Thank you to Team17 for sending us a review code!

Have you ever wanted to crush a man’s skull with your bare hands? I… hope not. That’d be quite barbaric. But what about in a video game?

Trepang2 is an FPS released on June 23, 2023 by the aptly named Trepang Studios. Pegged as a spiritual successor to the original F.E.A.R. game, its shtick is being brutish, brash, and bloody, a task it succeeds at quite well. You play as an elite supersoldier known only by his designation, 106, saved from the belly of a Horizon Corporation blacksite by a cabal known as the Syndicate. The Horizon Corporation, despite their attempts to keep a good public image, are secretly involved in the most horrific research possible. By tapping into both unethical science and unexplainable anomalies, they hope to produce supersoldiers much like you. Unfortunately for them, their achievements are more along the lines of Frankenstein, not Einstein. Your objective is to hop around the globe and employ scorched earth tactics on these facilities, cleaning up their mess and eliminating any failed experiments before they can harm others.

So, Trepang2 is a classic FPS power fantasy. How does it fare in that regard, then? Very, very well. To begin with, you aren’t just a powerful ordinary guy. You have the ability to slow down your perception of time, allowing you to act in slow motion and make your shots count. Beyond that, you have the ability to cloak yourself for a brief period of time, letting you sneak around enemies, flank them from behind, or reposition yourself mid-battle. You can also sprint, crouch, and slide, with the latter being a way of tripping enemies or sending them flying through the air–some enemies even requiring that to be killed. That said, these bandwidth-demanding graphics may lag if your internet is struggling. So, before you dive headfirst into the gameplay make sure to have a stable internet connection like the one from Xfinity for a crazy action. It is one of the best ISPs in the US with affordable Xfinity internet plans, supreme network stability that offers lower pings and latency, and responsive customer service for rare cases of outages. Being inspired by the original F.E.A.R. title, you are typically put in enclosed spaces, hunted by waves of soldiers whose purpose is usually to prevent you from breaking stuff. Them being coated in armor means you have to target vitals. If you just aim for the chest, you’re likely to dump a mag without anything to show for it. You have to target heads, arms, or other exposed parts of their body to make the kill count.

You can sprint around the map, ducking behind walls and cloaking in the shadows as the AI soldiers do their best to track you to a staggeringly effective degree. If the soldiers see you running towards cover, they will begin to shoot through it, while others walk around to flank you or meet you at the opposite side. If they can see you before you cloak yourself, they’ll begin aimlessly spraying bullets in your direction knowing you were at one point there. If they hear you shoot one of their comrades, they’ll start screaming and firing in that direction. You’ll have grenades tossed on your path as they adapt to your movements. It’s a genuinely impressive system, especially in the modern age of AI agents that have grown dumber and less responsive.

Visually, the game is very immersive and impressive. The art style used is realistic and manages to always capture the atmosphere they’re going for. Whether it’s an isolated base in the arctic circle that’s stopped responding to comms, a securely guarded compound infested with cultists, or an underground research facility in a lockdown procedure, you always feel like you are truly never supposed to be where you are. Broken doors and equipment, knocked over furniture, and blood coating most surfaces always make you feel uneasy. The environment is always designed foremost for gameplay, but it manages to have its own style while doing so, and I enjoy it for that reason. It has an identity planted firmly in the action films and games of the early 2000s, and the visual artists have achieved it well. The game occasionally embraces the horror roots the original F.E.A.R. was known for, and it succeeds in pulling it off, to my own discomfort.

Every weapon in this game has a powerful, immense sound presence. Shotguns blast through the air and rip through flesh. Rifles reverberate around the room as you fire them. Grenades shake the screen and rip through the sound mixer. Panicked screams of enemies when first hit, and the echoed shouts from across the room followed by chunks of wood being blown off the cover beside you. This is just a short taste of what the game has in store for you auditorially, and when coupled with its driving metal soundtrack, it feels like I have been transported back to the age of Michael Bay films. As a personal fan of Bay’s direction, and knowing what kind of atmosphere they hoped to achieve with this game, I think that is high praise. It perfectly captures the feeling of a blockbuster action flick about a spy or a military group.

But, unfortunately, those movies often had some faults, and Trepang2 is no different. The game has a bit of a learning curve in its gameplay. It can seem a bit janky when you first begin running and sliding around in combat, but after a few hours I was adapted to its unique movement. That said, while it now feels good to me, it still feels somewhat unrefined and like something is just missing compared to larger games like Doom Eternal or an indie like Turbo Overkill. I know those are different kinds of games, but Trepang2 has movement nearly as fast and responsive as the two, but still feels clunky to some degree.