Scrap Riders Review: between narrative adventure and beat ’em up

The drama of a review: is Scrap Riders more point-and-click or more horizontal scrolling fighting game?

I almost threw the Nintendo Switch several times while playing Scrap Riders. It had been a long time since I had suffered through a scrolling fighting game, specifically since the release of Streets of Rage 4 in April 2020 when I decided to tackle the main campaign on the highest difficulty level together with a friend of mine. Satisfaction, at the time, once we succeeded in the feat, invaded us like a Portuguese wave breaking on the beaches of Nazaré.

Here, the Streets of Rage 4 Vibes I savored them again a few months ago with Teenage Mutant Shredder’s Revenge and in these early days of 2023 with Scrap Riders, the new work from Spanish development studio Games For Tutti, published by Microids and available on Pc and Nintendo Switch starting Jan. 9. There is a lot of point-and-click in Scrap Riders but also a lot of beat ’em up, the mixture of which makes an early 1990s figure. A title with a dual soul: Monkey Island on the one hand and beating the crap out of us as if we were standing in front of an arcade booth on the other. All, strictly in pixel art as we play a member of a motorcycle gang that smacks very much of Sons of Anarchy.

The Scrap Riders have come to town

The Scrap Riders had a valuable deuterium stolen: as the Rust and accompanied by the ingenious robot 50N1-which, incidentally, in fistfights hardly ever helped me-I went out to take justice into my own hands, exploring cyberpunk cities populated by unscrupulous gangs and creepy farms that look like they were left over from the very old Wild West. That’s enough now though, no spoilers, you can read the synopsis of the game anywhere.

The writing (localized in Italian) has a very good pace, flows along nicely , never fills conversations with unnecessary, redundant words and proceeds hand in hand with puzzle solving; he attempts the breaking of the fourth wall and, not to be missed, names the Matrix, Hercules, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The citationism in Scrap Riders is remarkable for a tale that managed, more than once, to wring a laugh out of me.

Reading, reading like there’s no tomorrow and asking the right questions of the grotesque characters I encountered on my journey riding a Harley from the future-this was the key to surviving in Scrap Riders. Each puzzle, in order to be completed, required a whole series of brilliantly interlinked actions that were not always easy to grasp.

During one mission for example, I met a shirtless handsome man while he was smoking pensively and heartbroken. I decide to help him by having him deliver a love letter he wrote for a suitor with space for a photo of a romantic landscape that I need to find and take; I then reach a spot in the city that can bring butterflies in the stomach of even the toughest of tough guys and, once the moment is immortalized, I hand the gift package to the robot the boy is madly in love with so he can clear the way and gain access to the facility. Usually, having completed the valuable point-and-click session, the brawl begins.

Let’s kick some ass

As mentioned then, Scrap Riders alternates between moments that require ingenuity and utter chaos in long levels-sometimes too long-in which I both beat like a blacksmith and cashed in like a boxer before collapsing, exhausted, to the mat. Fast and heavy striking that can be strung together to give rise to phenomenal tooth-busting combos; grapples of “wrestlinghiana” memory; a gun to injure from a distance; a few throwing objects; and finally a devastating special attack that causes massive damage.

A gameplay enhanced then by a strategic nuance not to be underestimated that successfully curbs the button mashing typical of the genre (if you press keys at random, you are doomed). Which unlucky one to knock out first and to whom to shoot the precious projectile collected by the only enemy, unfortunately, who drops them? All questions I continually asked myself between fisticuffs.

I died countless times over the course of the five hours it took to reach the conclusion of Scrap Riders and only stopped when I had memorized every level and every moveset of the many bosses, all of which were well characterized and diverse. And it is precisely in the moments of pure action that the title lends itself to some problems. Better management of the checkpoints, which are too far apart, and more cures would have greatly benefited the fights, during which there is a risk, due to the high number of game-overs one can run into, that fun will turn into frustration.

No mob, in fact, drops Dead rats with which you can restore the life bar, a factor that I discounted especially in the confrontations against the big bad guys at the end of the level (in many boss fights there are no cures at all) in which one is also swamped by a quantity of lesser opponents, the variety of which should be noted in the positive, perhaps too excessive. Are we playing Elden Ring here?

The game world is really well constructed, joyful and excellently characterized. Games For Tutti has done a great job of pixel art, accompanied by a ladylike soundtrack. In short, a round of applause for this Scrap Riders seems to us to be in order.

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