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It's all good, man. I am the same way, so I try my best to get the text right first and then design the pages around it instead of the other way around.
I've been thinking of standardizing our review page layout, so it may look less flashy, but a lot easier to work with.
Speaking of getting your text right the first time, it's your turn to tell me where I fucked up:
Trepang2
Remember F.E.A.R.?
Well this is F.E.A.R. on drugs. Not too many drugs, we didn't end up with F.E.A.R. 2 or F3AR, this is made by fans of the original with some of their own OC Donut Steel ideas sprinkled in. As well as some not-so-OC stuff they found on the internet. It's a good game and you should play it.
Made by the Trepang studio, consisting of only 4 people (a dozen if you include subcontractors), the game was released on PC on the 21st of June 2023, followed by a console port in October of the same year. The quality of the final product is out-fucking-standing and considering it's an indie title only pushes this achievement higher still. It plays well, looks nice (most of the time), sounds edgy and bugs are rare. Excellent job.
STORY
You are 106, a gun-slinging, stealth-cloaking, drop-kicking, slow-motioning son of a bitch. You wake up handcuffed in front of cable television guilt-tripping you into following orders from a major corporation. A mysterious masketta man (one of many) snaps you out of your stupor and you begin your journey through a maze of industrial hallways, dark offices and warehouses. Still handcuffed. Eventually you get your hands on some tools and make your violent way out of the facility and evac-ed by your unit "Task Force 27", who greet you with open arms like an old friend. After you've been flown back to home base, you are free to test out your aim at the weapons range, your skills in the wave combat simulator and your fashion sense at the locker. Not 5 minutes after taking off your clockwork orange jumpsuit, you are ordered to take on a mission against Horizon, the same corporation that kidnapped your ass earlier.
All the levels and settings are inspired by some other piece of media, so while the individual pieces of this game are not very original, they still meld together quite well. Some parts, like the first level, are direct homages to F.E.A.R., while some resemble SCP entries. The balance between spooky and tacticool is set just right, but I'm afraid they may have dated their game by using direct references to what may as well be an internet fad. The game's been quite successful thus far, I do hope it stands the test of time.
Levels have small pieces of intel sprinkled throughout the whole game. Depending on the location it may be a dropped phone, an unlocked computer, a document or a scroll. Most are very short, so they don't interrupt the flow of your mass dismemberment process, but the fact that there may be over 20 pieces of intel strewn around a level does. If you stop to read every piece of intel, a 20 minute level will stretch into about an hour long ordeal. To make up for it, some of them include very good and disturbing artwork. You will piece the story together faster than the game would have given it out to you normally if you stop and read every piece of non-encrypted intel, but pretty much everything is revealed to you at the end. There is also a "hidden" flying roomba in every level, which grants you obfuscated intel and collecting them all grants you the secret ending. In the castle level, I found a collectible plush bunny rabbit in the same room as teh roomba, which didn't do anything of pickup. Later in the same level, after killing the Enforcer on a staircase, he dropped something, but it fell through the stairs, so I couldn't tell what exactly it was. I read online that there were plans to include a hidden bunny in every level as a secret collectible, but for some reason the idea got scrapped and only one bunny remained. I guess I could see somebody saying there were too many different collectibles for the ADHD-ridden players (intel, roombas, gun attachments). I got all but one of the roombas on my first playthrough, but to see the secret ending I had to replay the entire final level + bonus level, which is fucking hard man. I finished every mission in the game on Very Hard, but the bonus mission humbled me down by a couple of difficulty levels as well as forcing me to cheese a couple of encounters along the way. Remember, this is a spectacle shooter, so being out of place when a certain enemy spawn trigger is activated can fuck with the AI.
PRESENTATION
Speaking of spectacle, the game looks very very nice. Screenshots look amazing, guns sound powerful, animations are fluid, but I didn't care for some of the effects being over the top. I know that's the name of the game and I do like the destruction you inflict upon the enemies and environment alike. But at times it becomes difficult to tell what the fuck is going on. It may be just me, but I haven't had this problem with F.E.A.R. and this may be due to my replaying that game almost a dozen times at this point. Another nitpick I have is the glove textures bleeding across the screen. I don't know what happened, but it looks like they're made out of smoke and beetles, especially if put your dukes up against a bright surface, like a computer screen. You stop noticing it after beating the first level, but I did spend almost 15 minutes trying to get rid of it before actually playing the game. I noticed a similar effect being used in Remnant 2. It reminds me of how moving pixels would leave smears on the original Game Boy.
Voicework is outstanding too, I never expected such quality from such a small team. I'm not familiar with military technobabble, but it all sounded on point to me, man. One element from the Replica soldiers that hasn't been replicated in this homage, was the variety of voicelines. Where Replica soldiers would call out your position in accordance to your actual location ("Behind the sofa!", "Under the desk!", "In the cubicle!", etc.), I haven't noticed such a bouquet of voice lines in Trepang2. There was one line, which came across as less than professional: after grabbing a human shield, one of his comrades said "Uh-uh, not gonna guilt trip me into not shooting" and promptly peppered his squadmate with half a mag of delicious .45 ACP. Funny, I guess.
