I wish my first night with Sprawl Zero would have been the entire experience. The shooter, developed by Maeth and published by Kwalee, sets out to pay homage to the titans of the genre of the 2000s. Blocky weapons and enemies, a mix of industrial and gritty city landscapes, and a ridiculous enemy starring in a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously are elements that defined this era. To a certain degree, they are all present here. And for the first few levels, it all works in harmony.
At a glance, the shooter kicks things off in a mundane way. You have your jump, your sprint, your ground slide, and more weapons on screen that you can count. Yet, Sprawl Zero immediately introduces one of its central mechanics, in which you can use your left arm on specific environment objects and pull them toward you. A wall is blocking your way but has enough of a crevice to make a hole in it? Press E to make way. You run out of ammo but the enemy you killed dropped his gun? Press E. Need to throw a battery toward a specific station slot to open a door? Press E and then make the throw.
The mechanic works great, and it adds so much to the experience all the way to the end. Pair it up with a breakneck rhythm and some other interesting abilities that you get to unlock and upgrade as you progress through the story, and Sprawl Zero sounds like a winner. Unfortunately, every subsequent level after the first batch undermined the experience a little bit more, to a degree that I still can’t wrap my head around.
You incarnate the suit of Five, a supersoldier under the command of the Junta. Your objective is as straightforward as it comes for a shooter like this: there is a religious group called Imago-Dei that is looking to, well, basically destroy human existence. The usual. Your objective is finding the leader and putting a stop before he succeeds on his mission. For this, you’re sent to an array of levels, each with a series of small tasks. The structure is quite linear, taking you from point A to B most of the time, with the exception of objectives that have you, say, destroying three objects scattered around the map, which you can tackle in any order. By and large, however, you always know where to go thanks to a handy radar-style ability that you can press at any time if you get lost. (This has a cooldown, for some reason, which can be quite annoying in a hurry).
Normally, boomer shooters aren’t exactly known for their stories. But it’s worth remembering that Sprawl Zero wants to evoke the 2000s, rather than the likes of Doom or Quake. Games like Halo and F.E.A.R. were more pressed about narrative, and the same goes here. Five isn’t exactly a chatty protagonist, but he’s in constant communication with his commander, who shares some story tidbits here and there while guiding you through missions — because every shooter supersoldier needs a voice in their ear telling them what to do.
As you navigate levels, dozens upon dozens of enemies will try their best to stop you. Again, the first couple stages feel great, and that’s because of a careful balance. For reference, there are three difficulties to choose from: you can take 200 percent damage, 100 percent damage, or 20 percent damage, while your adrenaline, which you need to use special abilities, lasts longer. I went with the second option, and fights felt largely fair. The rhythm, as well as the constant barrage of foes hunting you down, demands that you have quick reflexes at all times. For the most part, this is due to you not having traditional weapons that you get to keep and reload with ammo you find lying on the ground. Rather, every gun has its specific number of ammunition. Once it’s depleted, it’s rendered useless.
The quite smart design choice turns every gunfight into a constant tradeoff. Thanks to the aforementioned button E action being so snappy, picking up weapons from the ground becomes second nature fast, and hardly repetitive. There’s a decent weapon variety, too, with different gun tiers (the higher the tier, the more damage it does), as well as some extravagant options like katanas and minigun equivalents that appear on occasion. Some weapons are quite bad, feeling like peashooters or not doing quite as much damage as they’re supposed to. Others feel great but don’t really have enough ammo for you to really engage in them to get into the zone. All in all, it’s all in service of keeping things moving, which is how Sprawl Zero wants you to be.
The problem began when, for some reason, the experience started to slow me down in multiple ways. The first few stages slowly introduce you to your three special abilities: a bullet time that slows things down, a shield that absorbs enemy bullets that you can then riposte at enemies in front of you, and a dash forward that involves strong melee attacks that is great to break enemy shields. Conceptually, these are all excellent additions that complement each other and the overall rhythm quite well. Yet, they quickly began to lose effectiveness as I was presented with new enemies that had much more health.
You get to upgrade them later on during specific stages (there aren’t skill trees or anything of the sort here), which is neat, but it barely makes a difference. Basically, once you have all three abilities, the story has you losing access to them during specific events, as well as one stage that has a pivotal narrative turn. Once you regain them, the experience completely changes, as they never quite manage to replicate the effectiveness reflected in those first few stages.
The main issue is that the time to kill enemies becomes excessively long for no reason whatsoever. After a while, abilities like the aforementioned shield seem to barely make a dent, with foes stumbling down to the ground and getting back up basically unscathed. Regular enemies require for you to empty entire magazines, and then some, just to take one down. This hinders the enjoyment of constantly switching weapons. Since it takes forever to kill just one enemy to grab their weapon, the constant shoot and run is considerably dragged back. It forced me to put all my attention on one enemy at a time rather than having me thinking how to approach a group as a whole, which is what the first few stages made me feel.
Developer Maeth boasts having enemies with a strong character AI that are constantly trying to flank you and on the move, attempting to recall the brilliant enemy AI of games like F.E.A.R. The problem is that there are always way too many enemies around for you to approach things with a strong sense of strategy in mind. Yet, Sprawl Zero doesn’t really support the idea of using everything at your disposal to quickly dispatch said enemies in a fast-paced rhythm, because, as I’ve been mentioning, it takes forever to kill anybody. I became so frustrated that I switched over to the “easiest” difficulty. While I was able to actually endure for a longer time, my gripes with damage and enemy health remained present to the point of exhaustion.
It’s a shame because, up to the midpoint of the story, I was really enjoying Sprawl Zero. It starts off as a fairly cutthroat homage with enough modern touches to feel fresh, and quickly pivots to taking swings. At first, these land without question, and make a huge impact. Yet, they’re progressively eroded, with all the careful balance of all of the moving parts driving the experience forward tumbling down further and further. The final two levels pick up ever so slightly, but by then, I was barely participating in fights anymore, and rather just running to the next checkpoint. Stopping in place was the last thing I wanted to do.
