Sometimes, poor games get released – the kind that make you want to curl up into a dark corner and cry because they are simply that terrible, forever tainting your hard drive with their infernal presence. Other times, really awesome games are released that make you want to sacrifice a goat or some homeless person to the great Gaming Jesus in the sky as thanks for their blessing upon the gaming industry. And then you end up with games somewhere in the middle. The type that make up about 80% of the gaming industry, that have really neat concepts and some good ideas, but ultimately just aren’t special or advertised enough to avoid getting flattened by the Halo 2’s and Half-Life 2’s of the industry. Scrapland (I’m sorry, “American McGee presents Scrapland”) is one such game that tries to be really cool and innovative, but ultimately has the misfortune of being something that will most likely be forgotten in the face of better titles currently stealing all the hype – and sadly, it’s not just due to a case of bad timing on the release schedule.

Scrapland takes place in the far-off future, where humanity has basically run Earth down into a diseased, festering mess. Eventually they move off in search of a better home, but it’s not long before a group of robots move in and set up shop. After learning what had happened to the planet and how, the robots salvage what is left of Earth, turn it into a kind of burgeoning techno-metropolis, and outlaw humans or any other biological entities from entering. A little while later in the middle of nowhere, a robot named “D-Tritus” gains consciousness, builds himself a body out of scrap (how he pulls this off is not exactly clear), cobbles together a spaceship, and goes off in search of other forms of life to interact with. He soon comes across the freshly re-colonized Earth (which has been renamed “Scrapland”) and decides to land on the orbital platform to see what’s going on. Following a somewhat intense examination to verify that he’s not a human in disguise, D-Tritus’ matrix is promptly stored in something called “The Great Database” and, after being given a job as a journalist, is allowed onto the planet’s surface. The Great Database is a huge collective of unknown origin that allows robots who have their matrixes uploaded into it to be reconstructed at any time, should they ever meet an unfortunate end, and is run by a faction of “Bishop” robots, who charge fees for the “extra lives” the GDB offers and make a killing (har) from the frantic cycle of life and death in Scrapland.

After I went through the introductory sequence and got my own vehicle, I stepped into the rather sizable world the game offers and initially felt a sense of similarity akin to the Grand Theft Auto series – mainly in how I was free to explore the cities at my leisure between missions, guided by a mini-map at the corner of my screen. Of course, it only took a few minutes before I realized that Scrapland actually has very little in common with the venerable GTA series; there’s no real facility for hijacking vehicles for example (nor even a way to get out of your own vehicle except at pre-designated parking spots), and there doesn’t seem to be much incentive for exploration beyond seeing the sights, as I couldn’t locate any secret items worth hunting for. But I’m getting off-track, so I’ll start describing what Scrapland is actually about. Playing as D-Tritus, the player’s role is to follow the storyline and try to undercover the mystery behind the sudden murder of the “Great Bishop”, whom has his matrix conveniently “stolen” from The Great Database and, as thus, is certifiably and irrecoverably dead. While not busy hunting for clues and interrogating unhelpful contacts, the player can perform a number of side-missions to upgrade the hardware in his personal flying gunship. Getting around in Scrapland involves either using the public transit system or manually flying through the city districts from one point to another through the use of gunships – flying, multi-engine hovercraft, generally mounting an arsenal of different weapons – so having a well-equipped ride is important.

With that said, the gameplay in Scrapland is distinctly split up into two parts; on foot, and driving. The driving sequences allow the player to explore the several zones Scrapland is made up of, attack the random NPC traffic flying around the high-tech freeways, play cat-and-mouse with the police robots, and just explore in general (although, as I said, there isn’t really much to look for). The main reason to mount up in your gunship and fly around is to either go to a new location or to blow something up, and it’s the latter that can be expected to occur most frequently. This is where Scrapland’s gunship customization system comes into play. As the player’s financial reserves build up, he’ll be able to head on over to the local mechanic joint (run by a crazy guy named “Rusty”) and upgrade his personal ride by swapping out certain components for newer and better ones, or just switch to a new hull type entirely. The player can have up to 9 different ships in his personal hanger (as well as an “Emergency Ship”), and ships can be customized in four ways – hull, engines, weapons, and armor. The hull basically determines the overall durability and maximum weight the ship can handle, while the engines, of course, affect speed. Weapons are pretty much self-explanatory – different weapons can be mounted on specific slots (and some even have upgrades, such as an increased firing rate for your machineguns, or improved accuracy), and armor can be increased up to a certain point based on the player’s funds and how much the ship can handle.

