Scrapland Review

Did you ever wonder what would happen if the Earth was ruled by robots? More, than that...what would happen if these robots would go crazy? “Hey D-Tritus, someone has just stolen your matrix. Go to the Industrial District, kill him, retrieve the matrix and insert it into the Great DataBase.” I’ve mislead you, didn’t I? Well then... let’s walk into the Scrapland’s fantasy world.

In my opinion Scrapland is sort of similar to, highly known, Grand Theft Auto. You can move freely wherever you want, you can steal parked ships, talk with other robots etc. The game reveals the story of D-Tritus, a robot that has just arrived in the giant asteroid Scrapland, that was once a rich and flourishing human planet and that now, due to centuries of pollution, is just a pile of old iron. Once all the resources of the planet had finished, humans had left it and so the robots found themselves the only inhabitants of the planet. The main rule in Scrapland is that everybody must have a job, and as you are a “new guy in town” you will be doing a job of a reporter. You won’t have much time to sit and watch as your chief will right away assign you to information gathering related to a suspicious murder that happened in the town.

In order to move through the huge city, D-Tritus can do 2 things: walk and use the tubular transporting system to go to all the main buildings or pilot a ship to the wanted destination. In order to build a ship you will need a plan which you’ll get in certain missions or find in hidden places. The same is for the engines and weapons. You can spend your money and build different types of ships. You will need speed and also a lot of firepower so you have to be very careful with building your ride (adding more “life points” to your ship will decrease its speed, adding more weapons will again decrease the speed etc). Everything you buy costs money. You have 3 ways of collecting the money. You can kill other robots/ships and take their hard earned cash, participate at some crazy bets (illegal races and ship battles) or turning yourself into a banker (or the chief of bankers) and steal as much money as you can.

Many missions will require for you to change yourself into other robots. Here the Great DataBase (GTB) comes in the spotlight. You can use it and transform yourself into any character of the game. But be careful. If you stay too much in the police scanners they will discover your true identity and the alarm will start. In this situation all the police near you will transform into beasty killing machines and will take their aim at you. Luckily, if you manage to stay unseen for a period of time they will forget about you. Death in Scrapland is, as far as I can say, a daily occurrence. If one of the robots die, he is resurrected in a short while using his matrix kept in the great database. Every character has a unique ability (many of them reflect ironic situations from our life such as the mayor making the robots fall a sleep with his speech, cops asking for money etc). D-Tritus can rush through enemies destroying them. Of course these special abilities require energy and you will have to wait for some time before using them again.

During the game you can hire up to 3 mercenaries that will follow you on your missions and assist you on the way. Believe me you will really need them in the ending game levels. And this is something I couldn’t like in Scrapland. If the first missions were pretty easy, then near the end the levels are extremely hard. Just imagine...in one of the last levels you will have to “drive” your way through 3 zones and destroy stations that your evil chief uses to control the town. So you will be chased by 10-12 ships and in the chase you will have to destroy 6-8 stations in each zone, flying around and collecting much needed health & ammo packs (I was massacred so many times that I thought I’ll never finish it).

Besides the gameplay & idea, another thing shiny aspect of the game that impressed me, are the graphics. Smoothly designed and rich levels, detailed textures and special effects are just some of the wonders you will see. I remember in the first levels I was looking more at my ship and how it flew than to the traffic around it.

The sounds & music chapter wasn’t left behind either. The voices are well done, very expressive, and the music is integrated perfectly into the game atmosphere. Add the excellent control and an intense multiplayer with playing modes like Deathmatch or Capture the Flag where you can import ships from the single player game and you will have on your screen one of the best action/adventures games that appeared lately. So stretch your fingers!