My God. I wanted to play this game so badly for so long. I thought it was going to be a game where you use your powers to take down legions of soldiers, similar to FEAR.
After playing it, I cannot believe how quickly this game turned into crap. The start was so strong, you break out of containment and kill your captors. The voice acting is loud and intense, characters panic as they search the room for you, screaming out callouts as you brutally blast them all down with incredibly loud and powerful weapons.
Then the supernatural elements began to show more and more. Now I'm shooting weird goop zombies and then some engineered monster that just charges me and does the same attack over and over. This obviously comes from the FEAR inspiration there's just a small problem with that. The horror sections in FEAR are the worst part of the fucking game, why would you crank that element up even higher?
I shit you not, you're randomly transported to the backrooms for no reason, you have to run away from evil black clouds that jumpscare you if you get too close, and tons of other awful horror tropes. Most of this stuff is never really explained that well unless you take 20 minutes to read the logs you find. It's GMod horror map levels of not scary, and I really just rolled my eyes or even uttered a "Oh come on, really?" whenever this shit happened.
Whenever the game throws an enemy at you that isn't human, its the worst fight in the game. They're just bullet sponges that refuse to die or even react to your actions. It doesn't help that most guns do zero damage against anything with armor at all. I was playing on Very Hard and you either kill everything with a shotgun and assault rifle, or you die, simple as that. Explosives are good too but they are rare. Enemies do unreal damage as well, so you're super reliant on using your powers to really get around the battlefield at all. Any time you don't one shot a guy he's probably gonna one shot you instead. As the game progresses enemies get bulkier and better armor, which makes everything such bullshit since you can't even burst them down anymore, yet the game insists on being really stingy with ammo and never really letting you hold onto the good weapons for too long.
There's a really crappy weapon attachment system I barely bothered with, most attachments do nothing or just make the guns worse for no reason. Some are just nonsensical and make me think the developers never even played their own game. A minigun machine gun has an attachment that adds knives to the end of all the barrels so you can shread dudes in front of you. Issue is you can’t spin the barrel without shooting so you stick your high caliber machine gun in a dude’s face and he dies to the gunfire before the knives can even do anything. Oh should I mention that all attachments have ridiculously harsh downsides and that one in particular reduces the damage of the gun for no reason? Even though attachments are supposed to be hidden pickups to reward you for exploring? Let’s not even mention the fact that you barely ever hold onto guns for a long time due to ammo issues so there’s basically no point in equipping attachments in the first place.
Side missions are mostly just copy paste with a few small levels that just have you hacking things. These usually involve you being trapped in a small arena while waves of enemies show up. It gets old really fast, and by the later waves you’ll be getting one shot by DMR and shotgun users while you struggle to grab any ammo. Hope you like the low power SMG because it seems to be the only thing enemies carry. Most weapons drop almost no ammo. I think shotgun drops give you.. like 4 shots. Assault rifle drops give you about 12, not even a full mag. I don’t understand the stinginess with ammo, it’s not even easy to swap weapons out during combat since you gotta hold F for like 30 years while you’re being shot at.
There’s also a duel wielding mechanic, use it with the shotgun and nothing else. It’s awful, you chew through ammo and deal the same amount of damage, all the while being unable to control the guns at all.
The boss fights are stupid and the hit detection is spotty for any melee stuff. A boss will swing a sword where you were and you'd still take damage. Late game is pretty reliant on insta killing you for the challenge so you have to play like a boo hoo baby to get anything done. Your powers go from useful tools to the only reason you live ever, they are insane crutches for the horribly balanced difficulty.
And if all of this wasn't bad enough the game was really short too. Only about 5 or so main missions, I remember being really surprised when the final mission began, thinking I barely did anything. The story is mostly nonsense too, I couldn't care about it since the game insists on you stopping to read all this intel you pick up and it’s just filled with technical mumbo jumbo. I don't mind a deep and interesting story but you can't deliver it all through optional logs the player might miss. This is a high octane shooter why do I need my reading glasses every 5 minutes? It’s also so blatantly obvious that they didn’t know where to put a lot of this intel. You’ll find a bunch of it just placed around each other when you’re traveling in between fights. This game doesn’t have the atmosphere to have the quiet time FEAR has between combat segments so I usually just ran through them as fast as I could.
Smaller complaints include the boring map design. Early on arenas are pretty fun, but this disappears fast, hallways and massive rooms with no cover become the norm. Guns are hard to use correctly, with such insane fire rates you can't hit anything unless it's right in front of you. I fucking hate the main base and mission system. This game would have been a lot better if it was a continuous campaign. Once again, if FEAR is such a big inspiration why take the worst aspects and ignore the good parts? The visual noise is unreal. When you shoot at a guy sparks go everywhere, the reticle goes insane, your gun bounces around like your dude's shoulder is jello, and the enemy just freezes up and hardly reacts to the lead entering his body. It's hard to actually tell if you are killing dudes, they seem to just get up after you mag dump them. Stick to the shotgun and explosives and gib them, it's the only way to be sure they're actually dead. Lastly enemy snipers just delete you. Full stop. You're in their sights for a moment and it's over. Very fun and interactive gameplay! I really love how it's impossible to hit anything if it's more than 10 feet away from me!
Trepang2 could have been great, it get's the raw intensity very well. It's just a shame there's so much messy stuff mixed into it all. I hate to say it but I was happy to be done. I really did not like this game near the end.