The walking segments differ quite greatly in contrast. Whereas gunship combat is mostly about finding a target and hammering it with various high-explosive projectiles until it ceases existing, the gameplay on foot is a little more about tactics and caution. Shortly after he begins his career as a journalist, D-Tritus gains the ability to hack into The Great Database at certain terminals and swap out his own body for that of a different kind of robot, or simply possess any active robot in the area. Each body type has a different kind of ability, and becoming a different robot is often necessary to complete the various goals the game presents – for example, after the Great Bishop was murdered I was tasked with getting into the crime scene to snap photographs. Since the police had the area locked down, the only way in was to change myself into a cop and sneak in. Disguises aren’t totally foolproof however; flying drones called “Beholders” can see right through your disguise and will begin scanning you once you gain their interest, raising your alert level (if it gets high enough, the police will start attacking). Committing a crime or openly changing forms in front of witnesses will also piss off the authorities, which can cause quite a few headaches, especially since some robot types are more vulnerable to attack than others (and many can’t even attack back). Based on all this, the on-foot segments of the game can tend to focus on a cat-and-mouse mentality in order to survive – try to accomplish your objectives in a subtle manner, keep away from the Beholders, and don’t piss off the cops.

Things sound pretty good about now, don’t they? Of course, that doesn’t quite explain the average 3.5 rating seen across the top of this article, so I’ll elaborate. While the combination of on-foot and in-the-air combat makes the game pretty interesting at first (especially with the array of robot types to possess and different gunship combinations), it didn’t take long before I realized that Scrapland really didn’t have that much to offer. After playing through several of the storyline missions, I realized that they were rapidly turning into a simple pattern of “go here, talk to this person, kill that person, and then use this communicator”, with minor variations involving disguises or brief minigames. While I got some enjoyment out of the few interesting quests (like one where your own matrix ends up stolen and you have to get it back), I eventually started to become really turned off from the game, just from the tedium of having to do the same things over and over again. The side-missions I mentioned involve “Crazy Bets” the player receives in stages over the course of the game, which require him to perform three tasks (such as killing X number of enemies while disguised as a certain robot type, stealing a certain number of items, or shooting down specific gunships) before unlocking a “Super Crazy Bet”, which whisks D-Tritus off to an arena to complete a challenge, be it a chaotic deathmatch, a race, or a game of “grab the baton”. But like I said, repetitiveness is something Scrapland seems to suffer from quite significantly, and the predictable “Crazy Bets” do little to offset this.

Of course, even a repetitive game isn’t something that can be casually dismissed as terrible, but it’s Scrapland’s general lack of novelty or innovation that made the experience for me an average one at best. While the whole possession / disguise system opens up some intriguing possibilities, the game hardly takes them far enough to make the process amusing for more than a few minutes. After some time of playing, I learned I didn’t even have to ever bother with proper stealth or evasion, because the Beholder robots took far too long to properly identify my character through his disguise and sound the alarm, allowing me to easily get out of their range – and on the few times an alarm did go off, I never had any trouble getting away from the police unless I was in a particularly slow-moving body. The gunship segments were at least a little more challenging, but so long as I kept my ship up to date and my ammo stocks filled (an integral part to gunship combat actually involves grabbing respawning powerups strewn throughout the various districts) I had no problem overpowering my opponents.

