Category:

Vlog

Duration: 1:02:57

276 views

8

Surprise surprise! The demo got updated with the ability to rebind movement keys so I’ve decided to give it a second try.

Not surprisingly, being able to play with controls I’m used to made the experience much more enjoyable than the first time I tried the demo and I would definitely recommend people try this game out if they have the time.

The Good:
- Combat is fast, frantic, and for the most part fluent
- There’s a lot of unintentionally funny moments that occur during gameplay that make for a memorable experience
- The prologue level is really well crafted and ends in a pretty awesome final arena
- Player abilities have good synergy; one moment you’ll be stocking enemies from the shadows before unloading on them John Wick style
- AI can give off the illusion of being intelligent in some situations

The Bad:
- AI isn’t as dynamic as I’d hoped. They don’t give off the impression of coordinating as a team as they’ll usually stick to one area of a map or just disregard their lives and throw themselves at you. Sometimes you’ll see one flank but it’s usually because they lost sight of you and happen to bump into you when doing a sector sweep, not because a teammate called you out
- Environmental interactivity is pretty low. There’s not a lot of particle effects when you shoot stuff, most objects are nailed down, and only specific in game objects are set up with destruction schemes or basic physics (play OG FEAR or even the Selaco Demo and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about)
- There’s an annoying bug where if you jump during a slide and have enough momentum, you’ll perform a second slide as soon as you touch the ground, even if you’re not holding the crouch button. You can even keep the bug going by simply jumping during subsequent slides and your character will keep performing slides when the stamina refills
- Enemy animations still feel a bit jank. Bad guys with body armor hardly react to getting hit unless you shoot their helmet off when in reality they should stumble back and their aim should be thrown off, causing them to potentially hit teammates or objects in the environment

Suggestions:
- Would like to see more QOL improvements such as an optional hud icon to indicate when you can clamber on top of something
- For the demo, I think having both bullet time and cloak is fine, but I think for the main game these upgrades should be given to the player at certain story beats since having both makes the game a bit too forgiving. Would recommend having FEAR style boosters in secret areas as well to boost cloak, bullet time, and health capacity to reward the player for exploration

That’s about it for now. I definitely think Trepang 2 is an awesome game and I’m excited to see how it progresses. Hopefully some of these issues can be ironed out as it gets closer to an EA release but I think it’s a competent shooter that wears its inspirations on its sleeves.

Thanks again for watching and as always, stay Serious!

Trepang 2 on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1164940/Trepang2/