Soundtrack is composed mostly of metal and deathcore. I actually had to look it up and see that it also falls into a genre called "djent". Composer Brandon McKagan (who's also the games level designer, writer and voice actor) calls it "Trepangcore". While it's easier for you to just listen to it online, the best way I could describe it would be "metal bordering on symphonic, with elements of Cheshire, the composer of all music tracks behind Madness Combat series". Yeah, the color scheme and spoopy tacticool stuff also reminded a lot of the Madness Combat series. While "Trepangcore" was fitting for the action portions of the game, any time combat slowed down it stuck out to me as "tryhard" and over the top. After asking my metalhead-ish friend, he suggested that it's closer to industrial/metalcore, though it's very hard to pin down any one genre.
In that regard the soundtrack is in tune with the rest of the game: a combination of elements from multiple established sources never committing to any one for too long. Not a bad thing, really. Reminds me of how Resistance 3 didn't do anything original, but what it did, it did well.
I should also mention that this game loads levels REALLY fast. Like less than a second sometimes. The one exception is an optional mission that takes place in one open area (airplane crash site)., which took almost 5 seconds to load. Ghastly, I know. I did install this game on an SSD, but I don't think I've seen load times this short. I haven't noticed any hitches while transitioning between different areas of a level, though the music would stop in it's tracks after entering an elevator or something similar.
GAMEPLAY
Now we're talking. In comparison to F.E.A.R.s Point Man (and yes, I will keep bringing it up), Treapng2's 106 is much more mobile, able to sprint (while reloading), vault and slide long distances as well as cloak for a limited amount of time. Cloak is recharged naturally over time and is depleted entirely whenever you disable it, while focus (your resource for slo-mo) is accumulated through combat. Stamina is used for sprinting and sliding, recharges very quickly and is unlimited for a couple of seconds after grabbing or executing an enemy. You can grab people to use as human shields (those with riot shields are extra durable), you can also shove a grenade up their ass and ragdoll them into a group of enemies for an effective mass takedown. Sliding directly into a tight formation or shield-bearing enemies is also a viable strategy to knock an entire squad down on their collective ass. Melee consists of gun butt kisses, kicks and dropkicks. To my knowledge, kicking any regular soldier while he's down is dishonorable, but still very lethal. Takes only 1 or 2 kicks to finish off a downed enemy.
As mentioned earlier, dealing and sustaining damage refills your focus and a full bar lasts quite a while. There are no upgrades to your abilities except for the dual-wield serum you obtain towards the end of the third mission. This allows you to (what else?) hold up two weapons of the same type at once. Aiming becomes harder, recoil becomes almost entirely uncontrollable (especially on SMGs, don't even try to put a full-auto mod on two pistols) and chambering shells in the shotgun becomes a work hazard. Any attachments you had on your original weapon are instantly applied to the other one as well.
Speaking of attachments, each gun has its own set of tacticool goodies. Some come with suppressors, others with different ammo types and the chaingun can be affixed with 3 (three!) bayonets, so it can act as a chainsaw when you run out of bullets. Some enemies wield weapons with attachments already pre-installed, like the Horizon black ops members preferring suppressors and red dot laser attachments. Every so often you'll run across a cooling chest in a level, which allows you to mix and match these attachments on your own guns. The trick is you'll have to find each attachment in attachés hidden across the campaign and they are not interchangeable. While the attachment interface looks almost identical to the one found in Crysis, you cannot stick a pistol suppressor on a KRISS Vector or an optical sight from an assault rifle onto a bolt launcher, even though both have a Picatinny rail. Oh yes, the bolt launcher makes a return, it wouldn't be a F.E.A.R. knock-off without one (I think it's a little glitched, because sometimes dead-on hits simply wouldn't register), as well as the devastating Spas-12 shotgun and the Heckle my Koch SL8 DMR rifle.
After finishing a story mission, a couple of optional missions unlock as well. The first two are identical "King of the Hill" type of area denial levels, which lead me to believe they're all the same for the rest of the game. Thankfully, I was wrong, only 3 side missions are like this and they feature a unique enemy type - the Engineer. While they're lightly armed, they carry a huge anti-hacking antennae backpack. It's ridiculous, looks like a tower PC strapped to their backs. If they get close enough to your objective (hacking a server, every time), they pause the progress bar, forcing you to find and kill them. Shooting the backpack explodes it, so it acts like a second weak spot. Other side-missions may revolve around exploring an abandoned bunker or securing a crash site. Most are simply an arena where you have to deal with waves of enemies, much like the combat simulator back at your home base, they even have the same supply crate mechanic.
I should mention, that the experience is highly customizable, both in the options menu and in the cheats menu. After beating certain levels on certain difficulties, cheats become available for your enjoyment. Enabling a cheat will lower your current mission difficulty to Easy, which prevents you from unlocking any cheats tied to that particular mission as well preventing special spawns. These are Horizon specialists that spawn in specified set pieces on higher difficulties. You can read all about them in the Bounties/Intel menu. Some have unique death animations. Beating the game unlocks the bulk of aforementioned cheats, so it's recommended you play the game like a man your first time around and then have fun with infinite stamina and clumsy enemies as your victory lap.
The game is good. It can be as hard as you want and as long as you want it. Clocking in at around 6 hours on average, this is a fantastic love-letter to the original Monolith's F.E.A.R. done by an impossibly small, yet incredibly talented team. Which goes to prove once again, Sarah, it's not the size that matters - it's what you do with it!