Category: Video Games

Some of the most memorable action games I’ve played are 2012’s Max Payne 3 and 2005’s F.E.A.R., and Trepang2 cashes in hard on those memories of slow-motion action and strong enemy AI and variety. Yes, it’s really called Trepang2. No, it has nothing to do with the sea cucumbers of the same name. Instead, this is a first-person, stealth-action shooter that’s tilted decidedly toward action. It’s got plenty of excellent running and gunning, and while its story isn’t all that frightening there are occasional successful jumpscares that mix up the near-constant mayhem of battling its surprisingly smart commandos and corporate cultists. Granted, it’s also a bit short if you’re focused on its main objectives, but that just means it never outstays its welcome.

Trepang2’s brisk six to 12-hour campaign puts you into the boots of Subject 106, a generic super soldier type working for the equally unimaginative secret Task Force 27. After escaping a chilly underground Alaskan prison, you spend the next 10 or so hours in pursuit of the evil overlords of the Horizon Corporation – a Dr. Evil-like entity that is notorious for its failed attempts at creating its own super soldiers, among other evil schemes. What ensued was a series of video game and action movie cliches executed with such over-the-top violence that I had no problem suspending my disbelief – often in unimpeded bliss.

That is, except for when Trepang2’s gimmicky and cheap monsters popped on-screen in classic jumpscare fashion, before the story just sort of… forgot about their existence entirely, thrusting me right back into its gory military shooter-inspired action without more than a shrug and an occasional intel entry with a grotesque drawing on it. Let’s be clear: these monster encounters are perfectly fun, I’m just disappointed that Trepang2 doesn’t lean into them even more. Some excellent setups like a creepy homage to The Backrooms meme create a dark atmosphere to set some fights in, but don’t keep the story’s attention more than one segment of one level at one time apiece. There’s no character like F.E.A.R.’s Alma Wade keeping the steady tension of a more personal horror story rolling under the waves of Trepang2’s action, and as a result, the Horizon Corporation and all of its monsters come across as satirical rather than spooky. But there’s little indication that’s done on purpose.

At its best, Trepang2 is a clear tribute to the dreary, blood-drenched shooters of the mid-to-late 2000s, but without all the added melodrama to slow down its pacing between battles, a la F.E.A.R. 2 or DOOM 3. Most of the time it deftly connects the corridors of its various military compounds and corporate strongholds with a steady supply of boss fights that are often fun but simple, in that they rely on a single gimmick. The Mothman, for instance, chases you around a maze-like structure and can only take damage on specific parts of his body that are easiest to hit while he’s spitting acid. Meanwhile, each level’s nooks and crannies are littered with weapon customization parts and bits of intel to gradually explain what’s going on, which turns out to not be that interesting.

That said, it’s nice that you can comfortably ignore the story; much like the Doom Slayer, protagonist Subject 106 callously rips and tears his way through the corporate underbelly that serves as the main enemy of Trepang2’s campaign. He does so with enough gusto to make short work of everyone he runs into, to the point where other members of Task Force 27 will often comment on just how superhumanly powerful he is. This is played unironically, but it works for a few chuckles, not unlike off-the-cuff commentary given to the Master Chief by UNSC soldiers in Halo. It takes itself a bit more seriously than that, but it still adds to the over-the-top spectacles of B-movie violence throughout.

Halfway through the first level you’re already introduced to Subject 106’s nifty Cloak and time-slowing Focus abilities. Mixed with a button that lets you dive into a crouching position whenever you want, these abilities give you superhuman prowess in most situations, but not so much that Trepang2 ever made me feel overpowered – at least once I turned the difficulty up a notch or two.

It’s especially important to remain versatile since there are often so many enemies on screen at once – maybe as many as 20 or 30 – and they will relentlessly group up on you, flank you, and appear to communicate your position to one another, making cover basically useless in the heat of battle unless you’re able to stay hidden. I’m not much of a stealth player, and it always seemed like the cooldown timer for my Cloak ability was a bit too long for my tastes anyway, so I generally forgot about it. And I didn’t miss it, because great level design is far more important to stealth than a lazy invisibility button. Trepang2 often lets you shoot out lights to pass under the cover of darkness or set traps for a good old ghillied-up time. This all speaks to its excellent open-ended combat across its six primary and six side missions, wherein its eight highly customizable weapons gave me just as much leeway to simply dive into the action and kill everyone in sight on my own terms.

