If you ask someone about the F.E.A.R. franchise they’d probably just remember it as “that horror shooter on the Xbox 360,” and completely ignore the fact that it was actually a solid action shooter in its own right that just happened to have a creepy little girl in it. Fans of F.E.A.R. are quick to point this out when you don’t mention that detail, and it’s a little strange that few other games have tried to capture the same feeling of being a super soldier that moves so fast they can slow down time. Fortunately we now have Trepang2, an indie-developed love letter to F.E.A.R. and all that it entailed that recently came out on PC and will soon be on consoles as well.
Let’s get something out of the way right away: the gameplay is why you’re going to want to pick up Trepang2. If you hated the gameplay in F.E.A.R. or 2007-era non-Call of Duty FPS games then you probably won’t like it, but if you never played those games or loved them then there’s a good chance that Trepang2 will grab you immediately. The ideal way to play the game is with flash and style by using the game’s great mobility through its sliding, jump attacks, and bullet time to chew through the scores of enemies you’ll encounter in each level, but the best part of Trepang2 is that you don’t HAVE to play it that way to make the game feel good. I’m personally not great at these “frantic” kinds of FPS games so I played the game a little more methodically with bullet time and headshots, but the occasional power slide against enemy ambushes and the satisfying gore explosion when you fire your shotgun helped fill in any gaps in the super soldier fantasy that my “headshots only” style might have created. The game also provides an alternative fantasy with stealth options that give you the power to turn invisible and assassinate enemies with sneak attacks and silencers, but this is a somewhat half-baked gameplay option since the game is so dark it’s hard to move around often without your flashlight (which enemies can see), most weapons can come with laser sights (which enemies can see), and the cloak energy runs out in less time than it took for me to type the last twenty words. Plus when it’s this much fun to “go loud” in a game why would you ever want to use stealth options?
If I had one complaint about the combat it would be the occasional lack of ammo in some levels, particularly for weapons like the DMR, grenade launcher or LMG. Not that these sorts of weapons have common ammo drops outside of games like DOOM, but you’re generally only fighting regular soldiers in Trepang2 so I never found much of a reason to pick up or equip those heavier weapons partially due to this lack of resources when the shotgun (which also doesn’t get as much ammo as the other guns) usually does the job just fine against the occasional enemy that’s a sponge. Other military games typically don’t have this problem since they just have interchangeable ammo, but Trepang2 is very much from the school of “this gun only gets ammo from its own type,” which works in arcadey games where you can get ammo wherever you want such as the aforementioned DOOM but works less well in a game where your weapon drops are dictated by the enemies that you’re killing if all those enemies only carry the same three weapons (pistol, SMG, AR).
If I had TWO complaints about the combat it would be that your energy meter for your bullet time power, called Focus, only regenerates when you kill people compared to your cloaking power that regenerates on its own. Now I’m fine with the cloaking power doing whatever it wants, because it’s terrible, but it feels really bad to not have your Focus regenerate even at a super slow speed. I’m not playing a game with time powers to NOT use my time powers, and while it does regenerate from kills fast enough that you can theoretically keep it going forever if the enemies never stop charging you, instances of that happening are few and far between. Still, there is the occasional matter of game balance to consider and the game feels good whether your Focus is full or not, so I’m not going to make a big deal about it beyond saying that it makes some bosses less fun than they could be when you can’t use your bullet time against them.
What I am going to make a big deal about is how the game’s missions play out. You have about a dozen missions, with the story moving forward in campaign missions while you also have side missions that you can do at any time, and I just feel like Trepang2 needed to do a better job finding a proper tone between all of these levels. Since we’re a spiritual successor to F.E.A.R. the game will routinely dip into supernatural horror with the occasional monsters or just the traditional “spooky lights and noises” that you might remember if you did play F.E.A.R.. However in the F.E.A.R. games these effects were on constant display throughout the game while Trepang2 goes for a very minimalist approach. One level you’re just fighting dudes, the next you’re in a dark hallway covered in blood while someone whispers through the walls, then you’re back to fighting dudes, then it’s spooky shadows. There’s rarely a fusion of FPS action and horror on display here and when there is I don’t really feel like it capitalizes on its own concept enough to cushion the blow when we swing back into a less interesting “regular level” immediately afterwards. The side missions are even worse as they’re almost all wave-based affairs where you have to defend a progress bar against multiple enemies can disrupt said progress bar, which feels like it’s missing the point of a game where you can slide into enemies and knock them into the air while firing at their friends in slow motion. Sometimes the environment is adjusted enough to make this formula more interesting, such as on the oil rig level, and there is one standout side level that does try to do something a little different but even that one eventually ends with wave-based combat, but inevitably in all of these you’ll have one guy that you have to hunt down just to trigger the next wave. It’s nice to have shorter bits of gameplay compared to the occasionally lengthy main missions but at the same time the “oh more of this again” doesn’t encourage me to go on to the next one.
But go onto the next one you should, as the main game is ridiculously short without them. I’d say it’s about 4-5 hours on normal if you skip the side missions and maybe 6-7 hours if you don’t, which is something I’d be making a fuss about if the game wasn’t going for a reduced price of $30. Criticizing an indie game over it’s length when it’s been priced with its length in mind feels like blaming a tree for not being able to run a marathon, so with that in mind I’ll keep some of my other “it’s an indie game” complaints limited to this paragraph. The big one is the ragdoll physics that flop around and make far too much noise when you run into them, followed by the usual glitches you might see in games like this such as weapons floating in the air or enemies stuck in floors, though the latter only happened once and that in itself is rather impressive considering the amount of punishment you can inflict on soldiers in this game. My last “indie game why are you mentioning it” nitpick is that the subtitles and character names could have used one more round of proofreading, as characters routinely say either more or less than what is written out in the subtitles and the dialogue in one mission in particular says you’re going somewhere with two characters but their names are completely different when you hover your cursor over them. Oh and I’d be remiss to not mention the helicopter boss fight that is so poorly designed that even the devs seemed to realize it and the game’s checkpoints seems specifically designed to nerf it.
But again, all of that is a minor inconvenience when a game made by four people feels this great to play, and it’s hard to write a long review about a game that’s this short but also this much fun. Whether you’re power sliding through a group of enemies while dual wielding SMGs, drop kicking someone’s arm off, or using your bullet time to leap dramatically down a flight of stairs, there’s a lot of action to enjoy in Trepang2 and if these sorts of games are your cup of tea there’s a decent amount of replayability to be had with lots of difficulty settings and cheats that you can unlock to change the experience even further (think like the skulls in Halo). For $30 you could do a lot worse, especially if you’ve played F.E.A.R. before and were missing this kind of FPS gameplay for the last decade.
