Pros
- Insane creative freedom — build whatever you imagine, as long as the engine allows
- Mods unlock SO much more on top of vanilla
- Survival mode is a chaotic blast, especially with friends
- Challenges are fun even when playing solo
- Workshop is full of ready-made community creations to drop in
- Genuinely impressive engineering from the dev team
Cons
- Collisions can be buggy; cars on flat terrain jump up for no reason
- Optimisation needs work
- Very little developer-community communication
- Long gaps between updates — last real update Dec 5 2024, then just a hotfix on Mar 2 2026
- Chapter 2 still hasn't arrived even after ~3 delays
Scrap Mechanic is an interesting game with quite the possibilities. In Scrap Mechanic you can build whatever you imagine, as long as it's possible in the engine. But then there are mods, which allow for SO much more!
In the survival mode you can build a car, then hit some bots, and then crash that same car into a tree the next minute. Or into alien versions of cows. While the main focus of the game was creative, it sure is on survival now.
I personally cannot describe how much fun this game has given me with my friends. Without friends it isn't as fun as with them, but challenges are a thing too — and they're fun as well!
But don't get me wrong: this game isn't perfect. The collisions can be buggy, cars on flat terrain can jump up for no reason, and the optimisation isn't the best. Even with all that, it's still fun to play.
Sadly, it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. The game's issue isn't the game itself most of the time — it's the developers. And don't get me wrong, they're great! To build such a difficult game, I can't even imagine how hard it was. But the developers just don't seem to be interacting much with the community.
At the time of writing this review, the last new thing from them was nearly two months ago. And again, don't get me wrong — it's fine. But the last thing that came out was just a hotfix, and before that the previous post was on December 22, 2025. The hotfix was posted on March 2, 2026, and before that last post in 2025 the previous thing was an update — a good one, yes, but the problem is it was on December 5, 2024. That's too little communication with the community!
Setting aside the communication problems with the devs, the game just needs better optimisation right now. And of course, Chapter 2. But I'm asking too much, aren't I?
If your attention span is shaped by social-media short-format videos, then in short: I highly recommend Scrap Mechanic if you're someone who likes building and physics. If you don't like building or too much creativity, just download stuff from the Workshop and play with what the community has already made. If you still don't like it, then the game isn't for you.