The newest addition to the game is a survival mode, where you will be completing escalating challenges through a series of maps all while keeping tabs on a hunger meter that must be replenished by consuming pick-ups. It looks pretty fun, and should be a perfect fit for players wanting more out of the amazing core gameplay loop of Trepang2.

In addition to this, the DLC also features new weapon skins, player outfits, throwables, and cheat codes to give players something to work towards. Such content additions are always welcome especially for a single-player game, and more so at a time when games like Mortal Kombat 1 are charging players for premium Fatalities.

Inspired by the F.E.A.R. series, Trepang2 is about a soldier with no memories who possesses exceptional powers. They’re now on a path of vengeance, taking on mercenaries with different weaponry and gun-fu. Along with slow-mo for dodging bullets, invisibility and close-quarters combat, players can dual-wield weapons, toss enemies at each other and slide around.

Trepang2 is a throwback in many ways to old-school shooters and received critical acclaim for its high-octane, responsive combat. You can check out our review here, where we awarded it an 8 out of 10 (with the story and visual clutter during more intense gunfights proving problematic). Stay tuned for details on subsequent updates in the meantime.

Team17 and Trepang Studios have announced that Trepang2 will soon be coming to consoles. The first person shooter will launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S a little under a month from now, on October 2.

The shooter is now also available for pre-orders on consoles, while those who pre-order it will also get access to an exclusive in-game outfit.

In our review of the game’s PC version, we awarded it a score of 8/10, saying, “Trepang2 doesn’t really care about its setting and story. Instead, it just wants to give you some guns, the ability to slow down time, and just set you loose on some corrupt corporations and a shady cult. It features fantastic gunplay and some excellent enemy AI to play around with, and despite the visual clutter, you’ll quite likely find yourself having a good time.” Read the full review through here.

https://twitter.com/TrepangStudios/status/1698688106403172498

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding yes. Trepang2 is an incredibly fun game. Sure, the game features a story of some description revolving around a shady, heavily-armed cult and a company that seems to be partaking in some highly unethical science experiments on humans, but all of that is largely unimportant in the greater context of the game. Trepang2 wants you to pick up guns, run-and-gun-and-dropkick your way through its levels and take out some high-value targets. The story, while there, can be quite easily missed, and cutscenes telling you what’s going on are few and far in between. Instead, you’re just going to end up having too much fun actually playing the game to care much about why you’re gunning these people down.

"Trepang2 wants you to pick up guns, run-and-gun-and-dropkick your way through its levels and take out some high-value targets."

Trepang2 kicks things off in an interesting way. You seem to be captive in some sort of secure facility, when all of a sudden, some mysterious folks kill a few guards and destroy the TV you were being forced to watch, allowing you to start trying to escape. Your character doesn’t have any of their memories, aside from the fact that they seem to be a super soldier. You’ll discover other details about the game’s world through text logs that you can pick up along the way, but the storytelling remains rather minimal throughout.

Right off the bat, the tutorial level gives you your two most important abilities aside from guns—Focus and Cloak. Focus lets you slow down time to line up your shots, while Cloak allows you to go lightly invisible as long as you stay away from your enemies’ direct lines of sight. Pair these abilities with even just your basic pistol and the action really begins to ramp up. Since stealth is entirely optional is meant to give you the ability to kick off fights with an ambush or grab a quick breather in the middle of a shootout so you can reposition, the action throughout a mission essentially feels non-stop, punctuated by some moments of peace when you’re just navigating further into the level.

When it comes to options in combat, you have quite a few aside from just shooting at things. You can slide at will, knocking opponents off their feet—this is incredibly useful against enemies with shields. You can also grab stunned enemies to use as human shields, and if you find the right power-up, dual-wield weapons. While the possibilities don’t seem as vast as they should for a game focused on its combat, the simple baseline offers a lot of opportunities to rain down absolute carnage on your targets.

"You can also grab stunned enemies to use as human shields, and if you find the right power-up, dual-wield weapons."

