Sprawl Game Review

Sprawl was a game that caught my eye, I was waiting for it to come to consoles and it surprisingly came sooner than I expected. With that said, there's a really good game buried beneath here but it's marred by some awful feeling weapons and awkward bullet time mechanics. However the movement, level design and music do carry it.

The good things Sprawl does has surprisingly not much to do with actual combat. When it comes to movement and level design, Sprawl is quite competent. The game does have wall runs but the way you can chain jumps from wall to wall and how the game made me feel comfortable at traversing it's levels. I almost felt like a competent acrobat in first person in how much I was able to just casually time one jump and then quickly jump again on the same surface gave Sprawl a unique feel with it's wall run that I don't think Mirror's Edge, Titanfall or Prince of Persia managed to create since in those games once you wall run in them once, you are committed to do it. I almost feel like a speedrunner with how much I try to one up myself on if I can make it to certain parts of a level by entirely chaining wall runs.

Level design is also pretty good, at first I was groaning a little too hard with how much the game made you press x amount of switches to get somewhere, but it started to get more creative with the city street traversal and especially in the canals mission where you have to track down two captains and the level itself while being big felt like I knew where I was going and always looped back to the terminal to use the severed captain heads. There's also a pretty well made train level where you fight a large hordes of enemies while going through a train station. Two things the game does well with it's level design is how there is red lights on guiding the player, or how yellow outlines telling the player where the switches are and the voice in the player character's head giving him a good sense of direction on where to go without revealing too much.

The music is also really good since it's very much inspired by Kenji Kawaii's score in the 90s Ghost in the Shell movie and it does a good job at keeping me in the moment while borrowing from that movie. The entire cyberpunk industrial look of the game seems inspired by GITS too. There's even a boss fight in a large puddle of water all though there is no invisibility to be found.

Before I start criticizing the combat, I will say the enemy variety is solid and varied, there is regular gun firing goons, dogs, ninjas, mechs, large ships, robots with guns and so on. The weakpoint targeting system is also pretty interesting on paper since if you shoot them there you get rewarded with more pick ups.

There are just three major aspects of the game that holds Sprawl back, first of all are is the terrible feeling guns, the devs really screwed up the gunplay. All of the weapons lack a powerful punch, they sound pathetically weak especially the dual SMGs. Enemies take an unreasonale amount of bullets to be killed by them, you can shoot them in the head with the shotgun and they have a good chance of still tanking it. Don't even try headshotting enemies with dual SMGs since it will take more than half the ammo pool to kill one of them with, the dual pistols take too long to get any kills with and these 3 weapons are the most effective to use bullet time with.

This leads me to the next major issue in spite of the fact that bullet time is one of the game's selling points since games like Titanfall or the newer Dooms not giving it to you, it doesn't feel that great to use especially when compared to games like FEAR where you can at the very least kill 3 enemies with a full bar of it, Sprawl's bad weapon feel makes the power fantasy of mowing down enemies in slow motion feel null and void. The worst part is that all of the most powerful weapons like the railgun, chaingun, missile launcher and grenade launcher have very long pauses in between firing them again while in bullet time and since the pistols, shotgun and SMG don't feel that great when using it, on top of enemies being very damage spongey no matter what gun you are using makes one of Sprawl's biggest selling points rather lackluster and disappointing.

Final major issue is that due to all of this, I played 98% of Sprawl with the god mode cheat in the options menu since without it, I would think Sprawl is terrible rather than mediocre and would drop it. This just makes me wonder why the game didn't have a forgiving easy mode like Serious Sam does since because of this, the game could bore many first time players since there is no fear of death. I just found Sprawl stimulating enough to ignore that. You can also unlock trophies with the god mode cheat on giving less incentive to play without it. A forgiving easy mode could've helped.

Overall, Sprawl has the DNA of a good FPS but due to major design issues, it's just okay. The short length and god mode cheat is why I finished it at all.