Sadly, gunship combat also devolves quickly into a case of simply zooming around blowing things up (albeit with some sizable explosions, which are never a bad thing), and while I enjoyed the racing action quite a bit (many of the areas have little accelerator rings to give the player a huge boost of acceleration), the combat overall ultimately felt very unfulfilling. What could’ve been done to improve this? A few suggestions would be to make the missions more varied and interesting, with better dialogue and scripted events. Offer more versatility in the way gunships can be modified, rather than just encouraging players to throw on the thickest hull and the largest engines they can find before cruising around in their floating fortress randomly annihilating any idiot that wanders into their path. Make the police units a little more dangerous and increase the penalty for inflicting crimes a little. And finally, one thing that would have helped my immersion of the game immensely would be if more effort was put into the plot. I don’t mind a game that is light-hearted or focuses more on general action over long cutscenes and dialogue segments, but it felt as if Scrapland hardly made any kind of push to really flesh out the universe it takes place in, and it actually seemed to drive holes into it’s own plot whenever it was convenient. The characters in the game also felt really shallow, especially D-Tritus, who seemed unnaturally good-humored had absolutely no in-character qualms about inconveniencing or killing off his “friends” whenever asked to do so. Granted, the whole “Great Database” system means that death isn’t really a major problem for anybody, but isn’t it at least a little bit inconvenient for the victim? Perhaps I’m poking a little too much at the game’s storyline, but this, combined with the aforementioned repetition issues really brought my enjoyment of the game down. I like a game I can pick up and enjoy playing, rather than just feeling compelled to push forward to see if anything new and interesting will ever present itself.

At least Scrapland puts forth a very convincing graphical presentation. Through use of the usual countless high-end shader, bloom, and bump-mapping effects, Scrapland’s universe is a smorgasbord of artistic vibrancy and beauty. Each sector has its own little artistic style (like the Industrial district consisting of mostly brown, foggy, and very… industrial effects, while the Commercial district contrasts with flashy neon colors and big corporate signs), and the different gunship designs and weapon effects are very nicely done – I was especially impressed by the cool little heat-blur effect put out by the exhaust of my engines. On the downside, the individual areas aren’t really all that large and there are loading scenes for just about every transition (most likely a side effect of the game being a multi-platform release), which, while not too extensive, were still long enough to be somewhat of an annoyance. While the robot characters look nice and detailed, I was also a bit disappointed at the lack of variation between the various NPCs populating the land – while each robot type certainly had it’s own unique look and animation style, every character of that type looked exactly the same as the other, something that would sometimes have made it hard to pinpoint mission-critical NPCs were it not for the gaping arrow hanging over their head. Finally, I encountered a curious problem where the game’s framerate would drop erratically and I would get huge amounts of input latency if I put the game’s resolution at anything above 800x600, which was pretty unacceptable for my XP2500+ / Radeon 9600 Pro setup that ran Half-Life 2 so beautifully at 1152x864 just a week before. Seriously, are multiplatform titles doomed to suffer horrendous performance (and even technical problems) on their PC counterparts for all eternity?

Voice acting is also something of a mixed bag in Scrapland. I felt a lot of the grunt work behind the voices was delivered pretty much spot-on (the taunting, arrogant cops felt particularly perfect), but the nit-picky part of my brain kept isolating fragments of dialogue that felt awkward or poorly written and caused them to stand out as just another element to hurt my immersion in the game. I appreciate the effort the actors put forth, but I really wish the lines they had been given were a little better. But on a refreshing note, the game’s music is simply excellent - it fits the techno theme perfectly and sent me scrambling to the innards of the game directory so I could store several of the tracks in my playlist (you can’t go wrong with HumanGD.ogg). Sometimes certain games end up with a breakthrough where the music just fits everything beautifully, and Scrapland is one such game. Of course, I can’t recommend a game just on the music alone, but it almost gets to the point of being that good. The wildly random opinions of others may vary, of course, but all I can say is that I certainly enjoyed the hell out of listening to this game.