Being robo-Michael Jackson-alike D-Tritus (pronounced ‘dee-treat-us’) makes for a strange lifestyle. Scrapland is a sci-fi 3D game with action, speed and air combat; it has a good try at ‘doing a GTA’ with robots. The story takes place in Chimera, a gigantic neon-lit city built by and inhabited by robots on a tiny asteroid called Scrapland. Centuries of destructive exploitation by a race long gone (the human race presumably), reduced what was once a paradise into a world inhabited only by machines. Those machines, robots of all shapes and sizes, rebuilt Scrapland into an awe-inspiring metropolis in which death no longer happens…
Scrapland’s freeform open-ended GTA-style gameplay is structured in to multiple missions which will always earn you more scraps (the currency in Chimera), access to new power ups or further the story in some way. You meet many quirky characters along the way (well they all are actually) and in addition to your (what we’ll loosely call a) job as a reporter, you decide to discover who’s killing the city’s luminaries – the Archbishop and the Police Chief amongst them (sounds like they have the right idea to me). So a robo-GTA whodunnit from American McGee, the maker of that dark and weird game version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Oh dear, if your alarm bells ain’t a ringin’, then mine certainly were…
As you go through the game you can transform D-Tritus into any of 15 character types, thus inheriting not only their metal forms but also their unique abilities- some can fly, some have weapons etc. It’s only possible to complete certain missions or tasks or access some areas when in the form of certain robots, so changing forms is a regular event. The different robots obviously have different abilities and some have weapons, and vary hugely from the tiny and defenceless Staplers to the massive Armed Cops. You can also build and pilot ships made from several different basic blueprints and modular weapons and engines, making hundreds of possible permutations. On foot the indoor locations are all stylish, solid and detailed, and it’s interesting to watch the many other robots interact with each other (bankers steal money, Cops ask for bribes, but for some reason armed cops are always shooting each other!). Scrapland’s central computer, the “Great Database” stores the matrixes of each robot so they can be immediately rebuilt if they’re destroyed, meaning that you can take the form of any robot at a terminal or by approaching it and pressing ‘Y’. Impersonating robots is illegal however, and if you’re discovered you’ll be chased and if caught you’ll end up in jail (you always escape the same simple way though). The big problem here is that there’s no challenge to taking over another robot (I’m remembering the wonderful Paradroid’s take-over game here), and you’re always better off running away than fighting, so that renders a lot of the game pointless.
Rusty is one of your few real “friends” in Chimera, and handily he owns a scrapyard where you can build all your new ships and add weapons (once you’ve earned enough money and found plans for the ships of course). He lends you a small droid called Spoot-Nick (woah – more word play, how clever!), who can seemingly do so many amazing things, like beaming your ships around the city to wherever you are and repairing stuff, that you wonder why you don’t just sit back and let him do all the work... The city has its own “Tubular Transport” system to speed you from one district to the other, or you can fly just about wherever you want with the aid of the rather vague and too-small on-screen map. You’re always guided and prodded in the right direction, and unlike San Andreas there isn’t actually all that much to do aside from follow the plot, so you’re never going to get lost, despite the baffling complexity of the city (you’ll become familiar with parts, but it’s just too complex and alien to learn your way around as in GTA).
The ships control nicely and the handling varies quite a bit (you can add many more powerful weapons and engines), but the ships won’t loop the loop and the lock-on button means that most combat is necessarily more like Zone of the Enders than proper aerial dogfighting. Various lasers, miniguns and guided missiles all do the combat work in spectacular, eye-popping style, and you’ll soon have a craft that’s armed to the teeth, as hard as nails and fast as lightning. But for some reason whenever we redefined the controls to the layout we liked (similar to a FPS set up), the game forgot the next time we loaded the game and we had to set ‘em up again – annoying.
The story will take a while to play out (I found it best to play Scrapland in bursts of no more than a couple of hours as the gaudy colours and OTT effects made my eyes hurt after a while), and a rather half–arsed multiplayer mode tries to pad out the lifespan (it plays a bit like Wipeout without the style, for 1 or 2 half-arsed players, and has capture the flag, deathmatch or race modes - all a bit crap with just two of you). You can supposedly take your ships online with the PC version, which might have been fun on Xbox Live, but for some reason we console gamers don’t get the option - sheesh.
In a game that clearly had high production values, I was amazed to find a glitch like the aforementioned control setup thing, and a spelling mistake in the on-screen text boxes (after losing an arena battle I was told “You Loose”). For some reason I never really took to D-Tritus or many of the other robots in Scrapland, it’s a personal thing, a design thing, but I like my robots grubby and robot-like (like R2-D2) rather than shiny and effete (like C3PO), and Scrapland is home to far too many of C3PO’s close relatives for my liking. But there’s a tidy and varied game in here with a plot that (although rather drawn out) has its amusing moments that will likely keep you playing till the end. Shame they didn’t test the design of the central character on a few more people though…
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