SPRAWL

my playtime says most about what I feel in regards to this game. I didn't finish it, unfortunately. It started off fun with an interesting premise of wall-running boomer shooter action + slow motion with an emphasis on weakpoints that acted as your way to heal/gain ammo etc. In the middle of Episode 2 and on, the ratio of enioyment to frustration started tilting towards frustration and annoyance significantly. Wallrunning went from an interesting attempt at a different kind of navigation to a more complicated version of doing something extremely simple. (With the exception of a few rooms). A ledge or a platform just a smidge too high needed you to jump three walls just to get to it, while getting shot. Add that with a lot of enemies with no weakpoints and the initial draw goes away. Then you have weapons. A grenade launcher that is good only when you have nothing else, pistols that do enough on only the starting enemies and a minigun that is too slow for you to just hold the trigger and also slows movement... in a movement shooter. And then there's that weird multi-rocket launcher that needs about the same amount of shots as the shotgun to kill a berserker or a mech, does self-damage but alsothe rockets just fly in random directions when too far. I dunno man, there are cool ideas, most of which implemented in frustrating ways. Good art direction tho, love the aesthetic of the game and the music.

The game looks good, and certainly the gameplay video on the store page makes it look fun. But I keep failing to actually get into it because in practice, the combat just feels kind of clunky - which isn't a forgivable sin for a boomer and/or bullet-time shooter. Enemies tend to have too much health and don't usually feel good to kill unless you manage to land a headshot with a revolver (which is tricky to pull off and feels clumsy). Even then, once enemies get strong enough to survive one headshot (which is annoying to pull off even though you feel forced to do so), you just don't get the feedback you need that you are in fact doing damage and killing the enemy.

On paper, this isn't a bad game. In fact on paper it should be a good game. But there's something (or more than a few things) about it that just doesn't gel with me. Let me start with some positives. The music is really great, and so are the aesthetics. The voice acting is actually pretty okay and not too cheesy. The wallrunning and slide mechanics are definitely serviceable and so are the guns. Except for your starter dualies, they feel really lightweight. The core gameplay loop is that of a classic boomer-shooter. Run to environment, shoot bad guys, get keycard, move to next area. There's something about the encounter design that doesn't really make fights feel...very dynamic. By my best estimate it's a combination of just "serviceable" combat-feel mixed with pretty dumb AI. They just kind of run to get in your LOS, stand there, and get killed. It's no FEAR and not even really Trepang2. Now I'm not asking for Half-Life here, but maybe something to mix it up a bit like an evasive enemy, or one that tosses grenades to force you to move, would start to leverage some of the wall-running and sliding to make it more interesting. It's not too far removed from a Serious Same game, but without the grand scale of a SS game. There's also a weakpoint mechanic which feels kind of...mixed. Enemies' heads glow in bullet time, and also other opportunities like explosive jetpacks which cause enemies to blow up. But at least early on in the game, the weapons are so imprecise that trying to target backpacks feels really strange. Half the time I don't even try to aim for them and a stray bullet detonates the backpack. The mechanic is there but the execution doesn't feel solid or controllable. The third sin that comes to mind is the level design. They look great (at least at first) but the arenas often feel cramped and the signposting isn't so great, which kills the forward momentum frequently. Considering that most enemies are bullet projectile enemies or charger-types that require constant strafing, failing to navigate the cramped levels properly can get you killed often. And some areas are just really cramped corridors and force you to just crunch enemies as fast as possible so you don't get overwhelmed from being unable to dodge their projectiles properly. This game, to me, is almost good. It's missing some tweaks here and there to make it really click with me. If you like it, I'm glad you enjoy it. It's just not for me.

A true love letter to the classic FPS genre. Gun play is great, music is epic, and the movement is great. Enemies have a nice variety and the game doesn't overstay its welcome. Excited for Sprawl Zero.

You play as a glass cannon: bullet time, wall-running, wall-jumping, and a large high-damage arsenal, paired with a fragile health and armor pool. It can be tricky at times but checkpoints are frequent and reloads are fast, so the game stays fast. Great soundtrack. Runs great on Linux. Great performance. Surprisingly long campaign too!

Can't believe I experienced this for less than 2 bucks. The dude who worked on the level design knew exactly what he was doing. I f*cking love you Carlos.

