In the end there’s not too much to keep someone interested in the convoluted robot murder mystery. The gameplay is very
Scrapland is a futuristic murder mystery that tries to be smart and intelligent. In the end it falls flat because the constant finger pointing at the various suspects gets old very quick. You play as an out of this world robot named D-Tritus, who arrives at Chimera just in time to fall into the deep end of a global spanning conspiracy. This planet is actually the planet Earth thousands of years in the future after humans have left the planet to rot. Robots are the main “life form” and have made some major changes to earth. The world is a mind numbing jumble of rock, metal skyscrapers and strange traffic laws.
The world environment designed in this game is futuristic and alien, but neither are done in a good way. The areas are all haphazardly designed with no rhyme or reason for doing so. I understand that this is a post apocalyptic world run by robots, but these same robots have adjusted society to minimize the population down to about 8 different kids of robots. So logically the population has been reduced to a more functional manor, but the world outside is anything but functional. This makes the environments look more confusing than amazing. Character models are done well but there just isn’t enough variety in characters. Ships look great when parked up close but during combat they are hard to distinguish from one another feature wise.
Gameplay gives the illusion of a sand box world where you can eke out your living the way you choose, but besides the bets and main quest, there’s nothing really fun or interesting to do or see. The main storyline progresses through a bunch of missions that usually revolve around racing ships or battling with these ships. There’s dozens of parts to choose from so that you can change the way each ship looks of functions but in the end you’ll probably come to only rely on 2-3 ships designed with the best parts for the situations. Namely a racing ship or a combat ship, a third in between ship is totally optional. Other missions revolve around the fact that you can change into or possess any of the other robots that are walking around. These missions let you use each character’s special move to solve the mission. Unfortunately these quests are very few and far between.
In the sound department, everything is done decently. The voice acting is good and to me, the techno space music is bad. Sounds effect such as weapons firing and explosions are done well. The game could have benefited by emphasizing the sounds of the ships more than just a very low purr.
In the end there’s not too much to keep someone interested in the convoluted robot murder mystery. The gameplay is very repetitive, the game lacks character and the fun factor runs out about ¾ of the way into the game. So I’ve been to Scrapland but I don’t think I’ll ever return to it in the future.