Time for that old-school ultraviolence - Trepang2 Quick Review

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Definitely play Trepang2 if you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for the first-person shooters of the 2000s like Half-Life 2 and F.E.A.R.. As “Subject 106,” a bio-engineered supersoldier who was part of a mysterious set of experiments by the Horizon Corporation, you’ll have an arsenal of bullet-spraying firearms and time-bending mind powers at your disposal as you work with the shadowy Unit 2-7 to take the evil company down. It’s intense, often scary, and absurdly violent at all times—so avoid if any of those things causes alarm.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played three hours of Trepang2 so far, which has taken me through two story missions, one side missions, and a couple rounds of “VR training,” which is effectively a horde mode with highly customizable difficulty. I’ve escaped from the terrifying Site 14, run a raid on a Horizon experimental site that was disguised as an end-of-life care facility, and hacked a server database somewhere in Sweden. In each of these places, I never ran out of bad guys to shoot at—Trepang2 takes its cues from John Wick when it comes to enemy mooks jumping out of monster closets.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Old-school shooting. We’ve hit the peak of the “boomer shooter” renaissance, and Trepang2 seems to want to usher in the next generation of throwback FPS: The shooters that came after Half-Life and which form the bridge between the Quake- and Unreal-inspired games of the ‘90s and the “modern military shooters” we know today in the modern versions of Call of Duty and Battlefield. True to form, Trepang2 has no aim-down-sights—I was always firing at a static dot in the center of the screen, but I could slow down time Killing Floor 2-style to take accurate headshots in the heat of battle.

• Multiple difficulty levels. Trepang2 features six difficulty modes, and I was able to select whichever I felt like tackling whenever I launched a mission at headquarters. Things can get pretty tough: I found the first mission plenty difficult on “hard,” and there are three more difficulty levels beyond that to potentially take on. Trepang2 is designed with replayability in mind, though—I could go back and attempt any mission I had already cleared on a different difficulty level, and the game always kept track of what my highest clear difficulty was on each one. Completing different missions on specific difficulty levels unlocks new cosmetics for Subject 106, and certain NPCs can spawn when the difficulty is high enough… which brings me to my next point.

• Cool “most wanted” system. In addition to its endless supply of tactically-outfitted mooks, the Horizon Corporation also employs an elite group of special “high-value targets” that will show up and act as mini-bosses in certain missions. They tend to be heavily armored and surrounded by guards, so when they showed up, I always knew I was in for a massive firefight.

• It’s scary! During my first playthrough of the initial mission, I honestly forgot that Trepang2 has paranormal themes going on. There were plenty of normal human bad guys to blast my way through during my escape, which involved as much skulking around in the shadows and creeping through air ducts as shooting at goons. That left me wide open for shock when I wandered into the darkened passageways below the tower at the Horizon facility in mission two, where suddenly everything was encased in alien gunk and I was ambushed by a horde of faceless, misshapen mutants. Granted, Trepang2’s spookiness can sometimes turn goofy: The Mothman boss grabbing me and going “blaahhhh” with his face up next to mine while he puked Mothman sauce on me was admittedly funnier than it was terrifying. Still, the overall sense of tension is great, and it always culminates in a cathartic, bombastic firefight.

• Reasonable gun customization. Trepang2 doesn’t have the ridiculous gunsmith options you’ll find in Call of Duty, instead restraining itself to a pistol, an SMG, a shotgun, a DMR, and a couple other weapons. All of them can be customized with a limited range of barrel attachments, sights, stock options, and laser pointers, some of which I found by exploring the first couple levels. I appreciated that it took a more limited approach—I don’t need ten different options for handgrips in a game where almost all of the fighting takes place indoors and in enclosed courtyards. I’m more than happy to trade that for dual-wielding.

WHAT SUCKS

• Right-click melee still messes me up. I mentioned above that Trepang2 has no aim-down-sights (the DMR does have a usable scope on mouse-3), and the right mouse button is instead used for Subject 106’s extremely powerful melee attack. The attack itself is great: Depending on where I aimed at an enemy, I would kick, punch, or strike with the butt of my weapon and send enemy mooks flying. Years of modern FPS training, though, have programmed ADS into my brain stem, and I kept ineffectively punching at people whenever I tried to take aim. Actually, maybe this “what sucks” just applies to me personally.

• Too much empty space. There’s a lot of unused space in Trepang2, both in the levels themselves and in the headquarters, which is spread out and completely devoid of life. It seems silly to have to trudge from one side of a secret military bunker to the other to get from the mission planning screen to the character customization menu, and there are large areas in each map that feel under-used as well. Maybe it’s space to pack full of enemies in “rage mode” difficulty, but as I’ve played, I’ve found it a bit disorienting.

💬Will you be arming up and mowing down some bad guys in Trepang2, or is old-school a no-go for your FPS tastes? Sound off in the comments!