The rhythm of Trepang2’s combat is less about choosing the right gun; every weapon is viable in every battle, whether you’re dual-wielding assault rifles or finessing your way through enemy squads with a single handgun. Instead, it’s all about carving out the right approach: aside from the rank-and-file enemy soldiers armed with SMGs and pistols, many of Trepang’s enemy types are shielded or armored and only vulnerable to headshots. Some come equipped with long-range firearms and will scurry around the outskirts of a battle to pick you off when you stray out of cover, and some even chase you around with explosives in hand. Each enemy demands a different approach, and my favorite moments were when I was surrounded on all sides by a vast array of different variants, forcing me to improvise rather than stick to any specific weapon or tactic.

Its run-of-the-mill arsenal of weapons may bore at first glance, but they handle well with a mouse and keyboard, and I enjoyed using them just as much with my handy Xbox One controller. Pistols, SMGs, shotguns, and assault rifles can be dual-wielded once you find the hilariously titled “Dual-Wield Serum”, and that’s fortunately unlocked about halfway through the campaign. Dual-wielding adds an extra dimension to gunplay in that you can become lethal at close range when dual-wielding any weapon, though you’ll struggle to pick off enemies from afar. Likewise, it’s slightly disappointing you can only dual-wield identical weapons, so there’s no mixing and matching a shotgun with an SMG.

But it pays off with a gratifying spectacle when you decimate a crowd of armored bad guys in slow motion, brandishing two shotguns or assault rifles like toys. The reload animation when dual-wielding two unfolded shotguns will never cease to make me laugh, and running into the fray with two weapons of any variety feels badass no matter how successful you are at landing kill shots. Adding to the frenzy of Trepang2’s combat is a melee button that feels great to use, and it lets you beat your enemies down or unleash a Spartan Kick once you’ve closed the gap, making it easy and often hilariously fun to direct the flow of the carnage in slow-mo.

Dipping into that slow-mo Focus ability almost always let me pick off a few pesky foes before my meter ran out, and since diving around cost nothing, Trepang2 is at its best when you stay on the move while your Focus meter recovers in the background. Powersliding through ammo, health, and armor pickups and occasionally popping up to wreak carnage on the next group of enemies I encounter feels great.

I’m ambivalent about Trepang2’s lack of a default aim down sights feature for weapons with iron sights, veering toward Counter-Strike rather than Call of Duty in its military shooting inspirations, but it still works just fine without it. While ADS for non-scoped weapons is accessible to a limited extent via a cheat code that can only be unlocked later in the campaign, Trepang’s slick movement and slow-mo features make it easy to close the gap between opponents, effectively balancing combat around the use of crosshairs for aim akin to old-school shooters like DOOM and Halo. I’m used to it, coming straight off of DOOM Eternal which uses that style of shooting, but it’s still potentially disorienting for those transitioning from modern military shooters like COD.

It’s great that you can pick up different parts as collectible items in each mission, but it’s a slight disappointment that you can’t alter your loadout just anywhere. Ever so often, you’ll run into a weapon customization crate where you get a Crysis-style weapon customization menu, where you can individually customize different parts on your current weapon. For instance, the Pistol can be equipped with Silencers and Laser Sights, meanwhile, the Shotgun can be equipped with Incendiary ammunition and its stock can be folded. Every addon comes with a drawback that’s described in text, such as the Laser Sight making you more visible to enemies or the Unfolded Stock making reload times slower in exchange for better recoil, so it all feels balanced and often broadens the number of viable playstyles available.

There are also a variety of throwables like frag grenades, flash grenades, incendiary bombs, throwing knives, mines, and even “rat bombs”. All of these feel good to use, but you can only carry up to five at one time, and only of one type. It’s great that each level is generous with these, encouraging you to use up your stock in the bigger battles.

Trepang2’s wild action also consistently looks awesome. Sparks and blood fly in all directions at gloriously high framerates in 2K resolution at max settings on PC, even when the action seems like it should be too much to handle for my now-aging GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Some of Trepang’s levels are drab and colorless like a typical shooter from the Xbox 360 era, but its action truly comes together in some of its more detailed environments. In the Horizon HQ, the festival of carnage is contrasted against arrays of LED panels refracting colorful waves of light across the tower’s glimmering marble floors.

I’ve seen better, of course; enemies can glitch out sometimes, and it can be somewhat irritating to walk through a pile of corpses and then hear them all shuffle around behind me like a monster sneaking up on me, only to realize it’s their ragdoll physics glitching. But these are minor complaints in comparison to how well my system held up, both in ultrawide (with an expanded field of vision, demanding more processing power in exchange for a broader view of the action) as well as in plain 16:9 widescreen mode. It rarely stuttered or lurched to a halt when tens of things were happening at once, giving an almost consistently smooth shoot-’em-up experience from start to finish.

