SPRAWL zero Abilities Guide

FIVE’s cybernetics are the loadout you actually keep. Guns come and go. The Gravity Gloves stay on your hands, and three adrenaline augments — Bullet-Time, Gravity Shield, Rushdown — decide whether a street fight is a highlight or a restart. This page is the kit manual. Rankings of those tools live on augments. Fight structure lives on combat.

The demo teaches them in order: gloves and punch immediately, Bullet-Time in The Graveyard, Gravity Shield in Buried. Rushdown is the aggressive closer of the trio. If a pickup is late in your run, explore; the levels are not a single hallway.

Gravity Gloves (always on)

The gloves are Half-Life 2 gravity gun energy with a supersoldier punch attached. They pull weapons from range, yank barrels into clusters, grab enemies, and throw whatever you just stole. When your firearm is empty, the gloves are how you stay in the fight. When your firearm is full, the gloves are still how you cheat angles — pull a gun off a catwalk instead of walking into the open to loot it.

Empty-handed punch is part of the same system. It is slow and huge. Use it as an execute or as architecture: the game would rather you smash a wall than press Use. Punching into a healthy firing line is how you donate a cutscene of FIVE eating bullets.

You can catch your own projectiles and fling them. Combined with electrical specials, that becomes chaining damage. It is flashy and it is also practical when the only ammo left is the round you already fired past someone’s head.

SPRAWL zero Gravity Gloves, Shield, and shotgun chaos

Bullet-Time

Bullet-Time spends adrenaline to slow the world and magnetize your shots. Rounds curve toward the bodies in front of you. This is the answer to a spread-out squad and the answer to a captain you can barely see. It is not an I-win button if you sprint: sprinting cancels the effect. Strafe, track, dump the mag, throw the gun, pull the next one while the world is still thick.

Kills during Bullet-Time drop stims that refill the adrenaline you just spent and can heal you. The intended loop is spend → kill → restock, not save forever. If your bar is always full, you are playing with a third of the kit disabled. If your bar is always empty, you are popping it on single riflemen. Save it for captains and for rooms you cannot peek safely.

Gravity Shield

Unlock the Shield in Buried if you follow the campaign order. Catch incoming gunfire and throw it back. Full-auto suppression that would shred a cover-camp becomes a free grenade you toss down the street. The mistake is treating Shield like a crouch. Activate, eat the volley, return it, relocate. A second element is already flanking while you admire the sparkle.

Shield is also how you survive the demo’s bridge and extraction volleys. Enter those encounters with adrenaline in the tank. If you spent everything on Bullet-Time because a side alley felt cinematic, you will not have a catch for the machine-gun nest.

Rushdown

Rushdown is the invulnerable smash: close distance, break a knot of enemies, and leave a hole in the architecture. It is the opposite of Shield. You use it when you already know where the squad is — ideally after a captain die-off has painted them through walls. Charging a fog of unknown angles is how Rushdown players still die, just closer to the problem.

Because it costs the same adrenaline pool, Rushdown competes with the other two. A build that lives on Rushdown should also live on stim greed: you need kills that refund the bar. Pair it with close weapons. Pairing Rushdown with a sniper you are too proud to throw is a contradiction.

Adrenaline, stims, and sharing the bar

One meter, three spenders, plus the implicit cost of playing badly (you take damage and then need the same crates for health). Health crates fill both pools. Bullet-Time refunds via stim drops. Shield and Rushdown need you to create those refunds or to loot the map. The demo walkthrough marks crate-heavy rooms so you can plan spends instead of starving on the bridge.

Difficulty changes how greedy you can be. Martyr will not wait for you to learn the cancel rules. Unstoppable will. See difficulty.

Once the kit is comfortable, stop thinking of guns as identity. FIVE’s identity is gloves plus one augment per room. The weapon tier list only matters after that sentence is true.