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.