Trepang2 also promotes replayability in a rather interesting way. Along with the game’s light story, you’re also given a list of high-value targets that can only really show up in specific missions, and some on specific difficulty options. If you want to take down the main man behind the cult’s weapons supply, you’re going to have to play the game on a higher difficulty, for example. Interestingly, the game allows you to pick from any of its five difficulty modes right from the beginning, and switch around if you start finding things either too easy or too hectic.

Alongside the combat, the music in Trepang2 also goes incredibly hard. Featuring a largely electronic synthwave-styled soundtrack, Trepang2 will have you headbanging to hard bass drums and grungy synths as you mow down your enemies in slow motion. Outside of combat, the game features an atmospheric soundscape, letting you hear enemy chatter and the missions’ own sounds alongside some light music humming in the background. Needless to say, when it comes to getting in the right state of mind with Trepang2, you’re going to want to keep the music turned all the way up. It’s just that good. It also certainly helps that the sound effects are incredibly punchy, with just about every weapon showing off its stopping power with just its sound design.

The art direction is where the praises for Trepang2 start slowing down. While the game definitely looks good, and some of its levels can offer a surprising amount of variety despite the game largely taking place in hallways and corridors, it tends to suffer quite a bit from visual clutter. For example, early on in the game, you’re told to use your flashlight with care because enemies will be able to make out your position if they see light from your flashlight. 

"It tends to suffer quite a bit from visual clutter."

In actual combat, however, you’re going to find the flashlight incredibly important just to try and make out where your targets might be. It’s quite easy to miss enemies just because of the sheer amount of debris and sparks flying around in the middle of an intense shootout, and unless you’re incredibly good at twitch aiming, using Focus becomes borderline mandatory to try and line-up a headshot.

Trepang2 doesn’t really do much to tell you what’s going on around its world aside from descriptions of high-value targets and a few text logs, but the important thing is that the game is so damn fun that you won’t really care about the story. Playing especially on the harder difficulties highlights some clever enemy AI and forces you to use just about every option in your arsenal, and the fact that the game allows you to toss a grenade in slow motion and shoot it in the air to cause a massive explosion should really be all you need to know to learn whether you’ll enjoy Trepang2 or not. Pair this with a fun synth-heavy soundtrack, and a fair bit of emphasis on replayability with its various high-value targets, and you have a shooter that can deliver a pretty good time.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

That being said, most modern FPS games tend to follow the rather rigid blueprint laid by modern shooters and other titles that do something interesting or fresh in terms of mechanics are a rare sight to behold especially in the AAA market. That said, the indie scene fares much better in this regard, with plenty of emerging AA and indie developers doing a great job of providing unique experiences like so many modern shooters and this feature series is dedicated to highlighting such promising games.

Trepang Studios’ upcoming Trepang2 is one such game that we will be looking at today. Trepang2 is shaping up to be one of the most brutal looking FPS games of recent memory, and the game features some interesting gameplay mechanics and design choices borrowed from popular PS2 era shooters with some of its own tricks that should hopefully result in an experience that’s equal parts fresh and nostalgic for long time fans of the genre.

The game puts you in the shoes of a soldier who wakes up in a jail cell with no memory of his past life. And being the hot headed berserk that you are, you immediately take up arms and set out on a quest to exact revenge from who captured you in the first place and hopefully regain your memories in the process. As you can imagine, it’s an incredibly straightforward narrative setup with minimal characters and exposition – so it’s obviously best not to expect a deeply engrossing story with Trepang2.

But that’s not something that should be taken as an objective criticism of the game. Of course, it would be a pleasant surprise if Trepang Studios ends up telling a compelling story with Trepang2 – but when the core gameplay is what’s driving the experience, it’s best to polish those mechanics to an immaculate sheen and keep distractions to a minimum.

And when it comes to the core gameplay, Trepang Studios seems to have brought their A game to the field. As mentioned previously as well, the action here looks extremely brutal in all the right ways. The weapons feature sounds that are appropriately punchy and intense, and firing each shot also results in realistic amounts of recoil as the weapon flails around the screen to depict the force of each shot. The developer has done a great job in terms of nailing the game feel here – which deserves praise because most AA and indie games tend to lack behind in this particular aspect.

