Sprawl Review – Skill Issue

When it comes to shooters, we typically see two types of releases these days; while AAA studios tend to be more focused on big, bombastic multiplayer-centric shooters, indie studios tend to lean more towards offering up more single-player shooter experiences with a higher emphasis on fast-paced gameplay. We’ve seen quite a few releases by different indie studios in a genre that has colloquially come to be known as the boomer shooter. Studio MAETH has come out swinging with its first big release in Sprawl.

On the surface, Sprawl looks like quite a promising game. It has a cool aesthetic, along with some fast-paced shooting action, the ability to slow down time, and a touch of parkour to liven things up. While individual parts of Sprawl look great, the bigger question really is how well these different elements can come together in offering us a game that’s actually fun to play.

When it comes to gameplay, Sprawl isn’t really trying to reinvent the wheel. The basic shooter controls are the same as they’ve been since the WASD + Mouse control scheme was figured out over two decades ago, and the game throws in a couple of extra mechanics here and there to make sure that the action keeps flowing at a good pace. Weapons are just about what you’d expect, with pistols, SMGs, rifles, shotguns, and so on. Where the variety really kicks in when it comes to minute-to-minute gameplay is in the variety of enemies you’ll face off against.

" Weapons are just about what you’d expect, with pistols, SMGs, rifles, shotguns, and so on."

Sprawl starts off quite simple: you’ll have a pistol, a sword, and basic enemies to fight. As you make your way through the game’s opening levels, you’ll slowly expand your arsenal with, for example, dual SMGs, which greatly increases the damage you can dish out at the cost of the guns chewing through their ammo reserves. The katana itself isn’t particularly useful as your primary means of doing damage, but it’ll do in a pinch. Its more important use, however, is the fact that you can use it to land finishing blows on enemies to behead them, which rewards you with health, adrenaline, and ammo drops.

Much like other modern shooters, you’re encouraged to go for special finishing blows in order to keep your momentum going. And you’ll definitely need to make good use of it, since you aren’t particularly hardy. Thankfully, you don’t necessarily have to be in melee range and attack with your katana to get enemies to drop their goodies; even just beheading them from a distance with a well-aimed headshot does the trick. You’ll still have to actually go to the health and ammo pickups, however.

Supplementing the gameplay is the ability to use bullet time, which essentially slows the game down to allow you to pull off some epic action movie moves during a gunfight. The mechanic is important enough to the general flow of a fight in Sprawl that the default keybinds set it to right-click. Bullet time isn’t infinite, however, and you do have an adrenaline gauge, which limits the duration of your slow motion bursts. Going into slow-mo doesn’t really give you any new abilities, however, and it simply allows you to react to threats and pull off some moves in a more precise way than you would have been able to otherwise.

"Going into slow-mo doesn’t really give you any new abilities"

Tying all of the core combat mechanics together is the simple parkour system that adds some much-needed depth to Sprawl’s encounters and level design. Just about any wall can be run on, preserving your forward momentum while also slowly adding some minor downward momentum to give you a time limit for how long you can wall run. Sprawl also allows you to jump off a wall into another wall run, and these jumps can be done thrice before you have to land on solid ground. While the wall running takes some getting used to—and you’ll definitely want to get used to it considering the game’s general reliance on the ability for its level design—once you’ve actually figured out how it works, the game allows you to literally and figuratively run circles around just about any combat encounter you’re bound to face.

Speaking of level design, this is where some of Sprawl’s weaknesses come into play. While the individual areas where you fight enemies are, generally speaking, fine, the overall flow of a level often feels weird. An early level will see you fighting enemies on the street level one moment, and without much in the way of transition, throw you into a wall-running platforming segment revolving around giant pipes, only to ultimately end up fighting your way across building rooftops.

Sprawl also has quite a few technical issues, especially when it comes to how it handles its audio. While you won’t really find anything wrong with it most of the time, any time you load into a new level or continue from a checkpoint, the game plays a loud, harsh sound that seemingly ignores any changes you might have made to the title’s sound volume setting. Players who typically use headphones might want to steer clear of Sprawl until at least this issue is sorted. Other technical issues revolve around how the game sometimes handles inputs, making it really difficult to understand if you’ve successfully started a wall-run.

"The overall flow of a level often feels weird."

When it comes to non-technical aspects, Sprawl only really has one major problem—it’s really bad at actually teaching you how to play. The game features a tutorial in the form of floating windows in its opening level that tell you how you can do something. The problem is that these tutorial windows don’t really spend more than maybe a sentence or two in describing, say, wall-hopping, and you’re expected to just trial and error your way through a challenge to figure out.

When it comes to the story, Sprawl isn’t straying from its genre’s traditions. Players are put into the shoes of protagonist SEVEN—a special ops super soldier that was somehow disgraced, and is essentially out for revenge. There isn’t really much in the way of a deep, complex story here, and if you’re looking for something a little bit deeper than just an excuse to mow down hundreds of enemies, you’re not going to find it here.

The visuals are what really set Sprawl apart from many of its contemporaries. It features an art style that makes use of low-resolution textures with other more modern graphics technologies, giving the game the look of an old-school FPS while still maintaining a high fidelity and frame rate. The best way I can describe the visuals of Sprawl is that it’s what my brain thinks of when I’m thinking about a retro FPS. The art style was similarly expertly used in the System Shock remake from earlier this year.

Sprawl isn’t a game without its problems, both technical and game design. Its poor job of explaining how its skill-centric parkour works, and essentially throwing you to the wolves might be endearing to some, but it definitely puts a blemish on a game that’s otherwise pretty fun if you’re into fast-paced FPSes. The gameplay is the centerpiece in Sprawl, and just about everything else is made in service offering up an entertaining, if rather by-the-numbers fast-paced shooter.

This game was reviewed on PC.