There is nothing funnier in a game than taking a lethal weapon and, instead of using it for its intended purpose, chucking it at a guy’s noggin at full speed. It is a gag that never tires, never grows old, and takes the idea of guns as lovingly crafted machines of death and puts them on par with D batteries in the hands of an average Philly sports fan. If there is a choice between shooting a guy or throwing a gun at his head, I vote for the latter every single time.
I am currently playing two games that turn firearms into poorly optimized projectiles: 007 First Light and the demo for indie shooter Sprawl Zero. In the context of First Light, being able to chuck a firearm full speed at a man’s temple makes sense, as the game is the spiritual brother of Hitman, and Hitman is ultimately a series about careful espionage by way of improvised head injuries with whatever object is available. Guns in First Light are disposable; you will mostly never want for one in a direct firefight because James Bond is a killing machine who turns Blackwater mercenaries into dead mercenaries, and the resulting carnage covers the floor in pistols and submachine guns. The guns themselves tend to run out of ammo fairly quickly, which means you are often hurling a Knight AR-1 with the velocity of a fastball multiple times in a single encounter. The act itself becomes a comedic bit of punctuation, with a levity that other games lack. IO Interactive is good at many things, but they are absolute masters at animating characters going down like a bag of laundry in a way that makes me do a Butt-Head laugh.
The other game in this equation is the demo for Sprawl Zero, itself the sequel to the indie game Sprawl. If you have a PC and thus the means to download this game, do it the second you are done reading this blog and sharing it with your closest friends and loved ones. The Sprawl Zero demo whips ass. Imagine an alternate history where we kept doing Half-Life 2 gravity gun stuff and every game looked and moved like Quake III Arena. It is exceedingly sick to play and has a fantastic soundtrack that sounds like someone did a trance version of Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell soundtrack. The anchor that the gameplay is built around is the Gravity Glove, which allows you to yank random shit in the environment and whip it at guys. The glove also enables you to yank weapons from the ground; guns in the game run out of ammo quickly before transforming into a hard metal version of a dodgeball. The speed of the combat and movement, coupled with how frequently you run out of ammo, leads to a wonderful flow where you are constantly shooting, throwing, and yanking guns on a cycle while dash sliding around the environment. I am very excited for when the game finally releases.
The unifying thread between both 007 First Light and Sprawl Zero is how they conceptualize a gun. Many games think of guns like a precious samurai sword, some beloved object that stays with the player as time goes on and is often honed and improved. There is merit to this approach, and in many games it works, but I have always preferred the Vanquish approach, where guns are just something you pick up on the ground and throw away like garbage when you’re done with them. The former often involves a reverential if not fascist attachment to the beauty of firearms, while the latter is improvisational, more interesting, slightly disrespectful to the idea of a gun, and intrinsically lends itself to comedy. What is cooler, a guy decking himself out with an arsenal or a guy entering into a room unarmed and surviving because he knows how to give a guy a concussion with a Glock thrown like a boomerang? If we are going to have guns in games, when it works with the gameplay, let me throw a gun at a guy’s head. It’s just funnier to all parties involved, especially the gun.
