izigame.me

I really wanted to like SPRAWL. A retro shooter with wall running is a great idea that I think would've been a lot fun to play. Sadly, SPRAWL falls apart late game was a slog to sit through. Firstly, I do want to give the developers credit for releasing a complete game rather than launching SPRAWL in Early Access. I understand why many indie devs release their games in Early Access, since it gives them a lot more communication with their player base and allows them to make changes to the game based on community feedback. However the trend of Early Access games has gotten very exhausting to me so I'm glad to see a finished game out the gate.
But before I talk about the game I do want to bring up some issues with the options the game has, or lack thereof. Firstly, there's no way to disable the camera sway. There is an option to reduce or disable the weapon sway, but not for you camera. While I don't get any motion sickness from this, it does annoy me and I wish it could be reduced or disabled. Secondly, and most importantly to me, is there no way to adjust the HUD. If you don't like the size of the HUD or crosshair, too bad, you can't change it. I personally hate the "X" crosshair and would like to disable it and use my own dot crosshair overlay, but since you can't disable to HUD you have to have the crosshair on at all times. A minor nitpick to some, but so many other shooters let you make these changes that they seem like an oversight.
Before I begin I would like to mention that I played SPRAWL on it's current hardest difficulty, called "Nightmare."
SPRAWL has a decent start, giving you a tutorial of the wall running and how the slow-motion mechanic, called "Adrenaline", plays into the combat loop. The Adrenaline meter allows you to see enemy weak points, which is usually the head or a jet-pack if the enemy has one. The resource management aspect of this game is very straight forward as well. When an enemy is low on health they'll begin to glow yellow, indicating that you can run up to them and decapitate them with your katana to receive health, ammo, and adrenaline. Killing an enemy by shooting their weak points also reaps these rewards. While this system seems pretty simple, there is an issue that I have with it that makes the late game unbearable.
Either through decapitation or shooting a weak point, you only get ammo for the weapon the enemy has. So if you kill the basic solider, you'll get Handgun ammo. Kill a shot-gunner, Shotgun ammo. The cloaked enemies, Sub-machine Gun ammo, and so on. If we compare this system to Doom Eternal, the game this resource management system is clearly inspired from, you get ammo for all of weapons (minus the BFG) on Chainsaw kills. On top of this, certain enemies don't seem to drop any ammo at all from what I could tell. I forget their names, but the hulking melee robots who run at you and can kill you in one hit don't seem to drop any ammo at all. And maybe this flew over my head, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get ammo consistently for the Railgun and the Chaingun. They never dropped from the enemies I killed, and I couldn't find any ammo pick ups in secret parts of the levels. Are they intended to be super weapons that you have to use carefully? Because that's how I ended up using them nearing the end of my time with SPRAWL.
These issues with the games resource management system culminates into what happened to me in the final mission of Chapter 2. After playing through the level, you're faced with a boss, however I didn't have enough ammo to take it down. Even though destroying the bosses individual weak points gives you health, ammo, and adrenaline (like destroying all of the other weak points) it still wasn't enough. I tried to brute force my way through but alas, I failed. The only way I managed through was to do what this game probably didn't want or how it intended you to play, lame.
Taking inspiration from everyone's favorite reviewer UnderTheMayo, I ran through the level again using only the pistol and the shotgun, eventually skipping the last couple of fights entirely to conserve as much ammo as possible. And I'm happy to report that I did, eventually, beat said boss. And even after playing extremely lame, I still barely had enough ammo to beat boss. But it was enough. This whole thing might be a me issue. Maybe the game explains how you can get more ammo from enemies and I missed it, if that's the case that this whole rant was pointless. But seeing as I'm not the only person complaining about the lack of ammo I'm willing to hedge my bets that it's a design issue.
I wanted to at least see the end of SPRAWL, given that at this point I'm well past my refund policy. But I had to throw in the towel at what I'm going to assume is the last fight of E3M1. A giant arena fight with multiple waves of enemies and, you guessed it, not enough ammo! Cycling through my already limited ammo pool to take out enemies while getting scraps of ammo in return wasn't very fun. What I did notice however is one of the enemies in the level, a giant ship, drops Chaingun ammo. But upon picking the ammo up I could't switch to the Chaingun. It could be a bug that's not allowing certain enemies to drop the ammo they're supposed to, who knows.
But I had to call it quits there. I had seen enough of what SPRAWL had to offer and quite frankly I'm disappointed. What was a cool concept I wanted to experience turned into a slow decay of misery attempting to beat the game. If this game were to get some patches and address my concerns with the low ammo count, then I'll gladly revisit SPRAWL and give it another chance. And if this is the first game that this dev teams had made, then I think they did a good enough job and can learn from SPRAWL to make an even better game. I just found what was released to be a disappointment, and personally wouldn't recommend in it's current state.