SPRAWL Review (PS5) – There are no shortcuts to making a good game. That’s the baseline truth to game design. But there are choices you can make that are undeniably cool, and could maybe feel like a shortcut.
Things like slow-motion action, wall-running, wall-jumping, and big meaty shotgun blasts that blow off heads satisfyingly.
You can find all that and a bit more in SPRAWL, a game which originally released in August 2023 for PC before coming to PS5 and other modern console platforms this past November 21, 2024.
The inclusion of the aforementioned features, and how they’re executed make SPRAWL a very fun game to play when it (and your player character) are firing on all cylinders.
But some console growing pains, level and enemy AI design that leaves something to be desired, and an oppressive soundtrack keep it from being an easy recommendation among its contemporaries.
SPRAWL Review (PS5) – Cheat Codes ON
Move Fast, Shoot Faster
Veteran FPS fans will be able to recognize that SPRAWL is closer to your boomer-shooters like early DOOM and Quake more than it is to the modern FPS games it takes influence from. There’s some Titanfall in there for sure, but the retro-design to the look of the game and the levels make this feel more like developer MAETH really loved playing DOOM and just wanted to be able to wall-run/jump, so they made that game themselves.
Skating across each level the DOOM influence is really felt in the design of the encounters. You’re movement capabilities are your biggest advantage, so trying to stand still and pick your shots is a shortcut to the “You Died” screen, and restarting from your last checkpoint.
Just like DOOM, when you get the hang of the controls, you’ll fall into a dance of sorts, swapping weapons on the fly for quick damage bursts of damage to the variety of enemies you’ll face, choosing the best weapon for each. But this time, you’re actually bouncing off the walls and jumping over the heads of enemies while hitting your shots in slow-motion.
As a former Apex Legends player, hitting multiple wall-hops and headshots in a row made me feel like SPRAWL was designed to help me feel like I could put together a highlight reel of clips to rival aceu. Put another way, once the controls click, SPRAWL becomes a pretty solid playground for FPS players that want to feel untouchable.
This is where SPRAWL shines the most, and when you’ll be having the most fun with it. Like DOOM, you’re not reloading in SPRAWL, but just picking up more ammo as you find it and grabbing what jumps out of an enemies head when you pop it with a well-placed shot. Once you’re in the flow of things you’ll catch a smile growing on your face with each explosion of blood and fire you leave in your wake once more robotic enemies are introduced.
Especially because you can really savour the best moments with the slow-motion, which even helps you by indicating where to shoot for weak points. Your skills feel doubly vindicated when you see a small stat-card appear at the end of each level, telling you how efficient and accurate you were.
SPRAWL might be far from perfect (as I’m about to dive into) but the fact is that it has a strong gameplay-loop at its core that is fun to play.
Surface Deep
Unfortunately SPRAWL does not keep the same level of quality in its other aspects. Beginning with the visual design, I want to start by saying I love retro designs and pixel art, but SPRAWL is disastrously bland. The cyberpunk setting does nothing to pop off the screen, and you’re looking at drab greys and browns more than you are anything with proper colour.
There are numerous pixel art games that are striking from one scene to the next, and SRPAWL simply never is. The odd neon sign does nothing to change that, nor do the red lights that are meant to indicate the path through the level, a task that they don’t really live up to all that well.
“My kingdom for some yellow paint,” I exclaimed more than once in my playthrough because red lights were absolutely everywhere, and looked more like general factory work lights than they did indicators marking where you should go next. But really, what I wanted were more tightly designed levels that aren’t confusing to navigate, where I can figure out where to go next intuitively through level design that doesn’t rely on crutches.
And to be clear, I’m not saying ‘yellow paint’ or indicators like it that help the player find their way are a bad thing, or a sign of poor design. In fact while most players might not want to admit it, game developers know that in reality, these indicators are often necessary for players to understand where to go next.
What makes the level design feel lacking is that the environments in SPRAWL don’t feel distinguishable, and often the path forward would not be clear without the red lights strewn throughout the game. I think that’s what makes ‘yellow paint’ or indicators like it feel like a crutch, because it’s more than possible to design an environment where the player can figure out the path, without being directly told. And if there is ‘yellow paint’ or in SPRAWL’s case, a string of red lights, they blend with the rest of the background and fit naturally into the environment.
SPRAWL lacks that, and the issue was exacerbated further when I found myself getting lost for a minute or two because everything looks the same, and because every objective you’re given by the game’s narrator is to flip a switch to power on a door or grab a keycard to open a different door.
Moving on to other aspects of the game and level design, the enemy AI is a big sticking point. They’ll do nothing but run directly at you, which is only really threatening right at the beginning of the game when you only have dual-pistols to fight back with. In the very beginning it forces you to learn that you need to keep moving to stay alive and win fights, which is all well and good in terms of using gameplay to tutorialize key concepts.
