It genuinely pains me to have to do this but after around 1300+ hours of playtime, I'm switching my review from a positive one to a negative one. I've been playing this game since the very beginning in 2018, and it has been a genuine disappointment to see it throw itself further off a cliff with every update, and have feedback ignored or outright discarded by the developers. There are so many issues i have with SCUM, so for the sake of brevity I will keep to around 3-4 mains ones to get my point across.

I understand this a loaded accusation, but it's an accusation that can be easily substantiated. At the time of release, prior to, and even a few major patches into development, the devs made it abundantly clear what they wanted their game to be. It was a game that respected your time, and took careful consideration not to become a DayZ or Rust clone.

Bases were easy to establish and difficult to breach, meaning you could log off for 1 or 2 weeks and still come back to your stuff. The map was bigger than Rust & DayZ combined, with a total surface area of 144km[2], increasing to 225km[2], meaning that pvp encounters were difficult, but manageable. This made the game approachable to more casual audiences, and -- this part is important -- it didn't need to sacrifice it's realistic game mechanics to do so! Now SCUM is plagued with game design choices that feel inconsistent, lazy, and downright unethical, all while offsetting the responsibility of optimisation onto the players with "server settings".

Vehicles take forever to find, leaving most players to walk around a 225km[2] map, and treating them as luxuries rather than necessities. Because when POIs are often times kilometres apart, and running is the only option, and body fatigue will affect your performance after a light jog, having a vehicle is kind of crucial when navigating the map. Instead the game forces you run everywhere, which greatly affects where you can go without overexerting yourself.

Not to mention finding a vehicle that works is impossible when they have a chance to spawn without seats, wheels, batteries, or the entire engine block, leaving tens of 2 tonne functionless bricks on the map. And as a comically sick joke, SCUM will also sometimes force you to find the rest of the car, just to bust your balls! :) Anything including doors, bumpers, headlights, and even the ENTIRE BODY of a vehicle, all with their own proprietary parts that only fit to their own vehicles, can be missing when finding a vehicle, making them even harder to use and maintain.

The dev's response? It's working exactly as intended! Not a single thought to whether players will find running around an empty 15x15km map boring or grossly disengaging. No thought to how these mechanics might conflict with or disrupt existing game systems. In fact it was such a cosmic fumble that one of the co-founders had a meltdown on twitter over it. They couldn't even justify their own decisions. This is the sign of an ethically bankrupt team of creators, and it unfortunately wouldn't be the last.

SCUM is no longer a game that respects your time, but it also doesn't respect you as a player. The game forces you to interact with a central economy, and will delete your entire save if you incur enough debt. Re-spawning on a base that takes days if not weeks to build up requires gold, which is the thing the entire economy is backed on, which is extremely expensive to acquire. You will spend more time earning an income than interacting with any of the survival mechanics this game offers, effectively turning this game into an anarcho-capitalist simulator, where the players with the most money have the best chances of winning every single time. It is an unprecedented amount of reliance on a system that may i remind you, belongs in a SURVIVAL GAME, and it is categorically ahistoric in the entire survival genre.

Gamespires could've kept the economy optional, and allowed players to figure out if it was even worth using in the first place, but instead they made it mandatory, and punished players for not playing with the traders, so now the answer has to be yes :)

Oh and gas for vehicles costs money too, so the game doesn't just force you to play with the economy, it reinforces it by gating vital resources behind more money! What does this do? Nothing! It doesn't go back into the economy, it doesnt increase trader funds, it just siphons off money. It's honestly like the devs completely forgot what taxes are, or maybe just think taxes don't do anything for society, which would explain a lot about how this economy was designed. Gamespires should've read Marxist theory like Obsidian did for FO:NV. Maybe then their game wouldn't suck lmao

I received this game for free by a friend after winning a bet playing csgo, and i stayed because the development was not only ethically sound, but morally consistent. It felt like with every patch came reassurance that the devs were building a true outlier in the survival genre. Their decisions held up their own weight and generally things made sense. Now I dread every update that comes out bc every update has felt like 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Everything feels like it was done 60% right, and that's always so frustrating especially when the 60% that was done right was done extremely well. I still play this game, but I don't play on servers anymore. Everywhere you go are communities and squads who've managed to beat what this game has to offer, and think its their god given right to demand an evermore difficult experience at the expense of more casual and laid-back players. I have had people tell me that I'm just lazy. That difficulty bores me and that i just need to get better, when that just isn't true. I've played a lot of SCUM to understand and learn it's difficulty curb and enjoy it. What I don't enjoy is a game that uses difficulty as a shield to justify rancid and disengaging game design. A game can be difficult and built well, and unfortunately, at least for me, SCUM just doesn't check those boxes, and given we're 1 or 2 major updates away from 1.0, I doubt it ever will.