Scrap Riders is a game that is packed full of charm, humor, and will keep you engaged with its fun beat ’em up combat and witty movie and game references.
Ah, nostalgia. It’s such a powerful feeling, especially in today’s day and age where companies are constantly hounding us for our personal data just so they can shove adverts in our faces. It’s so overwhelming; if only we could go back to a simpler time, when everything was easier, and we could just enjoy our favorite movies and video games again. Well then, here’s the perfect game for you. Scrap Riders is a side-scrolling beat ’em up developed by Games For Tutti and published by Microïds and uses nostalgia to give players something new.
In Scrap Riders, you play as Rast, the newest member of the titular Scrap Riders, a small biker gang trying to get a name for themselves in the desert wasteland outside of Uber City, a great metropolis ruled by street gangs and mega corporations. He is your standard, run of the mill deadbeat protagonist, he’s lazy, unhygienic, and regularly gets punched in the face but despite all that he has a big heart and a sharp tongue. Alongside Rast is 50N1, his robot companion and fellow gang member who also serves as their mechanic. He is witty, snarky, and something of a nymphomaniac. Together, they must make a delivery across the wasteland. Wait, why does this sound so familiar?
As for gameplay, Scrap Riders is divided into two types, combat and exploration. When in combat, the game takes a lot of inspiration from old arcade style beat ’em ups, such as Streets of Rage. Rast has two options for attacks, your standard close-range punch and a distance grappling attack. You use these attacks to build up a combo, the higher the combo the more damage you do. Pretty standard stuff, right? However, Scrap Riders spices things up by adding in a skill bar. This skill bar increases with every hit you deal as well as with every hit you take. Once full, you can pull off a devastating attack that deals massive damage to your enemies.
During exploration, which is similar to a side-scrolling point-and-click mystery. Rast can explore the world around him and has to find clues or tools to solve his current objective. This either means chatting with NPCs and doing side quests for them or interacting with things in his environment. When you find something useful, it will be added to your inventory, but some items do need to be combined with other components before they can be used. When interacting with NPCs, Rast has multiple dialogue options.Based on your choice of dialogue, Rast will either seem like a good Samaritan or a cocky asshole. While this doesn’t really change the outcome of the situation, it does let the player have some fun, especially if they want to see Rast get his ass kicked.
The game features a vibrant pixel art style that, once again, is meant to look like an old beat ’em up arcade game. However, unlike an old arcade game, Scrap Riders doesn’t have to worry about the hardware limitations of the past, meaning that the character animations and movement move smoothly and fluidly across the screen. This smooth animation paired with the game’s simple yet satisfying combat means Scrap Riders feels fantastic to play, especially with an incredible synthwave soundtrack.
Scrap Riders has more than just a catchy soundtrack but also has excellent sound design. When in combat, punches sound punchy and impactful. The game even makes the enemy sound effects intentionally sound as if they’re distorted and bit-crushed. This gives the game an authentic retro arcade feel to it and makes players feel as if they’ve been transported back in time.
Whilst Scrap Riders doesn’t do anything new or exciting with its gameplay, it does provide gameplay that is incredibly fun and enjoyable and plays into the nostalgia of old 80s and 90s video games, which many people still play to this day. However, the barebones nature of gameplay and nostalgia may be intentional, as they both play a major part in the rest of the game.
For example, the world of Scrap Riders is a massive city run by mega corporations and is surrounded by a desert filled with biker gangs and mutants. That is probably the most generic dystopian cyberpunk setting a person can come up with but that’s the point. Scrap Riders does use a lot of tropes. However, as mentioned in a previous review for Frontier Hunter: Ezra’s Wheel of Fortune, using tropes isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Scrap Riders makes a lot of references to popular dystopian and cyberpunk media from pop culture such as: Futurama, Akira, Escape from New York, Ghost in The Shell, and Bladerunner 2049. It is a very self-aware game, and it knows what it’s doing when it makes use of either a trope or a reference, so when a character makes a reference or uses a stale trope to play into nostalgia. It’s done intentionally.
The game even points this out by making other characters comment on the reference that was just made, for example saying “Oh, I’ve watched that movie” or “Yeah, I’ve read the book.” These types of meta-jokes and humor are done to point out how overused and cliché they are and that’s a part of the joke. That’s not to say there aren’t a few slip-ups. Some of the jokes stay for longer than necessary as if the game is going “Did you get it? Did you get the joke?” Pair this with how frequently these references are made and it just becomes annoying and feels forced.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing these days and Scrap Riders knows it. From its soundtrack to its gameplay, Scrap Riders gives us a simple yet enjoyable arcade beat ’em up that feels like it came straight from the past. While it doesn’t do anything revolutionary, it doesn’t need to. Ultimately, Scrap Riders is a game made with love and nostalgia for old gaming.
