Trepang2 from Trepang Studios is a high-octane first-person shooter set in a world of heavily militarized private corporations waging secret wars for power and influence.
You play as 106, an experimental super soldier liberated from the Horizon corporation’s black site lab by a rival secret military force. With your enhanced abilities and a chip on your shoulder, you systematically strike out with this new group at various Horizon strongholds to extract data and eliminate key personnel. Despite the by-the-numbers story setup and incredibly obvious late-game twist, the narrative didn’t offend enough for me to tune it all out, and some isolated sections actually offered intrigue. I particularly liked a spooky mission gone wrong that traps you within the internet-famous “backrooms.” But no mission feels mechanically different from the last as you unleash bullet-time hell on all manner of enemies in your path.
From the world map you’ll select sequential missions that will shuffle you through tight hallways into larger rooms filled with cover points for combat. It’s distinctly linear; there are side missions that will drop you into small open arenas and pump waves of enemies in while you run between objectives like planting charges or hacking servers, but this busywork only highlights how strongly the game leans on its combat.
Gunplay is solid. There’s a heft to the sound and animations of weapons firing, and enemies are highly reactive to the bullets that hit them. You have a crouch slide that acts more like a dodge as you can do it in any direction and from stealth, or after a melee you can grab enemies to use as shields or push them into others with their grenade pins pulled. There’s a good variety of armaments from pistols and SMGs to grenade launchers and chainguns. Unlockable gun customization allows for some really fun and powerful modifications like incendiary shotgun shells or harpoon-like penetrative rounds. Tormenting enemies with your arsenal is a good time, but it can grow stale even with the inclusion of sci-fi powers like Focus, which lets you dodge bullets in slow motion, or Camouflage that briefly makes you invisible.
Fighting identical rank-and-file soldiers feeds the power fantasy in short bursts, but tougher sequences throw an absurd amount of baddies your way. The sheer amount of screen shake, particle effects, and other visual noise in combat scenarios reinforces the use of your Focus and Camo, but both skills are governed by a stingy stamina bar and neither can be upgraded outside of an in-game cheat. I still far preferred the variety of differently armed soldiers to the one instance of otherworldly monsters, which pretty much mashed every variant of zombie from other games into one extremely annoying acid-drenched hybrid, then threw a mob of them at me. Though that section is a one-off in a generally enjoyable 8-hour campaign.
Visually, Trepang2 has a fairly bland aesthetic, yet it can look impressive due to great lighting and visual effects that can easily convince you that there’s much more behind its explosive fire fights than there really is.
Ultimately, that’s the exact sense I get from Trepang2. It’s pretty and makes a lot of noise in order to distract from how little it’s actually doing. Yet it in no way felt like a waste of time as there’s fun to be had with its blustery gunplay. Its biggest issue may just be that it’s not good or bad enough in either direction to be remembered. The game is out June 21 on PC.
Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Trepang2.
