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Notorious designer American McGee makes a return to gaming with Scrapland. Enlight Software has teamed up with Mercury Steam to design what has been widely referred to as Grand Theft Auto with robots. Although the game does feature a massive city waiting to be discovered, it doesn’t quite have the same freedom or variety of missions as the game that inspired it. On its own though, Scrapland is a good but not but great game.
You are D-Tritus, a robot who finds his way to Scrapland, or more formally, Chimera. The world is controlled by robots – robots with jobs – so D-Tritus is assigned to be a journalist since others are not available. It doesn’t take long to be involved in a plot of murder though. You see, someone is stealing the information of robots that died – who would have otherwise been able to purchase a new life – and effectively eliminating them forever. Along the way, you’ll find a number of twists and turns that are unfortunately made a touch less interesting due to all of the additional, non-story related missions that must be made. Nonetheless, the story is compelling and provides a reason to keep going.
The game includes a number of pretty repetitive missions which basically break down into a few categories – pretend to be a different robot to get something, photograph something, steal something, or just destroy something – and you’ll have a few successive missions that have the nearly the same exact category. And most of these missions simply rely on you getting from one point to another, in very large areas. Even so, it is pretty neat to be able to turn into a variety of different robots, of which there are plenty. They are all pretty distinctive and offer some humorous commentary, although robots of the same type are nearly the same. This is a bit disappointing and definitely could have been more fleshed out. Thankfully, you can steal their abilities, like stealing when you’re a banker, but that is illegal and will get you in trouble with the police.
Aside from the on-foot missions, you’ll also be able to control many ships, which you can buy or simply steal for parking lots (another nod to the GTA series). The ship you have in control can be upgraded by buying a new engine perhaps, but wasting too much money on it isn’t recommended since once it is destroyed it is gone forever. The city is huge and there is much to look around. You’ll engage in much combat on air, which provides a lofty challenge since the AI is quite apt at picking up ammo power-ups.
Aside from single-player, the game includes a multiplayer mode with the typical matches: deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag. Online isn’t a major part of the game. Even three weeks after release we had difficulty finding a player to play against during several attempts.
Visually, Scrapland is a wonder. The game is massive, with plenty of scenery, traffic and robots populating the area. They are all detail-rich, with excellent textures and truly vary area per area. The robot models are pretty neat, with reflective bodies, and they are all interesting to look at. They all animate well, for the most part, although a there are a few animations that could have been fleshed out more to provide true fluency. There are a few frame-rate drops here and there, but nothing too annoying. The artistic side of the game is equally rich, as well.
The game’s soundtrack fits the world very well and is made up of some environmental ambient flowing music to go with the flow, but changes to some techno music when things get exciting. The sound effects are equally fitting, although none of them make a memorable inkling. The voice acting, however, is superb. All of the character types come through with excellent voice acting and some truly great writing to boot (although different robots in the same type are identical, which is a bit disappointing).
While Scrapland is not without faults, namely the repetitive missions, the game is recommendable thanks to its charming nature, technical dominance. The core game engine has a few problems, things that prevent the game from achieving excellence but nevertheless allow it to be a good, recommendable purchase. -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Nov 24, 2004
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