[Review] The Carnage Never Stops With Scrap Metal

Ever heard of the Twisted Metal series?  Ever played or experienced it?  Well, here’s a short summary of all the games: cars strapped with weapons (machine guns, missiles, oil slicks, mines and more) designed to cause as much destruction to other players as possible, in order to be #1 in the competition.  Now, combine that mayhem with a top-down driving style like the original Grand Theft Auto and you have essentially what Scrap Metal is like.  Don’t take that the wrong way, but it’s a good thing.

The game starts you off on choosing between two different control schemes, one which lets you point your left stick in the direction you want to go and the other allows you to steer left or right (relative to the car) and accelerate with the right trigger.  In both cases, the left trigger brakes and in both cases you can wreak large amounts of havoc around the track.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, the theme of the game is cars mixed with carnage, chaos, crashing, wreckage and lots of booms!

The game gives you a junkyard with 4 car slots that you can fill up with various cars.  You acquire cars simply by destroying them, after which the scrap metal is delivered to your junkyard.  You can fix them up, customize them, upgrade them, and of course, race them!

With each different track there are a set of challenges: races, survival or number of destroyed vehicles that you have to complete. Along the way, you might have to race or wreak havoc on mini-bosses, but the final challenge on every track is a large, but not too difficult boss.  Once you learn their behaviour, it’s not hard to destroy them and automatically take 1^st place.

With that said, the vehicle and weapon loadouts that I encountered were numerous.  Every car you wreck will permanently be in your junkyard if you want to resurrect it. Be warned, if you’ve spent money on upgrading a car and you replace it, you won’t get that money back, nor will that car come back to you with all the upgrades again. So choose wisely!

So, if you like carnage with cars, or trucks for that matter, I’d suggest taking a peek at the trial, and strongly consider a purchase. The initial levels are relatively slow, but the game really picks up once you hit the 3^rd and 4^th tracks and wreck some nice cars and trucks. And yes, they do cause more and more pandemonium the further you go.