‘Trepang2’ Review: An Inspired Shooter Doesn’t Get the Console Calibration It Deserves

In Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, a character at one point asks, “Is it true that there is a place in a man’s head that if you shoot it, it will blow up?” Trepang2, from Vancouver-based developer Trepang Studios, believes in this idea with a near-religious fervor. The game is ludicrously gory, as the hail of your first-person fire is capable of mashing bodies into a red paste, sometimes even leaving behind intact organs in its wake. Eventually, you inject a serum that lets you dual-wield the shotguns and then modify them so that they set things on fire.

Drawing inspiration from the dreary aesthetics of mid-2000s shooters and 2005’s F.E.A.R. in particular, Trepang2 sits at the blissful intersection of the very silly and the very serious. Its heavily armored black-ops teams move through gray hallways and offices, coexisting with horrific creatures and experiments gone awry. You play as one such experiment, a silent supersoldier, Subject 106, who might as well be a disembodied pair of hands and legs. Subject 106 exists only to chew through the forces of the nefarious Horizon Corporation, and across the game, you get to make heavy use of his abilities to turn invisible or slow down time.

Horizon is the very loose connective tissue between the game’s levels, each of which features some new paranormal terror that the corporation, in its hubris, has attempted to exploit. Surely a sign that Trepang2 was created by a small team of developers is the giddiness of its ideas and one-off enemies. There are long, tension-building interludes through labyrinths of servers and yellow backrooms to punctuate the eventual explosions of violence against not just Horizon forces but against poison zombies, a flesh golem, sacrificial cultists, and even the Mothman.

Apart from a mid-game serum that allows you to dual-wield, the gunplay within these levels changes little. Its squishy, bone-crunching versatility, though, ensures that the game’s conflicts never grow stale. Each fight is incredibly loud, with firearms thundering as they lay waste to the environment while enemies bark out their tactics, which spices up the eventual satisfaction of forcibly breaking their formation. In addition to invisibility and slow-motion, you can perform a sliding attack and a jump kick. You can grab an enemy as a hostage and then throw his entire body after activating an explosive on his belt, turning your human shield into a human grenade.

This range of abilities makes Subject 106 feel nigh-unstoppable, though he can certainly be held up by a number of design irritations that feel especially prevalent in Trepang2’s console version. Ammunition can be oddly sparse, made even more difficult to find by some level segments that are so dark that it’s also tricky to easily locate the enemies firing at you. (After a while, the slow-motion begins to feel necessary to simply locate enemies standing in the shadows or amid visual noise of fire and debris.) Several of the wave-based sequences and the last two levels in particular devolve into throwing a lot of overly resilient soldiers your way who shoot at you from all angles, all but crying out for the greater mobility of a mouse and keyboard.

Trepang2’s default control scheme even neglects to map the crucial slide maneuver to any button, only triggering when you crouch while sprinting. This can be changed in the options menu, but the oversight speaks to how the game, which launched on PC back in June, hasn’t been rebalanced particularly well for its console release. As frustrations mount with the final level’s poor autosave and maddening boss fight, it becomes clearer than ever that a console is far from the ideal venue to experience this flawed yet inspired shooter.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Team17.