A decently-sized hub area ties everything together between missions, and this is where you can customize your loadout and restock your armor and equipment, or train in the infinitely replayable combat sim which gives a broad number of environments to play around with and learn various weapon configurations in a controlled environment. There’s also some extra replayability here if you’re willing to stretch out Trepang2’s slim campaign with increasingly difficult challenges, though those just involve beating the same missions over again at higher difficulty levels. This puts you in front of tougher boss fights, including some that only appear at higher levels, in exchange for unlockable cheat codes and secret gags. They’re delightfully old-school, and range from Infinite Ammo to a Big Head mode that makes shooting bad guys in their faces that much sillier. It’s a chaotic joy to go back through the campaign with different configurations of cheats.

The gang is back and this time they’re in New York City pulling off the most daring heists. The setting change up from Washington DC from Payday 2 is supposed to be an “enormous living breathing world” that aims to add new layers to the gameplay experience. Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf, and Chains are on the returning cast roster and the story is picking up where it left off. Our favorite heisters are coming back from retirement.

Payday 3 sticks to the classic formula of being a four player co-op shooter. You create your ideal team loadout with your friends and you can bring various weapons and gadgets into the heist with you. You can play solo and with AI teammates if you’re really a solo player but I can’t speak to how that feels since the hour I played was in a full group.

You can approach each heist with various different paths. You can choose to go quietly and stealth around and try not to get caught through the entire mission, or you can go loud and just go guns blazing from the get-go. Starbreeze promises lots of different ways around accessing locked doors and stealthing through the various new tools added to Payday 3.

In fact, there are now new heist phases: Search to go looking for you, Negotiation phase to give yourself more time, and Assault. The gameplay loop has you equipping your preferred loadouts, selecting new skills that you want to use, then entering the heist, assessing the map layout, initiating the heist however you want (stealth or loud), the getaway, then payout.

But of course, before you load into a heist, you have to perfect your gun loadout, along with the specific items and skills you want equipped. There are new skill trees for you to unlock different perks and bonuses. You have to level up to unlock some skills and clicking on a skill before entering a heist lets you “research” that particular skill and unlocks it for you once you’ve leveled. You can also equip your loadout with deployable items that will benefit your team like a Medkit, Ammo Bag, an Armor Bag, and a Zipline Bag (a new device that lets you link cash bags to a zipline to get it quickly to a new location.

I got to play two heists during the preview: Capital Bank and Surphase Art Gallery. Capital Bank was your pretty standard heist where you go in and try to grab all the cash you can while also reaching your goal of infiltrating the larger vault and getting a bigger cashout. Surphase Art Gallery, on the other hand, was an interesting twist on the heist system with the goal being to steal some of the displayed art in the museum, Mission Impossible style.

Capital Bank felt like a familiar return to the Payday 2 days. During the preview play period, I was teamed up with two devs and one other journalist. Dropping us into the game immediately was a bit overwhelming. For context, we were dropped into matches without playing the tutorial mode so I’m sure this won’t be as overwhelming to day one players but there are definitely way more elements to Payday 3 that can get to be a lot to remember – especially if you’re just going off what Payday 2 felt like. We attempted to try the quieter method of stealthing but because of the confusion of what the new first heist phase was, we ended up triggering security and just going guns blazing.

That was kind of the theme of the entire play session. Even though we did get a grasp of the new concepts and mechanics, the actual stealth play is extremely difficult and really punishing if you make the slightest mistake. I’m all for a challenge, but it was unfortunate that we didn’t really get to experience a proper stealth playthrough during my hour of hands-on time. The few times we got the furthest in stealth gameplay, it was really cool to find different keycards through pickpocketing guards or unlocking rooms to access safes that have documents containing info on where security breaches would be the safest.

The concepts of stealthing in this heist game that’s all about high-octane action are really cool, but I worry that most people won’t really experience that very much, since most people are used to just going guns blazing from the jump. Most players won’thave the patience to move really slowly and deliberately to set up a stealth intro when it feels like you’ll just have to eventually go loud once the heist really swings into gear because a single mistake from anyone will guarantee an immediate alert.

Speaking of going loud, the Capital Bank heist has you throwing thermite to breach the vault walls while fighting off waves of law enforcement who get increasingly beefier as time goes on. You start with fighting standard cops, then SWAT-like members who have heavier armor and riot shields, and then you’ll battle a terrifying division of special ops returning from Payday 2 called the Cloakers. These guys got an upgrade in Payday 3 and they can mask themselves and go invisible and reappear wielding blades that can knock you on your ass with one hit.

