Maeth took a big leap, but sprawled on the landing…
The visuals are my draw to the this one – I just love the grunge-industrial aesthetic. It’s urban sci-fi but there isn’t a mirror sheen on it – nothing is clean. Wet concrete and exposed brickwork, rusting grates, corrugated slabs of tin, and scuffed steel is offset by blaring neon. The low-fi visuals aren’t overly aggressive, either – you’ll notice them close up, but from a few feet away they’re surprisingly unpixellated, and I appreciate that in a world full of games that are trying to re-capture the retro aesthetic by reducing everything to 4-bit textures and smearing film grain and scan lines onto everything like a hipster desperately trying to revive a self-proclaimed “golden era” of film via the medium of cocaine. The visuals are 90% of the reason I picked this up, which is unusual as I’m not overly sensitive to aesthetic choices.
The writing is edgy. Obviously taking its cues from Neuromancer, but without any Gibson’s experience or craft. The AI caretaker guy prattles on in the background and I suppose he/it was attempting to be ominous? At times it sounds more like a cross between a Reddit atheist and an angsty 15-year-old nerd. I respect that they tried more than the average boomer shooter that takes the “story in a game is like story in a porn movie” approach courtesy of John Carmack, and some of the codex logs are decent, but prepare to roll your eyes. To be fair, the average person isn’t playing this for the story. It’s just me who is purely in it for the atmosphere.
The soundtrack is an appropriately dirty EDM mix that I could listen to for its own sake, or as background music while working. It hits the right atmosphere. The gun sound effects are nice – even the pistols have a satisfying punch to them.
To wall run, shoot straight, and speak the truth.
The game revolves around three core pillars – the movement, the bullet time, and the glory kill/weak spot system.
Games that revolve around movement are all about entering a flow-state, where you just intuitively hit a sequence of actions with a fluid grace, allowing the one to follow seamlessly into another. It’s very satisfying when games nail that. If a game is movement-based, then the designers will often create lines. If you’ve ever tried skateboarding, you’ll be familiar with this concept. For anybody else, a line is just an intuitive imaginary ‘line’ that follows from one thing to the next – so from the ground, to a railing, to a stair set, where you can imagine tricking from the floor into a grind along the rail and tricking off the rail over the stair set and rolling away smoothly at the bottom. Parkour runners have the same concept, which was brilliantly used in Mirror’s Edge.
Mirror’s Edge was fairly minimalist in its presentation, it took a mechanics-first approach to the parkour lines, but it was consistent enough in that minimalism that it didn’t disrupt the verisimilitude of the setting. For other games that attempt to both portray a setting in an authentic manner and simultaneously do movement-based shooting well, they have to find a lot of weird contrivances for bits of the level to be laid out in the way that they are.
This is what Doom did well – design the levels in such a way as to allow the player to strafe jump around the place blasting demons in the face, without disrupting the suspension of disbelief. OK, do I really think that you need a football field-sized donut full of inexplicable walkways and platforms, around a giant energy tower? No. Or at least not in the way they’re doing it. But there are enough computer panels and control benches behind windows, holograms, techno-industrial flavouring, and nods to practical utilitarian design choices, that even if there is no particular reason for an undefined crate to be stacked in just such a way as to allow DoomGuy to hop seamlessly from floor-to-crate-to-balcony, that my mind doesn’t just start to squint at the idea and wonder what’s going on there.
In contrast, Sprawl doesn’t nail this particularly consistently. It normalises towering verticality nicely – you get the idea that you’re in a latter-day Chongqing analogue, where you can be standing in a public square on the 22nd floor, and public transport casually runs through the middle of residential tower blocks. I love that ambience. But it doesn’t merge the aesthetic into the gameplay particularly well.
There are nods to trying to integrate the movement into the setting, with players wall running along billboards and stretches of wall panelling over precipitous plunges, but these are mostly transitionary sections between encounters and the death drops are often just black pits to nowhere, they don’t feel like part of the level, so much as they resemble a Sonic obstacle. Why are they there? What’s at the bottom? What is the purpose of this back alley with a power box that is inexplicably stuck behind a bottomless pit linked to a big display piece three blocks away? It doesn’t make much sense.
