Scrap Metal

Throwing out the realism of racing, Scrap Metal offers the view of driving from a Top-down perspective. In single player mode, you’ll be challenged over 9 levels that offer 60 single-player racing missions (which include shortcuts, jumps, obstacles and temporary upgrades such as nitro boosts) for the vehicles.

As you continue to win races, a new vehicle is added to your junkyard. With 20 unique vehicles with options, including muscle cars, bulldozers, airboats, and monster trucks that can be customized and fitted with such weaponry as flamethrowers, chainsaws and rocket launchers and accessories such as a spear tire, decals and racing stripes.

Continuing with the Single player mode, when starting a new game your only option is to play a career mode for racing, so if you’re playing by yourself then the AI will be your buddy. You’re given a simple car to start off with and an easy oval track, to familiarize yourself with the control layout and get a feel for the game.

Multi-player in Scrap Metal also includes several multi-player modes, including “king of the hill”, “demolition derby” and a “Survivor” game in which players complete laps while being chase by police cars, helicopters and tanks. While the above sounds like a kick ass game, there are a few hiccups.

The controls are the biggest let down in the game. They’re easy to pick up but difficult to master because each vehicle responds differently. Given two choices in the way you can drive don’t complement the other, causing the handling to be extremely sensitive, so you often need to make adjustments with the analog stick when you’re steering.

With that problem, leads into the second hiccup; the environment in the tracks. Each track is well design and creative, yet it’s the environmental objects that are frustrating, such as being able to drive straight through a tree or some other large object in the middle of the track, but a seemingly slight collision with a small barrel could cause your vehicle to roll onto its roof, for example.

Also, your garage becomes another headache, as it only has room to accommodate four vehicles. By the time you beat the 60-plus single-player challenges, you’ll have access to all 20 vehicles (you can see the problem). Prize money is used to upgrade a vehicle’s speed, grip, armor, and firepower ratings and purchasing the right upgrades for the right vehicles is sometimes the only way to progress.

Unlocking new vehicles by completing certain challenges or by destroying them during race’s, will inevitably make you want to take others out of your garage to make room for them, at which point all of your hard-earned upgrades are lost forever, even if you decide to recall the vehicle from the junkyard later. Of course you can just hang onto a favorite vehicle or two throughout your entire career if you choose to, but who’d want to just leave all those cars just sitting there getting rusty. The first thing you’ll want to do when you unlock a new vehicle is take it for a test drive. There are several challenges that force you to use vehicles that you might otherwise ignore as well.

Your ride choices are extremely limited, whether playing multi-player online or locally. You have just two or three different vehicles with similar performance ratings. There’s still fun to be had in multi-player though, largely because other human players are better opponents than the questionable and sometimes dumb AI.

Scrap Metal is still a decent buy for an Xbox Live game, with a wealth of game play. It’s another question of quantity over quality, for 1200 Microsoft Points though that’s kind of steep for a game that many people aren’t familiar with. Not to mention the similarity in another game with the same use of the word metal and that could be its problem causing the kind of successful damage it wants to do. It might be an Xbox Live Arcade game, but the name of the game sums it all up.