American McGee's Scrapland could best be described as a little bit of a chameleon, being a combination of an open-ended action RPG with an aerial combat game. This combination of genres is not a new innovation, but it's been put to good use here, as the two styles of play compliment each other very well. The game is, rather unsurprisingly, set in a place called Scrapland: an asteroid abandoned by biological beings after becoming little more than a galactic junk-heap, which has been reclaimed and developed by its new, mechanical inhabitants, who shun all biological life.
Interestingly, the game's protagonist, the robot D-Tritus, is also something of a chameleon, as one of the abilities he gains early on allows him to take on the form and abilities of any other robot on Scrapland. He's even able to transfer himself into another robot's body, gaining him a convenient disguise and consigning the unfortunate previous occupant to an untimely demise. Whilst perhaps a little more...invasive than more traditional methods of allowing player characters to gain new abilities, D-Tritus' body-swapping expertise certainly helps keep Scrapland fresh and interesting.
On foot, the control system is a fairly standard keyboard/mouse combination, as found in most third-person perspective games on the PC. However, the interface used to select actions is a little simplistic: looking at another character or an object in the world will cause a large text prompt to appear, indicating what will occur if the player clicks the mouse. This is probably a result of the fact that the game is also being developed for the Xbox console. Personally, I feel it detracts from the immersion a little, and hope it's eventually relegated to a less-invasive portion of the screen, or to a tutorial mode.
On the ground, the game feels like a more traditional action RPG. You're able to wander around, gawp at the scenery, gather information from the non-player characters, and complete missions and storyline-related quests. There's nothing earth-shatteringly new here, but what I've seen of the storyline seems engaging, and everything is implemented with a high degree of polish, even in this pre-release demo.
It's in the air, however, that Scrapland shines. The flight controls are simple and intuitive - this isn't a complex flight simulator, but feels closer to an arcade game in control style. Getting around in the air isn't a huge hassle, if you're able to navigate the robotic city. To aid in this, a radar screen is provided, with iconic blips identifying mission goals and certain points of interest, but for those without a good sense of direction, navigating this kind of fully three dimensional world can be… interesting, to say the least. The highly built up environment of Chimera, the city in which the game is set, doesn't help here, as it's quite easy for the unsuspecting player to loose their bearings in the steel metropolis. A little patience works wonders in such situations, though, and the radar guide is invaluable when lost.
The aerial scenes aren't just for getting around, though. A choice of gunships was presented to D-Tritus within the first few minutes of the demo's start, along with a mission requiring me to destroy two aerial police cruisers. Not a particularly easy task, I might add, as the police both out-number and out-gun D-Tritus' ship, but not an insurmountable challenge. Once the deed was done, I was rewarded with a useful set of weapon upgrades were made available. Later, I was able to participate in a race against another of Scrapland's inhabitants - again, with a reward riding upon my success. It appears that this type of mission-reward pattern, separate from the main storyline, will be a large feature of the full game.
The graphics are very pretty indeed, as you can see from the screenshots, and from what I've seen in the short amount of time I've had to play Scrapland, a serious amount of design effort has gone into both the world and characters inhabiting it. The art style is a slightly tongue-in-cheek, and a little cartoon-like, but the individual characters and environments have bags of personality. The more generic elements, such as the ever-present police force, aren't quite so impressive, but they still possess the appropriate amount of menace and are able to play their part quite effectively.
A similar amount of effort appears to have gone into composing and performing the background music for Scrapland, although only a limited number of tracks were included in the demo I received. I'm no expert on music, so I'll limit myself to using the phrases "upbeat", "lively" and "makes heavy use of synthesizers" - at any rate, what I've heard compliments the mechanical world of Chimera perfectly.
Whilst I'm not overly keen on the console-influenced control scheme and the rather cartoon-like graphics, Scrapland is shaping up to be a game to watch very closely indeed this winter. The open-ended nature of the game's mission system suggests that this is a game which will last a good while, even after the main storyline has been completed. Finally, the world is absolutely gorgeous to look at, and it sounds pretty good, too. Personally I'm hoping the final game lives up to the all the promise it's shown so far.
As I'm currently living off a student budget, my recent purchases tend to be from the various budget ranges of older titles: I'm more likely to be found playing Quake II or the original Unreal Tournament than Thief III or FarCry. I'll probably make an exception for Doom 3, though. (For the record, I did try Doom 3, and wasn't very impressed. Thief III has made it to the budget range here in the UK, and one day I'll play it. Perhaps after I've updated this profile properly...)
I enjoy online games, but I prefer the persistent world offered by the MMORPGs to the competitive environment of the CounterStrike servers. I've a feeling too many years of leisurely RPG playing have ruined my shooter reflexes; needless to say, I tend to end up on the tail end of the scoreboards in online FPS games. That said, I enjoy the competitiveness of multiplayer gaming, but prefer the face-to-face encounters of LAN gaming to the anonymity of the public servers.