Take the "not recommended" vote with a lot of salt. I was initially going to reocmmend the game but then my review ended up mostly focused on the downsides and I felt the need to change the recommendation accordingly, since those ended up being my main takeaways from the game... Now onward to the review! --- SPRAWL often comes across as a shooter that does not really know what it wants to be. Do we want to be a twitch shooter like Quake? Do we want to be a slow-mo focused shooter like SUPERHOT ? Do we want to be a mindless horde shooter like Serious Sam? And to what degree should parkour matter for the actual combat? It is an interesting premise, to be sure, and perhaps the elements can be mixed and realized and create something truly unique and engaging. However sadly SPRAWL falls quite short of the target. There is also apparently a story in the game? I am usually a story-focused player (story is the main reason I play most games) but I'll be honest and say that the story in this one didn't make much sense or didn't hook me at least. ♥♥♥♥ happens for some reason, and it is all an excuse to blast some enemies and do the occasional wall jumping "puzzle". !!! Spoilers for the combat ahead !!! Once you get the hang of the combat it mostly boils down into the same extremely simple combat loop: shoot, take a step to the right/left/back, maybe jump a bit, and then shoot again. Rinse repeat until everything is dead. If there is one thing that ties all enemies together, it is that they're all effectively braindead and simple in their approach. - Most enemies, whether ranged or melee, will mindlessly approach you from straight ahead. No evasions, no tactical thinking, no thought into it other than traveling the shortest distance from their current position to the player's position. This means that "effective combat" often boils down to funneling mindless enemies into running in single file, one after another, straight ahead and into your shotgun blasts while you make minor movement adjustments and maybe some strafing here and there to avoid any return fire (if they even fire any). - Enemies will actually "forget" about the player if they are beyond a certain distance or if they lose sight of you. This mean that you can easily snipe targets far off in the distance with them making the occasional return fire, then they disappear around a tiny edge/wall and instantly forgets all about you and returns to their regular patrol route. Enemies will similarly also not take into account the distance that their weapons can travel. Like, one of the mechs in the game shoots grenades that bounces and explodess. Those grenades travels 15-20 meters at most, yet the mechs will still stand still and fire mindlessly at you when you are well beyond that distance and slowly damaging them. - Ranged enemies fires projectiles that does not take into account the player's current motion but instead mostly fires where the player is currently standing. This means that you will get hit if you are near them enough or if you stand still, but if you are moving, even slightly, and more than 10 meters or so away from them, their shots are almost always guaranteed to miss even from making tiny movements. --- Towards the end of the game most of the combat for me boiled down to sniping enemies from a distance with the pistols, or funneling melee enemies into a tight group or single line that I could then strafe a bit around and blast with my shotgun. For bosses, even major ones, making micro-jumps and movements in one place was often the most effective way of handling them. And yet, despite the combat being this "easy" in general, it could also feel surprisingly unfair at times, in that you took way too much damage than expected. I did not die often but the times I did I usually always went "uh, what?" That could just be down to bad indicators and the game generally not being good at conveying "danger" to the player properly though. Or it could also be a matter of damage scaling across enemy types. Anyway, because of the mindless combat I never really felt threatened all that much. The game does occasionally throw new enemy types at you, and even "bosses", throughout the game but nothing that really changed things up all that much or challenged the player. Even the larger and more "difficult" mechs that gets thrown out is handled the same as the smaller ones and so just became a matter of doing the same thing, for slightly longer, while shotgun blasting them to death. The most engaging boss I ran into was one where the level design actually necessitated the use of the parkour elements occasionally during the combat, which is saying as much. I had more difficulties from that one enemy than the final boss itself, despite the final boss involving far more enemies and much more health and weak spots. Was it a short but engaging FPS shooter? Sure, I guess. I was looking to do some mindless shooting as a time waster for a couple of hours and this met that need. Do I ever imagine myself replaying the game or playing more of it? No, not really. There's probably a lot of other FPS games that I have in my library that uses a similar style and blend of games that does some of the things better than this one did. --- Edit: I forgot to mention anything about the bullet time and that was because I almost never used it. Once you understand how simple the combat is, there's really no reason to use bullet time. Slide jump around or away from enemies, pick up ammo/health/armor when you need it, funnel everyone into single file or similarly bottlenecks, and then just blast away using your main arsenal (shotgun, pistols, and grenade launcher, in that order) and use the rest of the guns when a situation occurs or you run out of ammo.

endless stupid wall-jumping