SPRAWL

aggressively mediocre. sound effects were good though

Fun combat and pretty good movement system

Quake, mixed with Half-Life + wall running. Pretty decent story too. It's a gem.

Despite only being ~6 hours long this game was a blast the whole way through. Definitely check this one out!

"I'll do my best! Arasaka, all the way to the top!"

SPRAWL is a retro themed FPS which takes somewhat of an inspiration from Quake and the old fast paced 90s shooters I originally became aware of it because of the demo for the sequel or prequel, SPRAWL: Zero, and I enjoyed that so much that I wanted to play the first game. Interestingly both in graphics and gameplay style SPRAWL: Zero seems to be emulating slower paced more grounded FPS games from the early 2000s, though there is clearly enough of a strong art style shared between the two that they are set in the same location. SPRAWL as mentioned is fast paced, and in addition to the Quake style movement, really pushes wall running as well. The plot is pretty simple, you are a super soldier, betrayed by the military junta government in charge of the dystopia, and helped by a mysterious AI, you fight to escape or find your freedom. There’s only a few characters, and most of the dialogue is from the AI, with much of the surrounding plot given by codex’s found in the game, some quite hidden. I understand there’s a further hidden layer with QR codes, but I didn’t pursue that. Still without that and not even picking up all the QR codes I was able to get a sense of the story and world, there’s a good sense of progression and a feeling that there is a larger world around you. The world itself is great. The game has quite retro style graphics, but makes excellent use of modern lighting, scale and vistas to portray a vision of vast urban decay. It’s constantly making you feel small. The soundtrack is pretty typical cyberpunk, and indeed I thought sounded really similar to the Ascent soundtrack, but it still sounds pretty good and I enjoy that style of music. Guns and sound effects were suitably thumpy. Gameplay is good, guns are pretty standard for a boomer shooter but punchy, movement is responsive and I found bullet time helpful for those tricky moments. The enemies are satisfying to shoot down, though don’t always seem the smartest. I found the game has an excellent rhythm to it’s movement and shooting and while I thought at first I’d struggle, as I got into it I found myself getting into a flow state. I found the boss battles well paced and appropriately not too easy or too hard. My minor complaints is that DLSS/DLAA is broken in the game, and while it doesn’t really need it, due to the graphics style and the game running really well, the devs have acknowledged this back in March and said they were working on an update ASAP to fix it, and never seemed to have released this. Further a couple of the codexs with the in game lore didn’t seem to load properly for me. Overall I would not say that SPRAWL is some revolutionary shooter that does anything particularly new, indeed much of it has been seen before, but combined it works well together, with an interesting world, a plot that pushes you along, satisfying combat and slick movement. It’s short, I finished the campaign in 6 and a half hours and you can probably manage better if you are good at shooters. There’s some horde mode maps but not much else other than this. I picked the game up on sale for just over £3 and I’d say it’s well worth looking at if you enjoy Cyberpunk shooters and it’s on sale.

pretty cool. More Games Need SloMo.