When I’ve first caught wind of Trepang2 it looked like a really cool project – an FPS that’s attempting to recreate the explosive style of F.E.A.R. and Criterion Games’ Black from PS2, but with some of the more modern ideas thrown in? Sign me the hell up! Yet, when I’ve played the demo of the game, I found it to be… Well, sure – still explosive and stylish. But really boring, uninspired and with some of the worst level design I’ve seen in a major release FPS in a while. So, I’ve decided to ignore the game and would’ve continued to do so if not for some of the people I know, who said that the game was better than my initial impressions told me it is. And now that I’ve completed it, in its fully DLC’ed up version, I can say with confidence that my initial thoughts were spot on.
The main selling point of Trepang2 is the fact that everything simply explodes as soon as the firefight starts. Sparks, blood, guts, body parts and debris flying everywhere, and looking especially cool if you do it in slo-mo. But the game goes further than F.E.A.R. in terms of mechanics and also gives you the ability to grab enemies as shields and throw them, become temporarily invisible like in Crysis, your slide move (that has a dedicated button) is both defensive and offensive, you can customize weapons… also like in Crysis… This really is like mechanics of Crysis mixed with F.E.A.R., isn’t it? Well, it’s not a bad thing either way, and while your particular playstyle (and difficulty you play on) will make some of the moves more or less useful, it’s neat that you have this choice and it looks and feels good in motion.
Would’ve been nice to get a good game built on such a strong foundation, but instead we get Trepang2. Where levels are genuinely terrible and hard to read even when there’s not a bunch of stuff exploding everywhere. Where encounter design is incredibly uninteresting and at times frustrating. Where any attempt to bring in any supernatural horror elements (I guess because F.E.A.R. had it?) falls flat and the results make the game worse. Where the story is emphasized, despite it being horrendously stupid and poorly written… The game is missions based, with a home base you return to, and the whole process of resupplying and selecting missions is incredibly tedious, with some of the expected quality of life elements just being absent. One DLC also adds a survival mode into that base if you’re into that sort of thing. While the other adds a few weapons and a few missions that don’t really serve much purpose rather than making the game longer.
While I didn’t hate my time with Trepang2, I couldn’t help but feel that it was almost a prettied up investment pitch project or a mod. Though, honestly, in recent years I’ve seen mods and mods turned into full games that had more quality design in them than this. Yes, you can’t get anything quite like this in terms of a “F.E.A.R. – like FPS” experience, with this much spectacular stuff on screen. But you can get a lot of good FPS games, including the F.E.A.R. series, which are still much better than what this game is.