But they keep doing that the rest of the game, and when you’re kitted out (or basically once you get the shotgun) every enemy feels ridiculously stupid to fight. Especially when you can bring what would otherwise be an engaging fight to a grinding halt by just, jumping on a ledge.
Some enemies can jump to wherever you might be but plenty of them will instead just run at the wall. It also feels ridiculous because if they didn’t just run at you all at once, you might actually have to do some thinking about how to approach an encounter, where to go and who to take out first. Instead it’s more about constantly moving and then launching a grenade at the conveniently-bunched enemies trying to follow you. Like fish in a barrel, really.
The lacking level design and idiotic enemy AI makes everything just feel really surface deep, and would consistently take me out of the fun I was having getting into the flow of the movement. Those breaks in enjoyment would just always remind me that there are much better games I could be playing for a similar experience with far more depth and tighter design.
Shortcuts Don’t Always Work
At the top of this I called pretty much all of what can make SPRAWL seem like a fun time a shortcut to fun gameplay. Slow-motion action, wall-running, wall-jumping, a punchy shotgun – I still say they’re all cheat codes to smash the dopamine button in a players brain, but I understand there’s an art to them, and developer MAETH deserves credit for getting these features right in SPRAWL.
But they don’t hold up even in SPRAWL’s short run time. Which, is another thing I need to discuss, because my runtime was even shorter than it should have been. A boss at the end of Episode 2: Mission 4 is bugged, so I couldn’t beat it and continue the rest of the game.
You’re meant to fight this giant flying robot with multiple weapons attached to it, defeating it by first taking out the shield generators in the room and then one-by-one taking out its weapons, all while navigating an arena filled with toxic sludge where the platforms shift every few minutes. It’s not a bad boss design by any means, and I know all of that because the first time I tried it, things worked fine, I just died right at the end and had to try again. But now the boss in my game is stuck in the wall from the beginning of the fight and won’t come out. So I can’t shoot it, and it can’t shoot me, though I can tell it’s certainly trying to since I can hear the shots being fired.
At this point, that leaves three levels I’ve not played, and I’ve done what I can to fix it myself. I’ve tried re-loading my save, restarting the level, deleting and re-downloading the game, and the bug persists.
I am happy to confirm though that we did hear back from the developer on this issue, who says it is a result of the boss spawning outside the boss arena, and that a fix is coming in an update “very soon.”
Also this bug means I’ve not been able to see the entirety of the game’s story, but the reality of SPRAWL’s focus meant that it wasn’t really all that important. It served the purpose of giving you a reason to go from one room of enemies to the next, and that was enough.
I only ever heard one character and one voice (save the thousands of times the robots you kill say “critical system failure” when they die) and it honestly felt like textbook “the person who’s been ‘helping’ you this whole time is actually your enemy”-story, and I don’t really feel like I’ve missed anything by not seeing the ending.
Not a bug, but another technical issue that feels worth pointing out is the controls. You can entirely remap them so it’s not a huge issue, but the default layout feels like a game that’s really simple to grasp with a keyboard and mouse being haphazardly made to work on a controller that un-simplifies it.
While unfortunate, a bug fix for the boss I’m on doesn’t fix the other issues that ultimately make SPRAWL a lackluster experience. Though to be fair I’ve no doubt the boss bug I’m experiencing will be fixed, and it’s in fact the only technical issue I’ve faced with the game.
If you pick up SPRAWL and really find yourself digging the movement and basic combat, then the Horde mode and Time Trial challenges might let you eek out some uninterrupted fun for a while, just to focus-in on SPRAWL’s best bits.
But the best selling point for any game shouldn’t be its side-modes. Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the soundtrack, which I called “oppressive” at the start of this. By that I mean it falls on the wrong side of the line for electronic music. On one side, the beat invigorates you and makes you feel locked-in to the moment despite the constant pounding of the bass and overwhelming sound.
On the other side, it’s annoying drivel that you can’t stand for more than ten seconds. This was the side that SPRAWL’s soundtrack fell on, but at least I could mute it so it wouldn’t hamper my whole playthrough.
The progression-blocking bug aside, I can’t recommend SPRAWL when playing the games it takes influence from are a far, far better use of your time. Go play original DOOM, or even the most recent ones. They’re both excellent shooters with far more mechanical depth.
Or go play Titanfall and wall-jump/run to your hearts content while also playing a solid shooter. If you don’t exactly need to be firing a weapon, play Ghostrunner, which has far better level and enemy design, and delivers proper cyberpunk visuals throughout. BPM: Bullets Per Minute, Post Void, Warhammer 40K: Boltgun, and Metal: Hellsinger are all boomer-shooters that have far more interesting twists to the genre. For how fast you can move in SPRAWL, it doesn’t keep up.
If you’ve played all those and clicked on this review hoping that SPRAWL could be your latest shooter obsession, then I’d advise you to keep looking before diving into SPRAWL. There’s just not enough here to make it worthwhile.
SPRAWL is now available on PS5.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.