A visually striking semi-free roamer that will satisfy those looking for a unique experience.
What I liked:
*The story. The story is a murder mystery with a few twists and turns. But what makes it shine is the subtle sense of humor and the plethora of memorable, likable characters that come with it.
*The graphics. The graphics for the characters and environments are very detailed and pleasing to look at. The robots have a cool reflective shine, and the animations are fluid. The environment is very bright and futuristic, also very well detailed. This makes it fun to just wander around or fly around, checking out all of the metallic environments.
*The game world. Scrapland is a pretty big area, and there are lots of cool visuals throughout. Even if you get bored with some of the missions, you can find yourself enjoying the game just flying around. There are always a lot of other robots walking around, and different kinds of ships flying around, which results in a feeling that this game is taking place in a living game world.
*The sound. This includes the voice acting as well as the soundtrack. The voice acting is solid, and the voices are solid and match perfectly with the personalities and appearances of the robots. Scrapland's soundtrack consists of primarily techno music, which is fitting for a futuristic game. But it's not in-your-face rave style techno, it's more of a mellow background music that changes depending on the setting and situation.
*The gameplay. With some exceptions, the gameplay is pretty good. Particulary with the flying missions. The ship controls are responsive and differ depending on the specs of your current ship. The foot missions are fun, mostly because you have the option of changing your form into several other robots, each with their own unique styles and abilities. D-Tritus does have his natural form, which you will have to be in most of the time during missions. But you have the freedom to change into other forms and take advantage of their abilities, then change back. This allows you to wreak havok in many different ways.
What I would change:
*Repitition. Most of the actual missions are just rehashes of one type of mission. Since you're investigation murders, your goal is to seek out different characters who have clues. They all want something in return, and it usually results in you flying somewhere, destroying an enemy ship, and stealing or photographing plans for that ship, or the weapons of that ship. Once you have the plans, you can also use those to build your own ship. The game allows you to build about 9 custom ships which you keep in hangars, and you can get rid of them or upgrade them whenever you see fit. This can be fun if you're really into customizing, but in reality it's not necessary to get through the game. I found the need to build only 3 ships, and one of them I didn't build until the very end because I needed it to fight the final bosses. The other 2 consisted of a ship decked out with all the weapons, which I used if I needed to fight, and a ship with no extras except for a huge engine, which I used to race. That's all you need.
*Certain gameplay parts. Overall, I liked the gameplay. But it wasn't without some frustrating faults. For one, there's the autoaim feature when fighting while flying. This feature is an absolute necessity, because it's almost impossible to hit what you're aiming at without it. Unfortunately, there are times when it just will not lock on to what you want it to, and will instead keep locking onto another ship. It's also hard to aim at times when you're on foot. But really, there's not much action when you're on foot anyway.
*The manual. Yeah, this seems like a strange one, and I'm not sure how many people even still read the manuals, but I HAD to put this in here. I've never seen a manual so full of misspellings and messed up grammer. There was either absolutely no proofreading, or it was written in another language and translated poorly. I started reading the manual before I started playing, and I thought "Holy crap, if this manual is any indication, this game is going to be awful." Fortunately, the game is actually well done. I know this is a minor flaw which isn't even worth considering, but I felt the need to point it out.
Bottom line:
Scrapland is overall a pleasing game to play. I can't help but feel that it could have been so much more, but as it is it's still a fun game that doesn't follow a mold of another game. I'd recommend this game to anybody, but it would particularly be a good game for those who like the style of gameplay of games like GTA, but don't care much for the more mature themes and storylines of GTA.