American McGee Presents Scrapland (PC CD)

Let us first examine the positive: Graphically, the game is pretty. The cities, although claustrophobic to fly around, look alot bigger than they actually are. The place really does look the part. Flying above the city, or at high speed through tunnels and around obstacles is a cheap thrill, for a while. Customising your ship from blueprints can be fun, but seeing as the engines from one ship may be better but look like crap on your ship, its limited.

Possibly the best feature of the game is the ability to imitate other characters and use their abilities - in fact this is necessary to have any measure of success. Its fun as a banker, taking peoples money, or as the mayor, putting cops to sleep.

Thats it. The rest is crap. The sound is limited, and the voice acting is COMPLETELY inappropriate in all situations. If the main characters friends were killed, he'd sound like a bemused Amish person. The gameplay while in the ship is BRUTAL - the only way to kill is by complete surprise, so in the missions where the enemy expects you, you haven't a hope. The weapons are not powerful or accurate enough to do enough quick damage; the enemy ship blasts off suddenly when it has taken some damage and before you can do anything, its armour is back to full from a recharge. Its bloody impossible to kill anything! Of course, you get totally destroyed all the time. In addition, the storyline is poor at best, the characters could have been invented by a 6 year old and there is no sense of accomplishment as you progress. The internal areas are repetitive and when someone describes where you should find something, they could be describing 100 places. The missions are, by the way, often vague in this manner, and while an indicator leads you to the area, you have no idea what to do there.

It seems as though American McGee put his name on this and had nothing to do with it after; American McGees Alice was an excellent game, what the hell happened here???

This game has been called GTA3 with robots; NO WAY! Avoid this like the plague.

The problems however start pretty soon after that when you collect your first mission, this game is clearly meant for children - young children at that. Once you have your mission you set out in your flying car to go and shoot down a couple of other flying cars which was one of the most horrible experiences of my life; the cartoony graphics look great when standing still but when flying past at high speed they make you feel physically ill, the control system just doesn't work and the enemies are incredibly over powered. This game feels like a console port, and not a very good one at that.

This is a missed opportunity because the environment is so wonderfully realised and the game 'feels' very good, but the gameplay is just awful. If you are young enough to find people being called 'smelly' (one of the NPCs does this - and it's about the level of the rest of the game) funny then play Scrapland. Though I believe it is rated at 12+ so you shouldn't be playing it anyway.