3.5/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Trepang2.

It's sort of like Quake mixed with Call of Duty. There's maybe better examples but I don't play enough of this ilk of FPS to have a better comparison. It's rapid movement, weapon switching, tight areas full of enemies and hordes of enemies with a dash of spookiness layered in. The maps aren't quite built like Doom though the soundtrack is clearly inspired by it. The 'right weapon for the right enemy' gameplay of Doom isn't replicated here either. But more like Quake you're constantly roaming around a map, scavenging guns and armor and health, swapping guns repeatedly based on what's available. Blasting enemies that don't stop coming. It's fast, frenetic and fun. You have a Focus Mode which is just like bullet time from Max Payne and then you have a short timed cloak that lets you maneuver around the map with both a sprint and a powerslide. The slide topples enemies as well. So most of the game you're cloaking to avoid detecting, sprinting and power sliding into enemies to knock them over then hitting bullet time to make sure you mow them all down. There's no scoping (well there is with modified gun attachments that are not generally, readily available to you) so it's all hipfire. It reminds me a little of Call of Duty multiplayer where the most effective way to play on maps like Nuketown is to sprint slide around and hip fire. You're doing that repeatedly here in Trepang against tons of enemies that are lobbing grenades at you and various other tricks like being overarmored or throwing smoke bombs to disorient you. Enemies aren't anywhere near as varied as something like Doom, so it is a bit one note. But that one note is good. It's fun. Movement feels great. The game is gory and fast with occasional spooky horror moments and some occasional stealth missions. Stealth is very effective but it's also not nearly as fun. Trepang's movement and rapid gun switching are just an adrenaline run, it feels less rewarding to slink about the maps. But you can be very successful by going the Hitman route and grabbing enemies from behind and cracking their necks. It won't take you but halfway through the first level to really figure out the entirety of the game. Guns don't carry much ammo so you'll be swapping them for found weapons often. Especially and particularly on higher difficulties where enemies are bullet-spongier. You won't get more than two mags out of nearly any weapon and you'll be lucky to guarantee you find more ammo for that specific weapon dropped by enemies. More reliable to pick up enemy weapons since those enemy types will continue to drop ammo for that weapon. What that means is you won't be taking many of your enhanced and upgraded weapons very far into a level. Levels do contain spots to upgrade those weapons again but there's no guarantee you'll have the weapon you want or you'll find ammo again for it. So while some weapons do develop new ways of play and strategies can change, the reality is you're gonna spend most of the game fighting most enemies with scavenged base level weapons. Just like in the very first level. So you find yourself figuring out the flow of the game very quickly. And in a game where gameplay is the entire point. Well, that's not fantastic. There are new difficulties and they get very hard. Rage Mode in Trepang2 has to be legitimately one of the hardest fps experiences anyone can have with a game that wasn't made solely for anti-player design (are there I Wanna Be the Boshy fps-equivalents?). But fundamentally the gameplay will not change much. That's okay. The main story on normal difficulty I gather would take you 8 hours. Add in completing on another difficulty level and the side missions, maybe finding the weapon unlocks and you're looking at 12 hours tops without completing the game on every difficulty level. So the game has to get out on its front foot fast to show you everything. But I couldn't help but think the game left a little on the table. Levels could've made better use of verticality, there could've been more reason to use explosive weaponry, there is a long range scoped weapon but you'll virtually never need to use it as the game design never lends itself to this being very optimal. Perhaps instead of cloaking there could've been some other power up you could swap to. Given the way the game ends I could see them letting you choose other agents with other abilities. There just wasn't that much. I know the game is cheaply priced and it does execute well on what it is. But that doesn't mean what it provides is beyond rebuke. Trepang kinda plays like the best mod of a different game. A Garry's Mod lobby. Maybe a custom map on an old Call of Duty for PC. A private server on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory with edited physics and enemies or even like an old school Quake map. A game unto itself though? It's fine but not excellent. For as fun as the gameplay and movement is, and it is fun, it's not enough to keep you locked in to take on all difficulties and max out all levels. You'll rarely find a game so fun to play but a game that also runs its course in the opening half hour. It was fun and entertaining to beat it on normal difficulty. It was harder but not anymore fun to beat it on Very Hard. On Extreme the game was just kinda boring? Sure it was hard. Sure I was dying a lot. But I wasn't feeling rage or frustration. I wasn't feeling a compulsion to continue on and a reward for my success. I was just kinda going through the motions playing the same game the same way I had for hours already with level after level that played mostly the same (with the exception of the mostly stealthy spooky backrooms meme level). There just wasn't enough depth. Not to mention that the final level (the fight against the helicopter) is a wild difficulty spike on all difficulties. No fight or level in the game is anywhere close to the rooftop helicopter fight and at times the fight just feels poorly designed and plain unfair. I never bothered with rage mode. I played a couple levels and knew that either I didn't have the skill to do it nor the desire to put in the effort to get good enough to do it. The game is just not engaging enough to drag that sort of commitment out of me. I did have fun with Trepang2. I just wish I had more fun. The core gameplay of a truly good game is in here. But there's just nothing else going for it. The juvenile story which features enemy dialogue that is, and I'm not kidding, a string of 11 consecutive "fucks" and then in the second-to-last level an enemy saying "fucktard" without any sarcasm, is just bad. There's very little depth to it. The game flat out tells you what the big twist will be in the very first mission. You'd have to be blind to not see it coming and Trepang2 is okay with that. They don't care about the bland, generic storyline with faceless enemies draped in identical military garb spouting swears at you. They don't want you to care either. It's all there to provide you something to shoot at and to justify it. At the end there's a twist for the sake of spicing things up. Like putting a single bay leaf on your unseasoned, backed chicken breast. It's not doing a whole lot. But that's not why you play Trepang2 and it's not why the devs want you to play it either. The story is an obligation. Skip it. Ignore it. The best parts are tucked away in these way-too-long text heavy exposition dumps in the ingame codex. Most of them are very poorly written, but some do an okay job conveying the lore. In all instances you're best served ignoring them. Trepang2 just wants you to shoot shit. And it's made a game that is moderately fun to shoot shit in. At a pricepoint between $10-$15 on sale I think it's a fair asking price for a game with movement and gunplay that in genuinely entertaining. I imagine most people inclined to play this will have a fun time with it. I did. Just know that this is more of a "play it once, as fast as you can, in as few sittings as necessary" kind of experience than a "platinum trophy, 100% completion, play it annually" kinda thing. It is worth pointing out that the sound design for the guns is excellent. They're loud and realistic sounding. Very loud. Fire fights with hordes of enemies is an assault on the senses and is very well done. Some other sounds leave a lot to be desired but a pretty entertaining Doom 2016-esque soundtrack underscores frantic and booming firefights in a way that is genuinely pretty engaging. I'd be inclined to check in with Trepang Studios for another game in the future. One where hopefully they expand on their talents for engaging gunplay with a better knack for level design and any semblance of narrative storytelling.