I don't usually understand why certain games are so highly rated here on backloggd. BOTW, Celeste, Sonic 3 etc, so I wasn't expecting to love this. I mean, I hate backtracking, so why would I like something that basically revolves around it?

After about 2 hours of playing, I put down my controller, looked into the sky and said "I get it".

Yeah this game fucking fucks. Slashing through everything in sight, finding new relics to find new areas to find new items is so much fun. At a point, your inventory does become cluttered with useless shit, and some of the stuff you have to do to progress can be cryptic (waiting in a room for a minute) but those are really my only critiques.

The inverted castle is pretty infamous, but I don't think its AS bad as people make it out to be, especially if you get the Crissaegrim early into it (like I did).

Man, I have to start playing more Metroidvanias. I better go check out Super Metroid, since everyone loves that one.

This game made a girl I liked all through high school think that I was gay because my friends and I (who were 14) would refer to this game as Asshole Smashers.

We were obsessed with the game and for the longest time we would refer to hanging out after school as "going to go smash assholes" or "gonna go smash" or " have a gay orgy". The Smashing Assholes activity stuck for the entirety of high school; along with 4 years worth of terrible asshole smashing jokes -- that to a completely normal girl who wasn't in on the joke the whole time, might be convinced we were just openly gay and announcing sexual activities from the energy we were bringing to every conversation that involved hanging out and playing video games.

We refused to talk about video games at school without coded language because we went to a Catholic school and our form of rebellion was being as homosexual as possible. The fun part is like five years out of high school, one of my friends from that group announced they WERE gay, which is probably why he used Pink Knight so much. Hell yeah.

Anyway this is Behemoth's best game. You can tell they are not in the biz entirely for money because they could have made like 5 of these and they would have done well.

I wish they would make another. The couch/online co-op game is weak right now.

honest to god one of the most beautiful cyberpunk cityscapes ever. carlos lizarraga's level design and 3D modeling are so gorgeously bleak, i want a more fleshed out game or RPG, ANYTHING with this mamoru oshii level of detail. more cyberpunk games need the blue-gray gloom of ghost in the shell or patlabor 2 rather than vaporwave exuberance. the visuals and banging soundtrack were the biggest reasons for me to complete the game, but the gameplay was still pretty commendable. the beginning of the game is slow, boringly slow. you have dual revolvers and smgs, killing enemies that make DOOM riflemen look like einstein. but once you get the shotgun, the game begins to elevate. the extra movement from the shotgun blast, gaining extra height or boosting yourself backwards, makes the arena fights so much more engaging. it's another weapon-swap doom eternal retro fps, but its movement is restrained. there are no jump pads, monkey bars, dashing, or even bhopping. you have to slide and wallrun to dodge hellfire. it's the constant movement and arena encounters where you'll find the retro part of the game, the movement itself is unique to itself. gamers will see a wall run and call it titanfall. sprawl's wall run isn't infinite. you lose height over time and can only jump off a wall two times. combine that with the somewhat pitiful slide that cant be abused for movement, and youve got a game that plays like a trudge through mud when compared to the impossible speeds of titanfall 2 making the comparison unfair since theyre wholly different experiences. oddly enough, as the game expanded with its arsenal and enemy roster, the game got better (although the bossfights are a bit lackluster, not terrible just a bit eh). i say this is odd because FPSs tend to fall off in the end third or quarter of their playtime, but this game is so concise in what it aims to do that it has no bloat and doesnt lose steam. the limited movement and heavy weaponry come together to make decent to amazingly satisfying combat when the arena allows for fluidity. there are moments of bland, too-open arena fights or claustrophobic halls that can be too frustrating depending on the enemy, but the feeling of struggling to stay above enemies to headshot them in slow-mo while weapon swapping is phenomenal.

somehow the combat is both frantic and methodical. slowly paced with constrained movement and max payne bullet time while having hordes of enemies and bullets to dodge. but those instances of bliss with the gunfights are only occasional, momentarily beautiful violence. more often than not, the enemies are too simple to keep the gameplay loop interesting where so many enemies are the same thing but with variations in their health pool. the potential was impeccable, but the delivery was competent.

I got excited for Sprawl based off the first trailer. Motion based FPS action is something I have always been a fan of. Tribes, Quake, UT, Titanfall, Max Payne, Apex, even Ghostrunner -- they're all games that I have had a stellar time with.

It feels like Sprawl attempts to channel all of those games, to mixed success. The motion is fun, with a heavy emphasis on your tipple jump and wall run. But the game itself just lacks the polish that I would want (and compared to the other games listed above).

Both the story and aesthetics don't add too much to the experience. The music slaps! But most of my complaints come with the guns and enemies. The gunplay lacks some variety once you get to stronger weapons, and unless you're really practicing; you're going to be using a lot of bullet time to assist. This slows down the game. You'll do a lot of kiting enemies as you dance around their bullets and bodies. But then while you're dancing a random enemy may spawn around you and just do... comical amount of damage!

The enemy pop-ins feel quite frustrating. I can't always tell where I am getting shot from and a strong enemy could be unforgiving. Other enemies are kinda a non-factor, like the rail gun turrets.

At it's core there is something good and fun here. I played through it all on launch day in about four ana half hours. I have empathy for the small team, but I think this just needed a little more polish to really be what it could.

I did acid one time with a friend and I got bored and hopped on this world that my friend hosted and my friend Christian told me to hop on vc and then I had the craziest urge to just burn stuff with flint and steel and I planted my own little island filled with trees and burned it all down and i went back to my place and my friend was checking it out and I wanted to troll a bit by setting my house on fire and quickly putting it out but the fire spread IMMEDIATELY and my friend was in absolute disbelief that i burned my house down and i was laughing hysterically about it and as soon as it was completely gone I went on a burning things rampage and my friend still mouth agape in call
I give it a yeah out of ten

This happened to my buddy Eric
Genuinely better than the first one, and most of that comes from two things. One, there's an actual map, and two, the individual locations don't take long to reach. Pseudoroid forms kinda suck but you'll probably never use them unless the game makes you (which isn't very often, for example I only used Vultron twice, one of which was in the introduction) so it's not that big of a deal. Levels are fun too albeit a bit annoying at times, like with the scrapyard. Every boss feels like it was designed for Model A/ZX, allowing for more open-endedness in how you reach the end. Bosses themselves range from great to not great, although the fun ones make it worth it.

One last thing, the soundtrack is great and the only major problem with it is that it immediately succeeds ZX, so is there any way it can really compete?