SPRAWL Zero is an old school first person shooter full of fancy sci-fi abilities. Forcefields and gravity gloves are your basic abilities here and you’ll need to make heavy use of them if you don’t want die, over and over, like me. It’s a pretty distinctive and very fast paced shooter where standing still will result in your death.
The game’s influences are obvious: every sci-fi shooter from the early 2000s. We’ve got forcefields that stop and then deflect incoming fire, a gravity glove that can grab things, whether weapons, barrels, or rebar, and launch them at people. Then there’s the customary slo-mo, which also magnetises your bullets to enemies near your aim, which is cool and basically turns a shotgun into an enemy deletion button.
You’ll need all of these because you don’t actually have your own weapon a lot of the time, you have to grab them from defeated enemies and, once its ammo runs dry, all you can do is throw it at a nearby enemy and telekinetically grab another one from nearby. You’ll also find that you will die very, very quickly if you’re not careful and replenishing lost health from whatever fallen enemies drop is important. So keep moving through the enemies you’re taking out, keep shooting, gravity gloving, slo-mo-ing, and so on until there’s nobody left.
While you’ll keep the same aggressive attitude, you’ll need to try multiple approaches before you finally get through certain areas. This isn’t helped by some pretty significant difficulty spikes in some places, where the level design just makes things particularly challenging. Having to stay in one particular area so a timer can count down in a game where staying still is a death sentence is pretty frustrating, that’s for sure.
Despite that, however, the combat here is really excellent. Fast and frantic, grabbing nearby weapons with your gravity glove, using, and then throwing them makes you feel like a sci-fi John Wick, whilst the forcefield makes you feel a bit like Neo stopping bullets – both, coincidentally, being Keanu Reeves characters. The enemies are pretty good as well. They’re grouped into squads that coordinate with each other, but if you kill the squad leader it’ll stun and reveal where nearby enemies are, which is very useful and feels very satisfying to pull off.
There are a lot of weapons to choose from, usually grabbed from fallen opposition, but sometimes coming from a chest. These are colour coded, with fancier looter shooter colours meaning they’re more powerful weapons, though they don’t have legendary effects or anything like that. They are also completely disposable, as you can’t reload, just throw it away or at an enemy and move onto the next firearm. The heavy weapons that you’ll encounter occasionally are particularly enjoyable to use, even if it’s just because they absolutely melt through enemies.
There are a few bosses and scenarios through the game that are a bit underwhelming, such as a flying boss early on that you have to defeat entirely by activating your forcefield repeatedly. It was satisfying later on when another one of these turned up whilst I had a very, very big gun, though, so I can forgive it. I was also particularly frustrated by capturing checkpoints as well, as needing to stay in one area is a bad idea in this game.
Just as with the gameplay, the visuals are also styled after the 2000s shooters that inspired it. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s quite nostalgic, in fact, though you’re unlikely to be blown away by the graphical fidelity unless you’re only just upgrading from your PS2. Aesthetically it completely nails it, both visually and aurally.
A few control issues got in the way too. Specifically, sometimes enemies are standing on ledges and throwing an object with your gravity glove just hits the ledge in front instead of them, making it useless against anyone who isn’t level with or below you. You will also end up grabbing the wrong weapons, or telekinetically grabbing a barrel instead of whatever you wanted, simply because these things tend to be close together on the ground when you’re grabbing them.
