represented by a big green storage box. You’ll be able to add a stock to reduce recoil, laser sight or even compressors. There’s also a bevy of collectibles hidden for players to hunt throughout each level. In between missions, you’ll be in your safehouse where you can change your gear, weapons and also where you select the mission, campaign or side, that you want to attempt.

The game looks great. While not fully on par with the recent Call of Duty entries, the game’s visual are pretty solid; although while I understand why it released on Xbox Series S/X, I’m convinced it could’ve also run great on Xbox One as well. The ambiance is perfectly balanced where some areas are more opened, action driven where you’ll have intense firefights and other levels will have more of a creepy, unsettling vibe. It’s the first game this year to give me legit chills. Audio wise, the game is spot on. The soundtrack is a heavy metal banger and in more claustrophobic, creepy areas, the game relies on silence and ambiant noises.

The more I played, the harder it was to find something to nickpick about; but as you know, nothing is perfect. The game’s main nuisance is definitely the forced visits to the safehouse between visits. While it’s a nice way to get a respite and switch up your gear, it breaks the flow of the game. You have to go select your mission and then trace back your steps to reach the chopper that will bring you to your destination.

I’ll put it this way: Trepang2 is my personal game of the year. The game is a blast from start to finish with a perfectly balanced paced, decent arsenal of weapon, fun, albeit familiar, powers, action packed, intense boss battles. Sure the few detours to the safehouse are annoying and flow breaking, but it doesn’t hinder the whole experience. If you’re looking for an intense shooter or you, like myself miss the F.E.A.R. series, Trepang2 is the closest we’ll get. Don’t miss out.