After playing it, I cannot believe how quickly this game turned into crap. The start was so strong, you break out of containment and kill your captors. The voice acting is loud and intense, characters panic as they search the room for you, screaming out callouts as you brutally blast them all down with incredibly loud and powerful weapons.
Then the supernatural elements began to show more and more. Now I'm shooting weird goop zombies and then some engineered monster that just charges me and does the same attack over and over. This obviously comes from the FEAR inspiration there's just a small problem with that. The horror sections in FEAR are the worst part of the fucking game, why would you crank that element up even higher?
I shit you not, you're randomly transported to the backrooms for no reason, you have to run away from evil black clouds that jumpscare you if you get too close, and tons of other awful horror tropes. Most of this stuff is never really explained that well unless you take 20 minutes to read the logs you find. It's GMod horror map levels of not scary, and I really just rolled my eyes or even uttered a "Oh come on, really?" whenever this shit happened.
Whenever the game throws an enemy at you that isn't human, its the worst fight in the game. They're just bullet sponges that refuse to die or even react to your actions. It doesn't help that most guns do zero damage against anything with armor at all. I was playing on Very Hard and you either kill everything with a shotgun and assault rifle, or you die, simple as that. Explosives are good too but they are rare. Enemies do unreal damage as well, so you're super reliant on using your powers to really get around the battlefield at all. Any time you don't one shot a guy he's probably gonna one shot you instead. As the game progresses enemies get bulkier and better armor, which makes everything such bullshit since you can't even burst them down anymore, yet the game insists on being really stingy with ammo and never really letting you hold onto the good weapons for too long.
There's a really crappy weapon attachment system I barely bothered with, most attachments do nothing or just make the guns worse for no reason. Some are just nonsensical and make me think the developers never even played their own game. A minigun machine gun has an attachment that adds knives to the end of all the barrels so you can shread dudes in front of you. Issue is you can’t spin the barrel without shooting so you stick your high caliber machine gun in a dude’s face and he dies to the gunfire before the knives can even do anything. Oh should I mention that all attachments have ridiculously harsh downsides and that one in particular reduces the damage of the gun for no reason? Even though attachments are supposed to be hidden pickups to reward you for exploring? Let’s not even mention the fact that you barely ever hold onto guns for a long time due to ammo issues so there’s basically no point in equipping attachments in the first place.
Side missions are mostly just copy paste with a few small levels that just have you hacking things. These usually involve you being trapped in a small arena while waves of enemies show up. It gets old really fast, and by the later waves you’ll be getting one shot by DMR and shotgun users while you struggle to grab any ammo. Hope you like the low power SMG because it seems to be the only thing enemies carry. Most weapons drop almost no ammo. I think shotgun drops give you.. like 4 shots. Assault rifle drops give you about 12, not even a full mag. I don’t understand the stinginess with ammo, it’s not even easy to swap weapons out during combat since you gotta hold F for like 30 years while you’re being shot at.
There’s also a duel wielding mechanic, use it with the shotgun and nothing else. It’s awful, you chew through ammo and deal the same amount of damage, all the while being unable to control the guns at all.
The boss fights are stupid and the hit detection is spotty for any melee stuff. A boss will swing a sword where you were and you'd still take damage. Late game is pretty reliant on insta killing you for the challenge so you have to play like a boo hoo baby to get anything done. Your powers go from useful tools to the only reason you live ever, they are insane crutches for the horribly balanced difficulty.
And if all of this wasn't bad enough the game was really short too. Only about 5 or so main missions, I remember being really surprised when the final mission began, thinking I barely did anything. The story is mostly nonsense too, I couldn't care about it since the game insists on you stopping to read all this intel you pick up and it’s just filled with technical mumbo jumbo. I don't mind a deep and interesting story but you can't deliver it all through optional logs the player might miss. This is a high octane shooter why do I need my reading glasses every 5 minutes? It’s also so blatantly obvious that they didn’t know where to put a lot of this intel. You’ll find a bunch of it just placed around each other when you’re traveling in between fights. This game doesn’t have the atmosphere to have the quiet time FEAR has between combat segments so I usually just ran through them as fast as I could.
Smaller complaints include the boring map design. Early on arenas are pretty fun, but this disappears fast, hallways and massive rooms with no cover become the norm. Guns are hard to use correctly, with such insane fire rates you can't hit anything unless it's right in front of you. I fucking hate the main base and mission system. This game would have been a lot better if it was a continuous campaign. Once again, if FEAR is such a big inspiration why take the worst aspects and ignore the good parts? The visual noise is unreal. When you shoot at a guy sparks go everywhere, the reticle goes insane, your gun bounces around like your dude's shoulder is jello, and the enemy just freezes up and hardly reacts to the lead entering his body. It's hard to actually tell if you are killing dudes, they seem to just get up after you mag dump them. Stick to the shotgun and explosives and gib them, it's the only way to be sure they're actually dead. Lastly enemy snipers just delete you. Full stop. You're in their sights for a moment and it's over. Very fun and interactive gameplay! I really love how it's impossible to hit anything if it's more than 10 feet away from me!
Trepang2 could have been great, it get's the raw intensity very well. It's just a shame there's so much messy stuff mixed into it all. I hate to say it but I was happy to be done. I really did not like this game near the end.