The levels, despite giving the impression of scale, are often quite cramped. You’re diving and wall running through alleyways and box-sized courtyards, or through bombed-out apartment blocks and across inexplicably detached rooftops. There’s an attempt to give these locations obstacles – little raised boxes and ledges and surfaces to bounce off of, but the movement assumes too great a space for these mini-arenas. Which means you’re supposed to be pinging around the environments at breakneck speed, maintaining distance and velocity so the enemies can’t catch up with you and their bullets don’t hit you. While you’re doing all this, you’re trying to find an efficient angle of attack or advantageous position, and while in motion snipe very specific bits of enemies so you can maintain enough ammunition to be able to continue shooting at all, never mind maintaining the limited slow mo.
Frequently this just devolves into multi-tasking back and forth between looking where you’re going, and looking at what you’re trying to shoot. Which is fine in most games because they don’t only want headshots and actively penalise anything else. But it doesn’t work very well here because, on top of the overly restrictive mechanics, the levels just aren’t set out in a way that facilitate that type of gameplay. It’s’ bad enough in enclosed environments, where you can at least just slam into a wall if you mistime a jump. If you’re on one of the frequent small and cluttered rooftop sections, get used to becoming disoriented mid-jump while trying to figure out where you’re going, what’s shooting you, and what you need to be shooting at any given second, and flying off into the fog-filled vistas between tower blocks.
Movement is what the game purports to be centered around, but I just couldn’t get a good flow going – it’s far too easy to slide into a heap of trash and come to a dead stop. The arenas are surprisingly awkward to traverse – which somewhat defeats the point of a movement shooter.
Worse, there’s no mantling system, so trying to jump up onto a low roof is often an awkward guessing game of whether you can clear a ledge before an enemy springs up behind you, or whether you’ll just faceplant Loony Toons style into the stucco.
I don’t know what kind of feeling they were going for here, but I came away feeling less John Wu and more Bugs Bunny.
The focus on the doom-style glory kill doesn’t work very well here. Instead of a single-second canned animation to gain health and bullets, you have to pop their heads while hurtling through the air at 100 MPH. When the game is throwing dozens of enemies at you at once, you’re frequently focussed on surviving the hail of projectiles headed your way, and less on ‘shoot the moving orange dot’.
The slow motion mechanic is stingy at best, runs out incredibly fast and isn’t helped by the fact that the main source of replenishment is the glory kills – which makes sense on paper, but the way in which the mechanics and the levels intertwine never lets you get into a flow state.
This in turn would be less of a problem if you didn’t eternally feel so starved for ammunition all the time. We go back to the fact that I prefer the projectile-based weaponry that Sprawl used, over standard ‘hitscan’ weapons. But here the focus on precision everything coupled with very limited resources across the board, meant that I didn’t really want to shoot because shooting was, unless I could find an angle from which to guarantee a headshot, thus guaranteeing an ammo refill, a waste of resources.
To put a final nail in my disappointment with how uncomfortable the combat system in Sprawl is, the developers went out of their way to ensure that enemies are massive bullet sponges. This is to get you to engage with the Doom-style glory kill mechanics, but it just doesn’t work here. You can empty an entire SMG into a basic goon and they won’t flinch. Shooting the orange bits or don’t shoot at all. If you don’t go all-heads-all-the-time, then you will just run out of ammo.
Glory kills should reward me for good aim, not constitute the only way to play. If I’m effectively being punished for shooting the guys who are trying to kill me, I’m just going to put the game down.
It’s a game with a skill floor that is reasonably high, and I’m perfectly fine with enemies that can kill me quickly, but I just could not get a bead on this one. I don’t like power fantasies. I find them a bit sad. I just don’t really feel a need to Mary Sue my way through the experience as some kind of mirror shade-donning god of death – it feels like massive overcompensation. Maybe that’s why I hate the Doom fanboys. I just find them very cringeworthy. So it’s nice to play a character in one of these old-school FPS games that absolutely can be murked by the first goon in a suit of near-future riot gear that you see. Bollocks to power fantasies, I prefer an everyman.
