Gameplay
Scrapland has on foot and vehicle sections, separated by loading screens. The on foot sections basically consist of dodging cops. The vehicle sections are generally racing or combat. There are tons of other mechanics layered on top of these basic activities, and when I was first getting into the game, it was fun to explore all over and see what there was to do. Unfortunately, upgrading my weapons meant doing many of these activities until I was completely sick of them. Yay. Also, there's a pretty steep difficulty spike at the end. I turned the game down to easy and still ended up cheating to beat the last boss.
Theatrics
A lot of work obviously went into the setting and inhabitants of Scrapland. The intro walks through introducing you to lots of characters and places. You'll meet all the movers and shakers by the time the game ends. There's a murder mystery to be solved and a mysterious informant. The characters are pretty broad, but with the primary color style of the game, that is probably intentional. The voice acting is actually pretty good, but the wrong words are often emphasized, and context is usually missing from the performances. Also, the dialog often doesn't match the subtitles. I wonder if this is how playing games originally in English is for the rest of the world? (Scrapland was developed in Spain.)
Aesthetics
This is probably the game's strong point. For a game over three years old, Scrapland still looks very good. It has great metal effects, some nice shadows, scads of animation for the various robots, and even some neat moving bits on your ships. The cityscapes with vehicles flying by can be very impressive, as well.
Final Score
3 of 5
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