I completed the campaign of Trepang2 earlier tonight. That was an epic ride. The gunplay felt really great but requires consistent use of the slow time and invisibility abilities as you can't really take enemies head-on or you'll be seeing the death screen a lot. I didn't use invisibility half as often as slow time but I did find it very useful for certain stages in the game while playing on the Normal difficulty.
The level design in Trepang2 is well done. I never felt trapped and was pretty much always able to stay on the move while sliding around and flanking enemies as they lost sight of me behind cover. The sliding mechanic feels really good on the keyboard. It works diagonally and towards the direction you are pressing where you want your character to move, which is my preference, and not where your character is facing. I found it very interesting that enemies could lose sight of me just from sliding around a lot while behind cover. The AI wasn't completely stupid and could keep track of me but I liked that I could lose their line of sight without even going invisible. While it does offer a little bit of stealth and sniping on occassion, this is a non-stop action, bullets constantly flying in your face game.
While the slow time game mechanic felt like something I absolutely had to rely on in order to take enemies down, it charged up pretty fast and was fun to use while never actually feeling overpowered. I think Trepang Studios managed to pull off a well balanced powerful game mechanic here. The amount of enemies on screen at a time, the duration of the slow time, and the quick-ish refresh of the ability is nicely done. The boss fights though, those are much more tough in comparison to the rest of the levels but I thought they were very cool. It took me a little longer to figure out how to beat them at first cuz I had the Boss Health bar disabled in the UI and I had to realize I had to be missing something before enabling it.
The story is pretty decent. It's not as creepy as F.E.A.R. (I think mostly cuz of the music) but it does have some minor cool supernatural moments on top of the human experimentation with soldiers. There's a cult and cult leader you have to deal with. Some of it reminded me a little of Control, another excellent game. There were these cool demon-ghost-like forms at some point that were neat. They're in it for about five minutes though so that's kinda lame. I spent most of the time fighting off regular human enemies than I did fighting against demonic forces. The story is trippy enough to be interesting but it's not deep at all. It's entertaining. Some of it reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line as well. There's some brief deeply disturbing parts.
The music in Trepang2 is so good in-game and really sets a great badass mood for the non-stop action. The music in the menus is also really good. The visuals are really nice. Overall, it's one of the best shooter games I've played in awhile. Some of my favorites include Bullestorm, Shadow Warrior 2, The Darkness II, and Doom 2016. I'm sure I could name a lot more but those are some favs off the top of my head.
I still have extra content to play with in Trepang2 but that's all I have to say for now. I have nine hours played almost running straight through the campaign. I had died a few to several times on a few of the bosses. This game is badass and if you enjoy arcade shooters and especially if you enjoyed F.E.A.R., you should totally check this game out. Do know that it's very bloody and also has a "Cheat" to unlock that makes it even bloodier. I have not unlocked that yet but I'd like to for the heck of it.
Trepang2, developed by Trepang Studios and published by Team17, is available on PC, PS5, XBS|X, and Amazon's Luna. Thanks for reading. Game on.
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