I think the first thing that needs to be mentioned when talking about Trepang2 is that the name of this game is pretty random. After a quick search, you can find that trepang is a term that refers to sea cucumbers, often used in Asian cuisine. Dive a little deeper and you’ll learn that the 2 in the title doesn’t necessarily imply that this is a second game in a series. granted, there doesn’t appear to be a prequel of any kind. Some people speculate that the game isn’t even called Trepang2, but rather ‘Trepang squared’ hence the positioning of the 2 in the title. All of this is nonsense, and I’m really going down a rabbit hole that doesn’t need to be explored to appreciate the game itself, but it’s definitely odd, and kind of sets up some fair expectations for what the player is about to experience; fun nonsense with little to no context.

From the moment you launch Trepang2, you’re met with a main menu that has nothing particular of note, except that from the get-go you have the option of unlocking and playing with cheats earned in-game, but this isn’t found in an options tab. It’s placed center stage right on the menu screen in the following order: New Game, Cheats, Options, Credits, Quit. None of the cheats are unlocked from the beginning mind you, as each of them must be unlocked through means of completing certain missions on certain difficulty levels.

The cheat options all seem pretty generic and fun like they’re supposed to add nonsensical replay value, much like the unlockable cheats from older games like GoldenEye 64, except for one cheat in particular that caught my eye… ADS with all weapons. Um, hey? I’m sure most gamers are already aware that in most first-person shooters, especially ones that give off a ‘tactical’ vibe such as this, aiming down the sights to improve your weapon’s accuracy at the cost of decreased speed and agility is commonplace. Could it be that the team that made this game wanted the player to focus more on fast-paced gameplay and less on precision and accuracy?

It certainly seems that way. As with all games, before actually diving into a new game, I then checked the options, checked off graphical settings, balanced my audio settings, and looked up the key bindings so that I have a general sense of what I’m about to get into. This is where I noticed that by default, melee is assigned to mouse 2 (right mouse button), and zoom/ADS is assigned to mouse 3 (middle mouse button) for toggle or the Z key for the hold option. It doesn’t take very long to get used to, and all of the controls can be reassigned to whatever you’re comfortable with, but it reinforces the fact that precise aiming does not appear to be an important factor while playing this game and that much is clearly evident before even starting the actual game.

There also aren’t any lean mechanics to have you peek around cover at all. I guess the idea behind these choices is akin to, “Why lean around corners and line up precise shots at the bad guys when you could sprint in guns blazing like a madman, then trigger slow motion and murder everyone in a blitzkrieg style, blood-soaked gore fest?” If done right, this can feel very satisfying as the recent iterations of the Doom franchise have clearly shown. Does Trepang2 hit that same sweet spot? In short; sort of. Let’s explore how and why.

The game looks pretty solid in terms of world design, doing the Unreal 4 engine its due diligence, even as we start to enter the dawn of Unreal Engine 5’s latest showcases. The lighting in a lot of areas is serviceable at best. Oftentimes, early on in my playthrough, I found myself quite lost because there wasn’t much in the way of on-screen assistance to help you figure out where the next objective might be, or because of the poor use of lighting within the world itself. I can recall a few instances where I couldn’t see the door I was meant to go through. While there was clearly an attempt at illuminating the way to go in the not-so-obvious way that games tend to try and direct your attention without breaking immersion, the flare, spotlight, or whatever that was clearly meant to show me the way was so damn bright and poorly placed that I literally could not see where I was meant to be going until doing a few laps of the area and viewing said doorway from a different direction.

The same lack of attention to detail and perhaps play testing is evident with the audio. There’s a lot of background radio chatter that kinda takes me back to the feeling of overhearing the radio from the cloned soldiers from F.E.A.R or Shadow Company in Call of Duty, only back then, it was used to foreshadow an upcoming battle and give some perspective on what the enemy might be planning. Here, in Trepang2, it sort of just feels like it’s being used for dramatic effect. It’s not bad, it just feels like a missed opportunity to create immersion. Overall, the voice acting is pretty good, but there are no stellar stand-out performances. The player character, who throughout the game only appears to be known as prisoner #106, is entirely voiceless, but I feel like this was probably the right way to go.

