Scrap Review
Release Date: June 21st 2019
Publisher: Ultimate Games
Developer: Woodland Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Price: $2.99
In Scrap, you join a robot who awakens on an assembly line and for reasons unknown decides to make a break for freedom. There’s the whole story, the robot runs and you go along and choose when he jumps up or falls down to avoid hazards. Jump with A, fall with B, hold B to keep falling those are your controls. To stop you are a legion of spinning saws, laser beams, various robots, and plenty of other evil boffins that for some reason inhabit a robot factory.
Nothing like a little vandalism to win people over.
Run, run robot Sarah Conner can’t be far now.
Sadly, you are apparently jumping from pixel to pixel in 4 k because the jumps can be quite hard, this means you need to find the exact points to jump or fall to get anywhere. It’s rough going from the beginning, no doubt because, at just 30 levels long, Scrap doesn't have a whole lot of content and needs to stop you from blazing through it like Uncle Erik through a six-pack.
This is all well and good, but all the robot does is run in a straight line, and all you do is tell it to jump or fall, so everything is trial-and-error. There are power-ups, but these are usually placed in such a way that they're impossible to miss, and they tend to throw you off your rhythm.
In the end, Scrap takes a decent idea, but fails at level design. Any deviation from a specific route usually means death, there’s no experimentation, no alternate route, just endless attempts to make one jump and then another. Overall, it’s 30 rounds of Flappy Bird with better graphics .
The Good:
Straightforward concept
Good Graphics and Sound
Small file size makes it easy to delete
The Bad:
Atrocious level design.
Rigid game-play
Terrible implementation of power-ups