American McGee's Scrapland

Scrapland is a departure from the strange stories we normally expect from designer, American McGee. It is arguably as bizarre a concept as his twisted depiction of Alice in Wonderland, but in Scrapland, he uses more conventional humour.

Players take control of D-Tritus, a robot who finds himself on the world of Chimera. It is nicknamed Scrapland partly because it is populated by mechanical beings, but also because it is made up of a lot of junk.

Like the other inhabitants, D-Tritus is decontaminated on arrival for fear of harbouring any human germs. He is also assigned some work, but as little is available, he has to settle for journalism, a career regarded by other robots as the most demeaning on the planet.

As a writer, it is your job to discover the forces behind a series of murders. Ordinarily, such a crime isn't a major problem, as robots can be reborn simply by paying the order of bishops to assign an extra life to your matrix on the Great Database.

Unfortunately, the murderers have begun to kill off key political figures as well as steal their matrices - an ominous development that must be prevented. In order to do so, players must embark on a series of find-and-retrieve-style missions that make the game vaguely reminiscent of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Unfortunately Scrapland is a lot more formulaic. Many missions are almost carbon copies of each other, with minor variations in the item that has to be fetched. There are some humorous touches, and you can transform into different types of robot to perform new abilities, but this does little to liven things up.

If you have a passion for robots and like a good laugh, Scrapland has some interesting moments, but demanding gamers will expect more.

Contact:
Enlight Software
www.enlight.com/uk

System Requirements:

• Windows 2000/XP
• Pentium 1.2GHz
• 256MB of Ram
• 64MB graphics card
• 500GB of hard disk space