Buy 'SCRAPLAND': PC

If you've clicked the link to check out the review of this game, you might be a fan of American McGee — the name attached, seemingly by umbilical cord, to Scrapland — actually is. Or, and this is more likely, now that I think about it, you're reading this review for the sole purpose of figuring out just who Mr. McGee is. Or maybe you're somewhere in the middle, a gaming news savvy hobbyist who knows who American is, and is trying to figure out why, when, and where he suddenly gained the kind of notoriety that allows one's name to be hawked about on a game's boxart, sitting just above the title of the game, hoping to attract innocent American McGee fanboys to push the sales of the game over the edge and into platinum territory. Who is American McGee, and what is his crazy videogame all about? Being easily one of the more obscure Xbox releases of 2005, those are very good, and somewhat hard to answer questions, unless you've already played a good amount of this supposed "do everything" genre-bender.

Scrapland is one of those games that tries to expand its scope far beyond its reach. Mr. McGee (who is best known for his work on the seminal PC release Quake) has tried for too much at once with too few resources. The result? A snore-inducing melange of Grand Theft Auto meets Full Throttle meets Crimson Skies meets a quaalude-riddled scavenger hunt. In an era where U.S. game design is becoming less about "art" or function and more about "style" and pandering, American's ambition must have looked ridiculous before this project was even started. At this point, when even the biggest development teams with the most funding cannot handle fully realized worlds adequately (I'm sorry, but San Andreas still wasn't on the money), smaller, unknown teams like Scrapland's Mercury Steam simply have no business trying for such large-scale gameplay. Unless these guys were praying for their publisher to let them go on with development for the entirety of the current generation of consoles, I just don't see why such a large project was started in the first place. Scrapland suffers greatly because of its lack of focus, much moreso than even the Grand Theft Auto series. As with so many of these unnecessarily mediocre games from smaller development studios, this game could have been really good. Instead, when faced with the pressures of reality in an industry that is becoming more and more of a mirror of Hollywood, the Scrapland team clearly caved, and did what they could in the face of the almighty dollar.

Despite all of this aforementioned reaching-too-far hooey, Scrapland is still an adventure game at heart. At first, the game seems to be very rewarding and perhaps captivating to some, given its theme: A world built from the scraps of a ruined civilization — creating something of a "scrapland", one might say — by a pseudo-race of strange robots who themselves look to be thrown together with a spot of twine and some elbow grease. Your robot progresses through the game by taking control of the bodies of other robots in order to steal their abilities. Indeed, the first hour with Scrapland is a blast. A generic blast, but a blast nonetheless.

Everything after that, however, is only slightly more exhilarating than walking your laundry downtown in a broken plastic basket.

The worst of it is also the main portion of the game: The missions. Like the 3D Grand Theft Auto games (in which the missions were easier to avoid playing through), the missions in Scrapland feel more like irritating chores than what should be present in a fun videogame. There are fetch quests. Quests that force you to travel about in a straight line, swerving only to avoid buildings and small obstacles. Fetch quests. Oh, and there are a bunch of fetch quests, just so you know. Did I mention the repetitive fetch quests? And even the non-fetch quests are repeated endlessly, giving the game a tedious feel to the point that I would feel sorry for all the other gamers out there who took the time to play through this entire thing.

Much of the game is played while on-foot, but a large portion is experienced in the cockpit of a personal spaceship. The control here is simply flawless, and definitely under-appreciated by the level designers; not nearly enough dogfights are present during the course of the game, and when they do arise, usually the difficulty level is so embarassingly low that the fun is taken away. Every time I emerged victorious I wanted more. "No, don't die yet! No, get back here, you little — argh!"

Other irritating mechanics crawl into the mix, most notably (annoyingly?) the all-too-frequent stealth segments. Enemies chase you down relentlessly, with almost unrealistic vigor and aptitude... and then suddenly they don't care anymore. Is it some strange, complex A.I. tactic meant to trick players into a false sense of calm? No, American and his boys weren't thinking on that deep of a level; you probably turned a corner, and now that the baddies can't see you, they aren't interested anymore. Yeah, other times they are, and they'll know every move you make, and yet other times it is terribly clear that they dropped off your trail because you basically stuck your head into the sand. Tsk, tsk, Mr. McGee. You're disappointing your fanbase...

If anything makes up for the rinse-and-repeat gameplay of Scrapland, it's the graphics. Unlike the ambitious gameplay, the scope of the world is actually captured for the eyes to see, if not to play with properly. While the art is not extremely, erm, artistic, the massive amount of space covered is impressive. The robots and surroundings are meant to look like smatterings of organized junk, but the backdrop doesn't pound that story point home as heavily as it should. The robots look more like one would expect, but their basic designs seem

generic and lacking somehow. Still, once you see how huge this world is, how much space there is for you to run and fly around in to cover, you'll see what I mean about these graphics.

And then there's sound. For most small studios, this aspect of the production suffers the most because of how hard it is to get sound technicians working on the cheap. Scrapland's team isn't horrendous — they get the job done — but the sound effects and soundtrack categories are both far from full professional quality.

American McGee is not M. Night Shamalyan. He cannot toss his name onto his games to garner extra sales — hell, it didn't really work for Shamalyan's the Village, now did it? I'll admit that at least twenty-three McGee fans will be rushing to their nearest CompUSA to pick up their idol's latest, but as for any strong impact on sales, well, I wouldn't want to put my foot in my mouth, but I don't think we're going to see this game tearing up the charts. I love the little guys. I want to support good, small developers as much as I can — I think they are the future of gaming, because as the emphasis moves away from updating graphics during the coming decade or two, gameplay is likely to regain its crown as king of the industry. And the little guys are going to be the ones who had to be pushing this all along, becase good graphics cost a lot of money — money that they could never have. The problem is, too many of these guys are trying to make the next blockbuster instead of making something from the heart, something that plays awesomely, something that they as a smaller team can actually handle. Scrapland is the symbol of what games without multi-million dollar ad campaigns should not be. Trying for something unattainable is synonymous with creating something subpar. And that's all Scrapland is, when it's said and done.

Score: 6.5/10