Scrapnauts
Released: September 15, 2021
Game Length: N/A
Grade: B-
Hidden Game: There was a game I found on Steam that just sort of popped up on my playlist one day. This game is so obscure that I doubt you will find anything from a Google search. I tried my best to find anything related to it - a video game website review, a company website, or a wiki page with a list of blueprints. The only thing I could really see was one of its many trailers. That and this crazy Bum Simulator that you can buy with it in a bundle. The game is priced at $13.99 and honestly looked like a neat little side project I could sink my teeth into. My results were... you could say "interesting" at the very least.
Unusual Game
Questionable Design Choices: For the vast majority of people who are familiar with any number of video games like this one, you might need lower your expectations a bit. There are a bunch of counter-intuitive choices when it comes to playing the game. I'm not going to say that these are "bad" choices, but they are things that could easily annoy or bore ones that aren't tolerable to an indie standard. For example, instead of being able to rotate the camera by holding down the right click button on your mouse, they have decided to tie the camera control to the 'Q' and 'E' buttons. Although they have taken the suggestion by allowing people to tilt the camera a few degrees, there is no option to zoom in or out. There is an auto-save feature, but it only works when you transition inside a structure instead of after a set period of time. You cannot click on an item on the action bar. The only way to select an item is by scrolling with your middle mouse button or pressing the indicated number. You cannot go to the craft station to make something while you are in building mode. The world around you - as well as your hunger meter - will continue to run while you are browsing the various building menus or placing down objects. You must press 'X' to close out of your looting window. You must carry around an "item finder" in order to highlight pickable things on the ground.
Inventory & Skills: If you are going to play this game, you are going to have to live with the fact that you cannot earn more inventory slots. The number of slots in your inventory, on your action bar, and inside wooden chests are as high as they will go. Instead, the game has incorporated colored books at each of the sites that will help advance the various crafting tiers - Yellow increases your Blacksmithing, Green helps your Alchemy, and Red determines your Technology. Blue Books build up your Management, which is a fancy way of saying that every blue book you find will allow you to have an additional item stacked on top of an inventory slot. This doesn't help when you want to carry different types of items around in the world, but it will help you when you start collecting 40 of certain kinds of scrap from all those robots you destroy.
Weird Combat: There are only a handful of enemy robots you will encounter in this world. They are sluggish to engage - perhaps due to lore reasons - to the point where you could easily outrun their puttering movements. They do respawn and either shoot you from a distance or carry some weapon that will hit you within melee range. The problem occurs when you want to hunt them down. First, Fight Mode must be initiated manually. By pressing the 'F' button, you will raise your shield, automatically select an item to use as your weapon on your action bar, and move at a more cautious speed. I could never figure out what weapon it would choose as sometimes the pickaxe that does 50% less damage on my action bar would suddenly be chosen over the mace in my inventory. There is also some sort of massive oversight when you are trying to select a different item, like a defense or health potion as it can potentially disengage Fight Mode. You have no idea how many times I died because my dude suddenly lowered his shield and was dealt a blow that reduced my health by 30%.
Optional Features
Multiplayer: You can choose to play the game by yourself. That's how it was originally designed. Or you can choose to play with up to 4 players online. I'm not sure if the game would be any better or worse if you decided to hook-up with other people, but it might make it a bit more enjoyable to see other people in the game.
Oxygen: I honestly believed at the beginning of the game that you would have to manage your oxygen supply. Unfortunately, this aspect of the game is barely touched on. Adjusting the difficulty meter does not change this feature of the game. You can easily run from your entry point to the oxygen supplier in each zone without having to refresh it. You will need to pay a little bit of attention while visiting the last couple of regions in the game where there are no sites that disperse oxygen to the area. However, it is very easy to collect a number of oxygen tanks and oxygen potions (air in a bottle?) to use between sneaking inside any number of the available buildings. And if you do suddenly find yourself in the middle of nowhere without a way to replenish your tank, you could pull up your map and click on any of the teleporter sites to instantly get you out of danger.
Crafting: The game provides you a number of interesting sites to build things - forest, desert, mountain, and beach were a few I noticed in my playthrough. Unfortunately, the variety of things to construct and their complexity is very limited. Alchemy is reduced to mixing different colored flowers for a handful of potions, houses have less than a dozen different things (with four different types of materials) you can combine to build a structure, and all the essentials you would see in Minecraft from a wooden chest to a plot of land. The majority of these items are not essential to make any progress and very little is restricted to specific environments. You can obtain a lot of decorative blueprints from visiting the sites, but I only managed to get a new one in every six locations. To a certain extent, it might be entirely possible to play the game strictly as a role of a scavenger where you only use what is available in the environment and use the crafting stations located at certain points during the story.
Miscellaneous
Base Raid: Unless you are playing on the peaceful difficulty, your base has a chance to be raided. Don't worry! The game gives you advanced warning on when your base will be raided. Three minutes was plenty of time for me to build turrets all around. If for some reason you leave during the countdown, the robots won't appear until you revisit your base. If an item is "destroyed" by the robots, the set number of items it took to build the object will appear on the ground. This can actually be a quick way to reconstruct your base since you are unable to move objects without deconstructing them to their base parts.
Story: The plot of the game is severely limited to regional transitions and craft gates. That isn't to say that the story is bad. You will be able to converse with a few different elements and learn more about the world around you. Unfortunately the world tends to repeat itself outside of those specific points in the game. There are differences between each of the landscapes, but there isn't enough contrast to distinguish the biomes between each other. The robots will feel the same, the buildings will look identical to each other on the inside, and the things you collect are consistent all throughout. Some gates will display what items you need when you reach them while others will require you to remember what is required. You have to drag each item onto your action bar, select it, then interact with the obstacle in your path. A lot of times I found myself waiting around until evening so I could sleep in my tent and progress the story.
Review
Summary: I wanted this game to be so much more. There are elements present that could revolutionize the building sim. Unfortunately, there are so many aspects of the game that are only subpar. The music gets repetitive, controlling inventory becomes a pain, there is barely any need to build on bases, and there is a huge lack of variety wherever you look. It is entirely possible to skip through a bunch of things and complete the whole game in under 10 hours. However, the low cost of the game and the depth of what you can do is enough to warrant a simple playthrough if you are able to adapt to its uniqueness. I would only suggest this game if you are really looking outside the box for another crafting sim.
10-5-2021