TREPANG2

"Break the Cycle."

the rest of these ^^heading gifs^^ will have blood and gore in them btw, nothing TOO crazy but some of it is still pretty brutal. just lettin' you know. :3c

okay i don't even know where to start with this game but its called TREPANG2 and its fucking awesome.

that little gif you see above is pulled from the game's steam page and i'd personally say it's a pretty good representation of an average combat encounter you'd have in-game even if it's just an example of melee combat.

you play as 106, this fuckin' uhhh... this cracked out supersoldier with a set of cool ass superpowers.

106 can "cloak" to turn invisible, really good for flanking enemies and giving you a huge advantage. it's also pretty good for getting out of bad situations if you need to find reprieve.

they can also "focus" to slow down time which is great for controlling recoil from guns, hitting shots more accurately, or just making high-intensity situations more managable.

that's about as far as i'll dive into the story of the game because i'm not a dick and i think it's something to be experienced on your own. (if you wanna spoil the game for yourself, go look up a playthough on youtube. but that's chump shit, you don't wanna do that.)

if youre tight on cash then don't worry! there's a free demo, and the base-game--plus the season pass which includes both DLCs--are on sale till the 17th.

i think that's enough jabbering i wanna get on to talking about the

WEAPONS

i love killing people!

(i'm not gonna talk about the dlc weapons yet.)

the combat in trepang is amazing. it's fast, intense, smooth, punchy, and it makes you feel unstoppable.

a well made mix of great looking visuals and guns that hit hard makes the combat in trepang feel great.

unlike some other FPS games, the guns in trepang do a fairly realistic amount of damage (sometimes...). they pretty quickly kill most basic enemies which seems like a bad thing but it's made up for by the fact that the game never sends out only ONE enemy no matter what.

this balance is really good now that i'm thinking about it. you can rip through enemies very quickly but if you get too confident their numbers can rip through you just as fast.

your arsenal isnt very huge by any means but it's still fairly diverse and each weapon is good. there isn't necessarily a weapon that's "better" than another.

you can easily kill a group of enemies with a pistol just as easily as you can with an SMG.

the pistol is more obviously more lightweight which means it has less recoil than the SMG so it has a leg-up on accuracy, but the SMG would take care of the group slightly quicker without needing to reload.

i find this really great because sometimes ammo is scarce which forces you to pick up new guns off of corpses. when you do this, you don't have a chance to pick up a bad weapon which wont even your odds of survival and instead you'll just get... a new gun. doens't really matter which one you get, as long as you can use it to survive.

obviously the guns are pretty different from each other in other aspects. like the shotgun being for close-range, turning any victim into red mist in an instant, and the rifle being for longer range, rewarding accuracy with very high damage shots.

not only can you shoot people with awesome guns, you can also use throwables like grenades and throwing knives!

okay i'll be honest the throwables are pretty underwhelming but are still pretty good. every throwable is a lot more diverse than the guns as most of them have pretty different functions from each other.

you've obviously got your standard frag grenades, good for taking out groups of enemies. you can also shoot them to make them explode prematurely.

you also have some simple flashbangs. they do like, no damage at all but stun your target(s) for a decent amount of time.

there's also non-explosive, throwable projectiles. throwing knives and tomahawks. uhm... from what i can tell these two are pretty much the same?? though i did notice the tomahawks are recoverable after being thrown so idk maybe the knives can't do that lol.

there's also some other wacky ones like fire bombs and gas grenades, plus some others i don't wanna spoil because they're pretty neat.

alright so, your weapons are great but what good are they if you can't maneuver to avoid being killed by the ones wielded by your foes?

MOVEMENT

"Me go fast, me say word."

trepang may have shooting, and movement, but i wouldn't fully group it into the movement shooter genre honestly.

despite this, i would still LOOSELY put it into that category because it still pretty much meets all the requirements.

the movement isn't anything special, you don't have any double-jumps or wall-running, but you do have a quick slide that can be used to trip enemies.

one thing i didn't mention in the weaponry section was the fact that you can grab enemies that are stunned/tripped or when you're behind them.

when you have a hostage, (some) enemies will be hesitant to shoot you. you can also throw the hostage into another enemy to knock them over. my personal favorite is throwing the hostage while using them as a grenade. useful in a pinch if you're out of throwables.

you can also just, kill the hostage without throwing them too... but that's kinda boring...... (the animations are cool though!)

that's really the furthest extent of the movement honestly, there's sprinting and all the other basic stuff like that but the slide is your main source of speed.

a gripe i have with the movement is that 106 has like.. respritory issues or something because your stamina runs out pretty fast. it's okay though? i guess? because it also regenerates pretty fast too but it's still kind of a pain in the ass to be awkwardly walking during a high-intensity firefight and you can't escape because you don't have stamina.

DLCs

ok now i'm gonna talk about the DLC weapons

okay uhm there's the Bladekisser DLC and the Survival Mode DLC and i'll only really talk about the Bladekisser DLC because the Survival Mode DLC doesn't add anything very major except two grenades and a new mode in the combat simulator which i don't even really care about lol.

the bladekisser dlc is so awesome. it adds two new levels which seem to fit very well into the base-game levels and it adds three new weapons.

the machine gun is pretty basic, like an assault rife but it's a bit stronger. i don't have much to say about it.

the revolver, it's cool as shit but ammo for it is VERY scarce which sadly makes it pretty unviable most of the time. :{

and the last weapon, the absolute peak of FPS weapons. the sword... it's a sword, it's super cool, pretty overpowered lol. i mean you see the heading gif up there, this thing SHREDS enemies into fuckin' pieces.

the sword is AMAZING!!!!! it slices through basic enemies like a hot knife through butter, killing them instantly most of the time. this thing seems almost too strong at first (cuz it iz lmao :3) but it's slightly balanced out by the fact that... well it's a melee weapon... and there's guys, with guns, shooting at you.

the sword also isn't able to penetrate the armour of armoured enemies which forces you to use your guns so it doesn't render them completely obsolete.

VERDICT

game good.

trepang2 has definitely become one of my favorite FPS games i've played in a LONG time. i place it behind ULTRAKILL in my nonexistant list of FPS games i thoroughly enjoyed.

it's not perfect by any means and it's only slightly rough around the edges in some places, but those flaws are negligible most of the time.

if you like fast-paced, action-packed, brutal and gorey, (slightly) movement-based shooters, then i highly reccomend playing trepang at some point. hell, go play the fuckin' demo right now!!! it's free there's no excuse!!!

i totally would've talked about this more but i'm too lazy and i don't want this blogpost to turn into a fucking multi-page essay lol.

9/10 -- go play trepang2 please :3