Just a passing glance at Trepang2 should leave you in no illusion as to the game series that it is influenced by. Indeed, Trepang2 doesn’t just take a leaf from the book of F.E.A.R, it seemingly takes the whole tree. Slo-mo combat? Check. Overly armoured enemies that need killing? Check. Huge amounts of gore? Check. Tight corridors which permit those three things happening on a regular basis? Check. Honestly though, it has been so long since F.E.A.R darkened our doorsteps (the last mainline entry in the series, F.E.A.R 3, shipped for PS3 all the way back in 2011), that Trepang2 actually feels a lot fresher than it actually is.
Trepang2 PS5 Review
A Furious Though Overly Brief Ode To F.E.A.R That Still Satisfies
Trepang2’s story casts players as a next-generation soldier who, after escaping a black site bunker and promptly murdering everything with a heartbeat on the way out, is brought into the fold of a secret military company that wants to expose the black site and the other experiments that occurred there. Sure, it’s not exactly an award winning narrative, but it sets the scene well enough for the furious action that follows. Unfortunately, Trepang2 doesn’t put its best foot forward to start with, since the opening ten minutes or so has you creeping around the bowels of said black site, without weapons and avoiding the attentions of the various special forces soldiers. Put simply, this isn’t what Trepang2 is all about.
If those initial ten minutes make your blood boil as it did mine, you needn’t worry too much because when Trepang2 puts that first handgun into your hands, the ultraviolence kicks in and it rarely lets up. Anyone who has played F.E.A.R will know what to expect here, since Trepang2 absolutely puts such a premium on hyperkinetic violence, that it makes you feel like you can do anything.
Whether you’re blasting a bloody path through a group of enemies, running off a wall before landing a flying kick that sends a foe careening across the room, taking a guard hostage and then pulling the pin off the grenade on their belt before throwing them into their friends, or destroying a gas canister and watching chunks of enemies spray through the air, the gunplay in Trepang2 is never anything less than consistently satisfying. Of course though, there is a limit to how much you can use the slow-motion and invisibility abilities, both of which regenerate as you damage and kill enemies. Additionally, there is also a stamina bar too which regulates how much you can do on a consistent basis which can, as you’ve probably guessed, be generated by either standing still or by killing enemies.
While such restrictions might seem a little overbearing at first, it makes sense to have them, not least because it provides a decent level of pacing to Trepang2’s combat which were it not there, would likely make you tire of its slo-mo murder gameplay loop really rather quickly. As a result, when the violence kicks off and the rumble of its heavy metal soundtrack hits a crescendo when the bullets start flying, it quickly becomes clear that there isn’t really another shooter on the market right now that plays like Trepang2.
Strangely, you can also go maximum Sam fisher too if you like by using silenced weapons and shooting out lights if you want, performing takedown executions on enemies and generally sneaking about the place. Clearly though, Trepang2’s obviously strengths lay in its furiously kinetic confrontational combat and it’s much more fun when it is played with that gameplay style in mind.
Other than its story, which is almost entirely forgettable, where Trepang2 stumbles the most egregiously is in terms of its duration – the whole thing just ends too quickly and can be completed in just over five hours. With six story missions and six side missions which can be tackled in different locations around the globe, there isn’t much to do beyond the intoxicating gameplay loop of Trepang2’s almost peerless combat. Sure, there is some incentive for completing these missions on the harder difficulties thanks to the miniguns, bolt launchers and rat bombs(!) that are unlocked when you do so. Other than that though, content in Trepang2 is thin on the ground and that’s a crying shame considering just how solid the core of the game is.
Something else that I feel should be acknowledged is that while Trepang2 is indeed generously inspired by the F.E.A.R games, it doesn’t nearly boast (or attempt to replicate) The Ring/Carrie-In-An-FPS shtick that those titles manage to so successfully pull off. So horror hounds looking for a shooter that pulls the jump scare trigger as reliably as it pulls other triggers, might come away from Trepang2 feeling a touch underserved.
When it comes to the visuals however, Trepang2 impresses, thanks to an overabundance of sparks that quite literally spray out of the walls and the environment whenever a single round hits, some truly gnarly gore, some great shadow effects work and a super solid 60 frames per second which keeps the action looking smooth and feel eminently responsive as a result.
I never wanted Trepang2 to end and that was the problem – it ended much, much too quickly for my tastes. While it lasted through, it was a glossy, flying-kicking, baseball-sliding, slow-motion neck snapping first-person shooter extravaganza that provided me with some of the most satisfying shooting I’ve seen all year. More of this, please.
Trepang2 releases for PS5 on October 2, 2023.
Review code kindly provided by PR.