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I just played 30 minutes of Sprawl Zero and if you are looking for something with fast-paced action, fantastic fluid gunplay, thrumming music, and something that really captures the spirit of the early 2000s and the Halo type games that were coming out then, I definitely think this is one to put on your radar. Prior to seeing Sprawl Zero, I had never even heard of this game. It is made by a very small studio. It is literally four developers, but it has so much polish and the gunplay feels so good that you can tell that they truly grew up playing these games and understand not only how to emulate what made them good, what the process is that actually make them good and made them stand the test of time and
why so many games still try to hone in on that feeling and create games that feel like that. Despite it trying to emulate, you know, the turn of the millennium games, I feel like there's a level of fluidity and polish that is extremely impressive. The environments are winding and interesting and there's a little bit of friction in how they don't necessarily lead you down just one straight path. It's they kind of interconnect and give you a little bit of freedom. And that freedom extends to the gameplay itself. You can go in guns blazing just using like very Doom style punches or you can grab a sniper rifle and sit up top and maybe clean out an area
before you go venturing further. But at the same time, there's never like this loss of intensity and action. It still has that feeling to it, that oomph that makes these games so fun. I find you and your council a waste of time. Something that we have very little of. I got to play about 30 minutes of the game and I started off in a cutscene that even the writing itself, like the dialogue, It had that very like moody, serious, uh introspective and philosophical tone that these games had. It reminded me of playing these kind of like sci-fi, uh you know, what does it mean to stand up to authority type games that were really popular in the early 2000s.
So, the fact that they kind of nailed even the messaging was really impressive. The music is very thumping. There's a lot of momentum. It helps kind of propel the game forward, uh and it makes everything that you do seem a lot cooler, which, you know, you're doing a lot of cool things. There's this telekinesis ability that you get where you can pick up items and then hurl them at people. Um you can pick up medkits and you can either throw them at your feet to heal or you can use them just to hit people if you don't want to heal with them, which is kind of like a fun little twist on that. There's also the ability, and the developer that I spoke to told me this was very much inspired by F.E.A.R., where you can go into like a bullet time
sort of situation. You hit a button and your bullets curve to actually hit the enemies and everything slows down and it just is a very good power trip. The game makes you feel very powerful. There's just something about the entire experience that brought me back and made me feel like I was a 10-year-old on my Xbox 360 hanging out with friends. And the fact that this game made by four people could invoke what these large teams were doing 20 years ago. And it like I said, doesn't feel like an emulation, but it feels like this fantastic tribute, uh that it has a lot of its own identity as well. And I know I've talked a lot about its inspirations, and that can sometimes
sound like it's just derivative, like it is just trying to take something that worked and make you say like, "Oh, remember this? Remember how you like this nostalgic thing? Buy this game." In actuality, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like these people were just really big fans like we are and wanted to make something that still has like these modern sensibilities. That still has like this John Wick style like fast-paced action. I mean, you can deplete a gun and then throw it at somebody. But, it does pay tribute to all of these things in a really interesting way. Fortunately, we won't have to wait too much longer because Brawl Zero is coming out relatively soon. There's not an exact
window, but I for one will be counting down the days. I am really excited to get to this game.