The sound mixing, on the other hand, definitely needs some work. On the one hand, it’s nice to board a helicopter at the end of a mission without the sound of the engines and blades spinning drowning out the sound of everything around me, however, in most instances, I could barely hear the chopper at all. In fact, on one occasion, some friendly fighters were rappelling out of a chopper next to me as reinforcements, only I had no idea and accidentally ran into them as they roped down, scaring the hell out of me. I then look up, and to my surprise, maybe 10 or so meters above me, there’s a Blackhawk just chilling there, not making a sound at all. Never mind the fact that these fighters typically die within seconds because the AI in this game isn’t great.

The animation quality on anything that isn’t the player is okay, and it looks at its worst watching the pathing of enemies and three allies fall apart. The first-person animations of the player are all pretty good, if not repetitive, but later in the game, you’ll come across these infected humanoid creatures that spawn in hordes of 20 or so in relatively confined spaces that basically sprint at you until very close, stop right in front of you and then spit acid at you.

However, they all basically run at you in single file so the best way to fight them is to corner yourself, line up a headshot for the first enemy and continue to shoot that very same spot, landing headshot after headshot because the enemies are lined up perfectly for this. The only reason to stop is because these creatures don’t drop ammo and so you have to do a few laps of the area to find more before finding a cozy corner to camp in once again.

Not all of the enemies are this bad, and during my playthrough, there was some variety in enemy types, from standard soldiers to bigger and badder armored versions, and cultists with the odd red coloured suicide bomber variant equipped with Molotovs, and they’re all okay for a while, but even the boss fights felt a bit repetitive. An average, end-of-mission boss fight in this game consists of circling the big bad while dumping bullets into it until either the escape route becomes clear, e.g. elevator arrives, or using the same strategy until the big bad finally dies.

This isn’t horrible, but even a game with all the potential of The Division has taught me that bullet sponges don’t always make for fun enemy design. The player also has some sort of cloaking device that they acquire at the end of the first mission. It’s not really explained how or why, I don’t even recall if it was a device or more of an ability, but honestly, I’m not even sure it matters. The only real use for it is to score a couple of stealth kills before a fight kicks off or to reposition mid-fight, which is important on harder difficulties.

The design and animation of the guns you get to use are all actually really nice. They don’t sound amazing when fired, but that’s not a deal breaker, especially when you see how much love was put into animating the reloads and such. I am curious as to why some of the trailers leading up to release were entire videos dedicated to showcasing specific weapons that included the real weapons licensed name, such as the SPAS 12 shotgun or Mark 23 pistol, only to give them the generic names such as Shotgun and pistol respectively. A bit of an oddly specific criticism I’m sure, but I do appreciate the little things with stuff like that.

There’s even an option to find small crates or benches where you are given the option to modify attachments, but these attachments are rare and hard to find, and the impact they make on the weapon is usually marginal. You have very little choice in the way of scopes, which would be perfectly fine, but as mentioned earlier, you don’t have the freedom to ADS at will. 99% of the weapons you pick up have iron sights, and for some insane reason, you can’t actually use them. They appear to be purely cosmetic; there’s not even a “Hold ADS to tighten up crosshairs implied accuracy” available.

The only scope I came across in my playthrough was on a weapon I took from a dead enemy. It’s entirely possible that there were collectible crates early on with a scope in them that I just happened to miss, but with it being that important to gameplay, I don’t think it should be easily missed. What makes this design flaw worse, is the fact that hip firing in this game is basically no more accurate than hip firing in any other FPS-style game. Trepang2 just says, “Here’s a Kriss Vector SMG, a big 50-round mag, crazy high rate of fire, and you’re probably familiar with this gun from other games, but good luck getting any shots on a target beyond 2 meters away.” Why? Why do this?! The simple solution here is to just give the aim-down sight option, yeah? Problem solved. It’s like this for pretty much every gun in the game, but the Vector, being an SMG with a high rate of fire, is by far the worst example, and it’s made worse by the fact it’s the weapon you’ll come across the most in-game.

