Sprawl Zero is the prequel to a game that’s on my wishlist but that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I don’t think I can get too deep into the lore from just the demo…

…or can I? The first bit of lore I found was a government-eyes-only historical database entry about why the city is littered with junked old cars:

• There was a plague, a fast-killing one.
• The plague’s survivors weren’t initially in any hurry to clean up, because the wreckage was the closest they had to a memorial for the loved ones they’d lost.
• Civilians couldn’t refurbish the cars anyway, because the scarce remaining supply of petroleum was tightly controlled by the ruling Junta.
• …which determined that the wreckage cluttering all the streets and hindering its subjects’ movements gave it a tactical advantage… over its own subjects.

Yes, the oppressive government literally calls itself the Junta, and the protagonist is one of its borged-up supersoldiers, who has traded his name for the number Five and his fine dexterity for some Half-Life gravity powers built into his oversized gauntlets.

And to drive the point home a little further, there’s a door between him and the first mission marker, and a Junta trooper’s trying to open it with a cutting torch. Five could open it faster with a gravity-pull, and he didn’t bother to warn the trooper first, so he got ragdolled. No one commented on this – not his commander on comms, not the other troopers standing nearby. The Junta doesn’t care about human lives, not even each other’s. They’re the bad guys.

The mission is to exterminate a bunch of raving religious nutjobs who may or may not be freedom fighters. All I saw of them was their attempts to kill me while calling me anti-cyborg slurs like “golem,” but considering what I was there to do…

…but what about the gameplay?

Well, it’s a shooter. I mostly played it as a careful cover-and-corner shooter, but it might work well enough as a frantic movement shooter as well.

…it’s a shooter with some caveats, I should say. I couldn’t reload with my big cyborg hands, so I had to keep picking up dropped weapons; at least I could gravity-throw the old gun at an enemy’s head first, and then grab his dropped gun from halfway across the room. I could also throw crates, pallets, barrels, barrels of poison gas, propane tanks, the enemy’s grenades, a chunk of concrete I’d torn out of a wall… and with an upgrade, I could catch a few incoming bullets and throw them back.

Some of the guns were a bit eyebrow-raising as well, like the Deimos firebomb launcher. Small magazine and not good at long range, but as long as the enemies kept clumping up and begging to be set on fire three at a time, I was willing to keep doing it.

Oh, and there’s bullet time, for when I was using a less explosive gun and wanted some more precision. Bullet time is actually encouraged, because it increases the chance of health drops; it is, of course, on a meter (the same meter as the bullet-catching power, somehow) to keep it from being used all the time.

In summary, the combat felt satisfying.

(Nitpick: the difficulty options only affect incoming damage, and the modifiers are 20% damage for easy and 200% damage for hard. Those gaps seem a bit… much. I got by well enough on medium, but more options – 50%, 150%, dynamic – probably wouldn’t hurt.)

(Another nitpick: the dropped guns have a rarity. It’s the same white-green-blue system we’ve all seen umpteen times, and it didn’t add much to the gameplay. It did let me ignore the lightweight pistols a fraction of a second faster, because they seemed more likely to be common tier, but I’m not about to get excited over a rare or epic loot drop that I’ll be discarding 30 seconds later.)

I found the movement… good enough; I could jump, mantle ledges, and sprint on the rare occasions I felt like it. I don’t know how well it’d serve as a movement shooter – the one time I was forced to crouch-slide, I found it clunky – but that isn’t my style and thus I’m not the best one to judge.

The demo lasted two levels and left me wanting more, which is a good sign. Wishlisted.