If you haven’t gone and checked out the demo for Scrapland, I suggest you hurry up.

I downloaded and played through it yesterday. First of all, American McGee’s name attached to any game is enough to get me to sit up and take notice. But from start to finish (of the demo) this game just oozes style.

It’s got a pretty interesting concept, wrapped around a very cool action/adventure, GTA3 style skeleton. You play a robot named D-Tritus (pronounced Dee-treetus, although the allusion to “detritus” is pretty obvious) who’s living on a robot inhabited asteroid planet called Scrapland.

It’s very tech-noir, with a lot of class, great use of colors and interesting character designs. D-Tritus is a newly hired investigative reporter, with ties to a twisted and wacky casino manager, who gets sucked into a big murder mystery. You play on-foot, during which you have the ability to ‘copy’ or ‘overwrite’ other robots, taking their appearance and abilities. Of course, overwriting another robot constitutes robot murder, so if anyone sees you, they call the police. This sets up for some very cool potential gameplay, requiring you to use different robots’ special moves to reach different goals/places.

The second half of the game takes place once you take flight in D-tritus’ ship, which you can upgrade, build on, customize, etc, in order to participate in dogfights and races, as well as standard transportation from point A to point B.

The demo was all too short, and I’m anxious to see how the final product turns out. There are a lot of possibilities here, great graphics, outstanding voice-acting (though D-Tritus’ voice takes some getting used to) and good control. There’s also a definite layer of humor mixed in for good measure. So go take a look.