Players also get a couple of supernatural abilities to use during combat encounters. Firstly, you have the ability to slow down time which enables you to fire off a buffet of shots in rapid succession to clear out entire groups of enemies in the blink of an eye. It looks absolutely slick in action, and has a ton of utility as well. Furthermore, you can also use a cloaking ability which turns you invisible for a short amount of time – which can be really useful for flanking the enemy between firefights. While such supernatural abilities aren’t something entirely new for first person shooters (it’s a clear throwback to Max Payne), it has been some time since we have seen them implemented in such an effortless fashion.

Thankfully though, the fun doesn’t just stop there. You can also grab an enemy from up close and use them as a human shield to block out incoming fire before hurling that dead body into another enemy and knocking them out in an instant. Furthermore, you can also cause enemies to slip by sliding towards them and toppling them over for a tactical advantage. All in all, the combat loop looks to be supremely fun and the developer has done a great job of stitching these abilities together in a way that results in a cohesive experience.

Trepang2 might be a shooter at its core, but the comprehensive suite of abilities at your disposal certainly makes it feel like a modern character action game where the focus is less on defeating your enemies and more on doing it in absolute style. Just take a look at the gameplay trailers and observe how the action feels like a meticulous ballet of last minute swerves and thoughtful use of the player’s supernatural abilities – and you’d get a sense of what we’re trying to say here.

But endlessly mowing through waves of enemies is sure to get monotonous after a while, regardless of how fun the actual combat system might be. Thankfully, Trepang2 is also set to feature stealth sections where players will have to remain hidden from their enemies and make their way through dark corridors and crawl through claustrophobic air vents – which should hopefully help in creating some variety in the gameplay. That said, the stealth gameplay also seems to be fleshed out with proper vision cones on enemies and what looks to be adequately functional light and dark mechanics. As such, you can use the element of surprise to your advantage and ambush your enemies from the dark.

But for all the merits that we previously discussed, Trepang2 also seems to be suffering from some important issues that are worth noting. The enemy AI seems pretty basic at this point, which will probably make it really easy to clear out entire rooms of opposition without much hassle. While this could be a direct result of trying to give the player a sense of a power fantasy, it could easily backfire and make the game’s encounters mundane after a while.

Furthermore, the environment design seems to lack in terms of visual variety. It looks great from a graphics standpoint, but as you can already see in the gameplay trailers – each room looks almost identical from the last. Combine that with the maze like levels and seemingly no objective markers to boot, Trepang2 could end up being a frustrating experience if players don’t enjoy traversing through these labyrinthian environments.

As one can already gauge by playing the free demo on Steam, Trepang2 is a game that doesn’t take much time to really get going – but what remains to be seen is how the developer will morph that instantly gratifying experience into something that’s consistently enjoyable right through to the end. Will players get more powers as they progress? Or will there be boss fights that require smart usage of your supernatural abilities? Or will the game have set-piece driven sequences?

Of course, we’ll finally get to know what’s in store when the game releases in June 2023 for PC – but these are the biggest questions that will ultimately decide how the final release ends up faring in the eyes of both critics and fans alike. That said, there’s little to detract from the fact that Trepang2 looks like an incredibly stylish throwback to shooters like Max Payne. A well realized combat loop and the apt portrayal of brutal firefights is what really makes this game well worth keeping on your radar. We have some really high hopes from Trepang2, and hopefully it will stand true on all of its promises.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

TREPANG2 puts you in the shoes of what looks to be a military officer on a quest to exact revenge from his fellow squadmates after “everything is taken away from you.” Of course, the gameplay is what matters here – and TREPANG2 seems to have a beautifully flowing combat loop – as you continually utilize bullet-time to massacre legions of soldiers and monsters in a plethora of different environments.

The game is in many ways similar to Rockstar’s Max Payne and F.E.A.R., the former of which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Details on the release front remain scant for TREPANG2, except for the fact that it will be available on PC via Steam sometime in 2022.