Sprawl Zero Key Art
Image: Maeth & Kwalee

I've always liked it when a sequel (or, in this case, a prequel) takes a big creative swing. While the original Sprawl was a very solid FPS, featuring all the twitchy bunnyhopping of a Quake-inspired retro game set in a crumbling cyberpunk mega-city, and with the bullet-time and wall-running of a modern movement shooter, SPRAWL Zero - out today - is the opposite, at least judging by its excellent demo.

While the first game had you running around as a rebellious, agile gunslinger with neural mods to let her scramble around the environment (and especially on walls), Sprawl Zero casts you as one of the big heavyweight enemies on the other side of the conflict. You're a psychic cyborg wrecking ball, with heavy armor, telekinesis, and the ability to catch and return bullets just like the mechs in Titanfall. You also cannot wall-run, no matter how much you may wish to.

While your character in Sprawl Zero might be a hulking piece of armament with Gordon Freeman's gravity gun on tap, they've apparently not made much space for guns. Weapons are treated more like temporary power-ups: grabbing them, emptying their contents into the nearest enemies, then flinging them as a projectile at the nearest guy's head before grabbing another weapon. That's a really fun loop, because it doesn't really give you a chance to fall into familiar loops with weapons, and also because beaning someone in the face with an entire rifle is very funny.

All of this is wrapped in an aesthetic that's... semi-retro. This feels like a game from either very late in the PS2's life, or early in the PS3's, right down to the slightly blurred texture filtering and the sickly green and brown post-processing haze. It evokes an era, even if it was seldom that clear-cut. While it's hard to pin the game's aesthetics down to a single year, the mechanics are like a best-of mashup of everything surrounding and immediately following Half-Life 2. We've got slow-mo, we've got ragdoll physics, we've got throwing random things around the environment.

As for the story, the demo hinted at an interesting setup. Weird terrorist cyber-cults rising up and being suppressed by an equally villainous government and corporate forces, and you're stuck in the middle. Whether it goes anywhere with those ideas, I've yet to see, but I'd not be surprised if at least some systems are getting smashed by the time the credits roll.

Initial reviews for this one have been very positive, with most reviewers vibing with the intentional pivot towards more old-school game design. Others find themselves wishing for something more, which I think they'd find in most modern, not-intentionally-retro shooters, but that's just me being sassy. Personally, I think I'm going to get along just fine with this one, especially given how much I enjoyed the demo.

Sprawl Zero is out now for £21/$25, with a generous 20% launch discount available until September 22nd, and a little extra off if you own the original Sprawl, Trepang2, Turbo Overkill , or Severed Steel- all excellent shooters that I recommend- effectively bringing the price down to around £15 if you already own any of those. And of course, there's also the demo to try first.