However, Sprawl‘s over-emphasis on shooting only the orange bits undermines the movement mechanics. The game wants you to be shooting only the orange bits, but it’s difficult to do that while flying through the air like a dollar-store Max Payne without the stylised diving. The result is that it seems objectively more effective to play this as if it were more in line with Rage or Wolfenstein or something. Circle strafing around the enemies and deliberately slowing down in bullet time to shoot them in the head once or twice, was far more effective than… engaging with the core game mechanics.
One enemy has a back backpack-looking thing, and occasionally explode. I’m going to say that the game deliberately wanted me to shoot them because they were highlighted, but found that most of the time when I shot the backpacks they’d never register. At other times they would trigger in instances where I wasn’t even aiming at the highlights. Another enemy has a hood, and that lights up like a glowstick, but I’d empty an entire SMG clip into their face and they’d completely ignore it. The result is that the game seemed give me mixed signals as to what it wanted me to do. Whether that was bad hit detection or delay/miss owing to projectile physics, I couldn’t say. Ultimately predicting the outcome of any given shot is, ironically, hit and miss.
Now, admittedly, it’s been a long time since I bounced around Turok, Quake, or Unreal Tournament, so I’m more than a tad rusty with old-school shooters to say the least. And I’d say that accounts for at least 40% of my difficulties getting into this one. My aim sucks. I’m going to miss the broad side of an orange flashing barn. I’m just not enough of a Gamer(TM) or whatever. It’s possible that if I just stuck with it, I’d get good, and I reckon there’s probably a pretty high skill ceiling here. So for the kind of person who is willing to sink the time in, they’re probably going to feel quite satisfied as they zip through a parkour maze of billboards head shotting every yellow-daubed riot officer who pitched up to work that day. As for myself, I have other responsibilities, and that gameplay loop just isn’t satisfactory or tight enough to warrant dumping the time it would take to perfect the ability to no-scope a neon balloon during a perfect 360 bunny hop off a Neo-Tokyo nun’s tits. Not sorry.
As a personal aesthetic note, the pulsing orange bits on the enemies completely kills the atmosphere: One second you’re shooting riot cops and cyber ninjas on rain-pelted rooftops and the next you’re PVPing with Risk of Rain 2’s Commando.
A solid chunk of the reason that I bounced off this one so unexpectedly hard was purely down to my own lack of ability. On the other hand, there are design choices in this game that seem to actively work against the ability to get into it. It’s a movement shooter that seems to want to you to be airborne half the time, but the levels are either very cramped and cluttered, or the larger arenas don’t facilitate the movement mechanics.
The game’s gritty aesthetic is fighting with the bombastic nature of the mechanics. The way this game presents itself as wanting to be played, and the way that is actually effective to play it, are two completely different animals. Sprawl can’t figure out whether it’s a down-to-earth grimy street tough in the back alleys of Cyberpunk Dystopia City #1572, or a full-bore balls-to-the-wall boomer shooter that’s there to flood players with happy chemicals and doesn’t care how it achieves that.
If you’re going to demand high accuracy, then slow the game down and design around a methodical approach and careful positioning. If you’re going to demand high-octane wall-running mag dumps, then don’t punish the player for doing high-octane wall-running mag dumps.
I’m not sorry I bought it. But I got about three hours in before the whole affair started to really wear at me. It felt like the game had more or less shown me what it had, and fights had long since devolved into swarm waves of clone troopers running in conga lines behind me, or stampeding en masse into walls. The term ‘brain dead’ would be charitable when talking about Sprawl‘s AI. Sure, there were more guns to see and more police to shoot, but between the awkward level design and the excessively finicky combat, I just couldn’t be bothered.
Originally posted on Steam.
Words and Chaos 
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