Sprawl review

A ballet filled with bullet-time and bloodshed

Sprawl delivers a capable amalgam of action mechanics. Sure, you’ll likely botch your first attempts at wall running. But before long you’ll discover the timing needed to hug curved surfaces, bound between two adjacent walls, or simply increase your elevation, especially if you’ve played games like Ghostrunner.

The trick is ensuring that each part of your triple-jump makes contact with a surface. Climbing vertically to seek cover from roving enemies is a bit inelegant, with your first-person perspective exhibiting an extreme close-up of a plain wall. But navigating across most of the game’s other spaces feels silky and satisfying. Well, at least until you face one cylindrical environment that demands an excessive amount of precision platforming.

Suicidal Sentry Dogs

Gunplay is Sprawl’s second ingredient. Largely, the game rewards experimentation. Naturally, you can slide in and try to get the drop on packs of robo-dogs. But the shrewd player will exploit the AI. Fire at these K9-bots from across a gap and they’ll charge with maniac aggression, frequently running right off the top of a building.

Much like the recent Doom entries, Sprawl rewards manic killing. Deplete the health of an enemy or hit their weak point and they’ll glow. This indicates that a subsequent melee strike will crack them open like a pinata, spilling health, ammo, and adrenaline candy. Pleasingly, the game rewards speed and risk, with additional dividends for those who kill ferociously.

Plenty of Guns and No Shortage of Targets

Ammunition is scarce in Spawl’s dystopian setting. As such, you’ll be forced to cycle through the game’s different firearms. While you’ve wielded the dual pistols, SMG, grenade launcher, and chaingun in countless other games, most guns feel sufficiently formidable when their characteristic advantages are exploited. Yes, switching to the shotgun to waste close-up enemies or using the chaingun to mow down mobs of low-HP foes is an action game cliché. But save for the prolonged firing delay when using the railgun, Spawl’s weaponry is gratifying to use against increasingly numerous and tougher foes.

At least some of that satisfaction stems from the integration of slow-motion, which is the finishing ingredient in Sprawl’s potent recipe. An adrenaline meter at the bottom of the screen shows just how much of a precious resource you have. And while it’s possible to advance without using it, the combination of reduced enemy speeds and illuminated weak points make conservation appropriately difficult.

Just Wait ‘Till The Boss Shows Up

About halfway through the game’s campaign, the intensity ratchets up relentlessly. As such, you’ll have to constantly be on the move, as pausing for even a split second can prove deadly when you’re facing multiple enemies. Breaking up the frantic wall sprints and firefights are the occasional boss battles, which aren’t the highlights you might expect. Not only are some of these elevated enemies a bit visually bland, but the showdowns themselves aren’t particularly imaginative. Here, a multitude of smaller opponents is replaced by a single adversary who is remarkably resilient. As such, your once-formidable arsenal seems especially anemic. Someone, please kill bullet sponges once and for all.

Worse yet, there’s a bug in the last battle that can make the completion impossible. Several times during play, the game’s final boss prohibited the protagonist from picking up any additional ammo. Maybe there’s someone out there who is dexterous enough to use melee attacks, but that’s a huge ask for mere mortals.

Forgive Me, Father

Narratively, Sprawl keeps the exposition appropriately succinct, relying on a few paragraphs of written text and verbal dialog delivered through an AI character named Father. The game’s military-industrial dystopia might be rendered in a stereotypical drab palette and lead character Seven undergoes minimal development. But motivations and allegiances are at least a bit ambiguous, which helps propel the story along. But largely, Sprawl is about gunning down dozens of enemies rather than deviating from the ‘quest for revenge’ formula.

Sprawl was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.