Scrapland Review

This November is a very special month for video games. As I write this, Halo 2 has hit the stores worldwide and we're mere days away from getting our hands on Half-Life 2. GTA: San Andreas and Doom 3 are still going strong sales-wise, and there are a number of highly popular franchises that will also get their latest iterations published this month. Everyone is gearing up for the holiday season and the big publishers are cranking up the huge hype machines that clank, puff and shoot all sorts of foul, loathsome advertisational goodness from all cylinders. (Is advertisational a word? - Ed)

While hitting the wall at full speed may sound like an interesting idea, I'd still prefer if you just turned right. Please?

Come on, drink this... This is the best motor oil on this side of the galaxy, and if you're lucky you might even get a screw with it.

But let's leave the big boys alone for a second and concentrate on the little guys instead. Surely, the onslaught of blockbuster games is not the friendliest of climates for a relatively unknown publisher like Enlight to release a game from an even less known Spanish developer, Mercury Steam Entertainment. In terms of its marketing reach, the saving grace for Scrapland might be the fact that American McGee is producing it (and that his name is slapped on every Scrapland game box), but does American still carry that much weight with the gaming crowds? I wonder... Scrapland enters the market with the daunting task of having to compete against products that could by all accounts eat it alive... financially speaking at least.

Even the title of the game is a little unfortunate - Scrapland - suggesting maybe what fate awaits it once it is eventually relegated to the bargain bin. And why do I say this? Is it because I don't like the game, or because those who try it might not like it? Not at all. The answer lies in the simple fact that to succeed in this business you need to have more than just a good idea... or good execution even. You need money: money to advertise, to get the best placement at the important retail chains, etc. In many ways, Scrapland deserves all this but I somehow doubt it will ever get it. The plain and simple fact is that this cute little fly of a title has gotten in the way of a herd of marching elephants - sure, it might have its endearing qualities, but will any of you ever get in the way of the herd of elephants to admire it? Again, I wonder...

Scrapland is an odd mix of GTA-style game play and a milder version of Douglas Adams' style of humor and outlook on the world in general. This naturally suggests that the game has a lot of spirit. You play as D-Tritus, a robot that gets a crash-course in investigative journalism only to land one of the most important cases in the history of the robot planet. You see, humans haven't fared all too well throughout history, so the robots decided to build their own planet and have it governed by their own rules. Still, as humans are flawed, so are the robots. Someone has killed the archbishop of Chimera (the capital of Scrapland) and you find yourself in the middle of a controversy surrounding his murder (Can you really 'kill' a robot? -Petro). As you soon find out, the archbishop's murder is only the tip of the iceberg, uncovering a much more sinister conspiracy underneath.

The game does a good job of keeping a very lighthearted tone while telling what, in many ways, is a classic crime/mystery story. I remember that after my initial contact with the game, I was thrilled with the humor, but as the plot thickened, sadly, I saw less and less of it. Throughout the game, however, the programmers have succeeded in keeping the illusion of a very active and autonomous game world, brimming with life and a hefty doze of subtle cynicism.

The art goes very well with the overall ambiance: the settings are detailed and as distinctive as one would expect a robot-populated world to be. The same goes for the characters: they are all beautifully animated and full of life (Petro - But is a robot truly "alive?" I mean really - what is "life?" Is it intelligence? Is it being a carbon-based lifefo... [OH SHUT UP PETRO! - Six]). D-Tritus, the main character, has the ability to take the form of any of the robots he meets during the game, so you'll get a chance to see all of them first-hand as they move, each in their own funny and peculiar way. The ship design is very detailed with cool-looking engine exhaust effects. The artists and level designers also used neat tricks like motion blur and the bloom effect to make all the different locales as moody and distinctive as possible.

You want 50,000,000 Scraps for the ship? How about I just steal it, then?

Stealing it was one thing, but driving it drunk on motor oil was a whole different ballgame.

Completing this picture of the world of Scrapland are the audio effects. The sound effects are very good, and there were a couple of tunes in the game that caught my attention. However, while voice acting in general is highly expressive and professional, there were times when it sounded a little flat and fake. My guess is that Enlight simply couldn't afford more quality actors to keep the authenticity and the quality of the dialogue on the same level for every character.

As far as the actual game play is concerned, Scrapland follows the principles used in the GTA series: you unravel a linear story, but at your own pace, while some of the objectives offer several different ways of completing them. The world of Scrapland is damn big, and players are given all the freedom in the world to roam in their ship as well as find plans to customize them or buy better ones. The non-linear approach to solving certain tasks is surely a bonus; however, I would at times find the main missions to be somewhat unchallenging and tedious. Granted, if you stick with it, the game will get gradually harder and the missions will become more interesting. Nonetheless, they will all come down to action sequences in which you'll either have to use your ability to turn into different characters or engage in Descent-like dogfights on the streets of Chimera in search of the next clue. Hardly uninteresting, but it's sadly not as engaging as I had expected. The AI does a good job of putting up a decent fight and the robots' path finding is damn good. Technically speaking, the game never kills that suspension of disbelief that you're engaged in a mystery in a virtual world, but also the action never becomes so intense that you truly become addicted. Of course, this is just one man's highly subjective opinion so do take it with a grain of salt.