Once you do make your way into the vault, you actually have to take even more time to make sure you deactivate the security ink pods that will explode if you try to steal the cash under it without successfully deactivating them, rendering the money useless and uncollectible. Once your team has all the cash loaded up in their bags, you can make your way out to the streets and start your escape.

The art gallery heist, meanwhile, was a lot of fun since it was a new environment and gave off an Ocean’s 11 vibe. Stealthing here was pretty difficult, too, since this map requires you to climb around if you want to find a quiet way into the art museum. The gameplay loop was similar to Capital Bank, but instead of cash you steal paintings or small statues and you have to verify which piece of art is the one you’re looking for.

For instance, one of the objectives was to validate the real painting from fake copies by getting a blue light tool to check for blood that was only on the real paintings. Once validated, you cut through the glass on the displays like a true art thief and make away with the treasure. I enjoyed the gameplay and environment way more in the art gallery and the actual museum has a few levels and exhibits you have to navigate through. Hilariously, you’ll actually end up using the “you are here” maps in the levels a lot to figure out where to go, as if you’re actually visiting a real museum.

Payday 3 was developed on Unreal Engine 4 which is a swap from Payday 2’s Diesel Engine. While there is definitely a visual upgrade from Payday 2, Payday 3’s graphics weren’t so incredible that I was blown away by this modern update to the series. Graphically, Payday 3 looked like Payday 2 but with more shading and lighting upgrades. But Payday 3 being built off Unreal 4 lets them do more consistent updates and have more support so I’m not too concerned with how Payday 3 looks visually. I was just surprised to see there wasn’t a real visually upgraded feel to the latest entry.

Payday 3 gives you way more time with mask off gameplay as opposed to Payday 2 where you just walk into the targeted building and strike into action. With Payday 3, you’re able to look around for safety faults, maybe a take a lap around the block to see what’s up and what some potential escape routes can be, and also examine the building from both the inside and outside to assess what your options are to either sneak or bust into the high security rooms.

The mask off gameplay is a bit restricted to what you can do movement-wise, however. For example, it took me a few matches to understand that you need your mask on to be able to climb things around the environment. I understand why that’s a mechanic tied to the mask, since you are most likely trying to climb and break into a locked building, but it was a bit frustrating and not entirely clear. Having to put the mask on for basic movements like climbing also puts you at risk of getting noticed before the heist even gets started so it forces you to really calculate the best moments to utilize the mask and stay alert.

The NPCs are more dynamic as well and you can destroy more things in the environment. There are now new heist phases: Search to go looking for you, Assault (when you’re initiating the heist), and a new negotiation phase that lets you coordinate a plan to give yourself more time in the heist.

When things inevitably go sideways, negotiation is by far the most interesting part of Payday 3. You’re able to actually negotiate with the police using your hostages trapped in that building with you. So you have to manage the hostages while also raiding the bank or museum you’re stealing from. You can use hostages as body shields since the security won’t shoot you if you’re holding an innocent person, or you can choose to release a few hostages to buy you some time for the heist.

The gunplay in Payday 3 feels really good. The transition between hipfire and aiming down your sights is pretty quick and the guns feel heavy and realistic. The different sights you can use for your weapons are varied so you can definitely find one that works for your preference. The movement in Payday 3 also feels pretty fluid. There is a new slide mechanic but I really didn’t find myself using it too much since it doesn’t work to increase your movement speed or hold too much momentum. Your armor segments regenerate over time if it’s not completely gone which lets you get back into the fight pretty quickly.

The initial fighting feels pretty easy, the waves of basic security feels almost like playing a normal horde mode since they never seem to really pose a real threat of gunning you down. It’s only after about ten to fifteen minutes into the heist that enemies seem to really crowd you and your team and the more armored and tankier enemies come out making it a real challenge. It may have also helped that I did have teammates who were good at communicating and supporting each other during matches, but the combat felt very easy until the escape portion of the heist.

One of the most fun parts of Payday 2 was customization. You’re still able to customize your characters in Payday 3 by unlocking different masks, outfits, and various other cosmetic items. You get access to more as you level up and get more money and you use the cash earned in game from heists to unlock them. There was a currency system set up in the shop when I looked during the preview, but we haven’t been given a real idea of what the real money bundles will consist of other than they will only be for cosmetic items.

Overall, I’m pretty excited to play Payday 3 again, especially with the same friends I played Payday 2 with and relive those old memories in a modern setting. Payday 3 is also going to be cross platform and cross progression so you can play anywhere and with anyone you want. It’s set to have quite a bit of post-launch content updates as well – like new characters, heists, weapons, and updated skills and challenges – so hopefully there’s a good flow of new stuff to keep players invested. Payday 2 had 20 DLC packs after launch so it’s not a huge worry of mine.