Don’t get me wrong, there were definitely moments in this game where I legitimately enjoyed my time playing it, but they were always short-lived moments where I’d activate bullet time, knee slide into an enemy to send them flying through the air, empty my mag into them, then spin around and attempt to shoot his teammate, only to hit maybe half of my shots because he was 5 meters away instead of the games maximum range of 2 meters. The only weapon where this really works is the shotgun, because you expect to hip-fire shotguns due to their short range and imprecise nature, and the over-the-top violence of being showered in an enemies blood and guts from a grenade or a point-blank shotgun blast IS satisfying, but you can’t build an entire game around that one feature and expect it to be perfectly playable and fun.

Not when you have some larger battle arenas like outdoor courtyards or random halls with plenty of open space and not much cover. The design team has clearly tried in some places to litter an entire hall with pillars, crates, and such in an attempt to make some areas feel smaller so that you have the upper hand when closing the distance between you and your foes, but I just don’t feel that’s an appropriate solution.

The story is about as generic and one note as one might expect it to be, without anything new or exciting on display. Your character wakes in a prison cell while some good guy mercenaries are attempting to break you out. Naturally, your character, known only as Prisoner #106, appears to have some sort of memory loss and doesn’t know who he is, how he landed himself in prison, or why he appears to have superhuman abilities. That might seem a bit random, and it kind of is. Everything regarding the story hereafter feels completely arbitrary. There’s little in the way of believable motive for the player character wanting to complete missions.

The text logs and similar collectibles do very little in the way of offering context or world-building. There are these random drones you seem to almost accidentally stumble across that do a terrible job of foreshadowing… something? The only exciting story arc is also probably the most confusing. After the first mission with your new friends, the task force director asks you to head down to their base’s basement where it is revealed that their base is sitting on top of a thermonuclear device.

The director then tells you that she expects you to head down there and detonate it yourself should the base ever get raided by the enemy to protect their sensitive information. So, to reiterate, you just got busted out of prison, you have no idea who anyone is, and for some reason, if things go south, you’re expected to sacrifice yourself by detonating a nuke to protect the interests of your new friends you’ve known for all of 5 minutes, and the best part? You can literally melee hit the big red button that sets it off, killing everyone instantly.

Pressing that button was honestly one of the highlights of my time playing this game. It could have rolled credits and drawn the curtains and I would have been content. The game, so far, definitely has its share of bugs. Nothing so bad as to be considered game-breaking, but not all that far off either. Plenty of small pre-release type bugs that are to be expected and patched out hopefully, such as remapped keys not always working as intended, the mission sound effects for choppers as previously mentioned, but also very tedious and consistent stuff, like the guns simply refusing to fire mid-game, despite having a full magazine and no obvious reason as to why that’s happening.

Honestly, that alone was the main issue I encountered playing this game, and I have to say it was frequent enough that it made me not want to play at times. This is a first-person shooter first and foremost. It’s bad enough that aiming has huge issues, but the inability to shoot will be the nail in Trepang2’s coffin if they aren’t quickly able to address that issue before the full release. It was bad enough that I even considered the fact my mouse might have decided to die on me, but between playthroughs, I didn’t have the same issue with other games.

There is a lot to be said about how Trepang2 compares to the games it has clearly drawn a lot of influence from. I’ve seen this game get compared to successful titles such as F.E.A.R., Crysis, and Max Payne to name a few, and while it definitely has some striking similarities to them all, unfortunately, it lacks the polish of any of them. It’s a fun little indie first-person shooter with some okay gunplay, some over-the-top violence, its fair share of bugs, and a number of questionable design choices. The potential for a great game is all here, but with its apparent identity Crysis and inability to commit to one genre and gameplay style, it just sort of feels like it misses its mark. There are a number of easter eggs that really showcase its inspiration but I’m not going to list them all here, instead, maybe if you see one while playing you can take a shot or something.

Written by: Jayden Healy