Recent reviews by Aleksa

Should you get SCUM? - If you enjoy hardcore in-depth survival games that are complex and offer a certain level of difficulty to survive along with tactical PvP, you are going to love SCUM.

Please note: as an early access game, expect to have some lag, occasional server crashes, FPS drops, d-sync, etc. If you aren't the patient kind who can deal with this for a while, do yourself a favor and don't play early access games. You will only get frustrated. Instead, wait until the game gets properly optimized down the line.

I have been playing on a fairly populated server with some friends since the moment that the game got released. To give you an idea, the server crashes 2-4 times in about 8 hrs. of game play. When it happens, you can't open any doors or containers, loot, shoot, etc. for about 2-3 min. The good news is that you won't have to restart the game and the servers are back up immediately. So you won't experience any downtime and have to wait around.

My PC specs include: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Asus X99-DELUXE ATX Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB and an Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz. The game is installed on a Samsung 950 PRO Series M.2 Internal SSD. I usually get anywhere between 60 & 100 FPS. They drop near structures and when it rains, as well as during PvP events (most people's biggest frustration at the moment.) The DEVs have already said that they are working to optimize it.

Now, onto the content:

There is a lot to explore and a good amount of points of interests (POIs) around the map.

-35 towns of various sizes, 15 of which feature police stations (a good place to look for guns, ammo and gear.)

- Heavily-guarded military-style POIs, such as an airfield (currently the hottest spot on the map for PvP), a prison, a factory, a train yard and a gun range; plus some hunting camps, outposts and bunkers (with awesome & plentiful loot!) The sentries (robots) guarding these POIs will annihilate you.

- There is plenty of loot and it's well-balanced around the map.

If you have a group of friends to play with, I recommend joining a well-populated server with 40-60 people on it. The map is big, so expect to be running around quite a bit, at least until they implement functional vehicles. According to their roadmap, those should be coming in Patch 1.0 along with several other exciting features (building fortification, an advanced crafting system, larger urban areas and safe zones.)

No, the game is not a running/eating simulator. Yes, you have to keep an eye on your food intake and expenditure and you do run a lot. You have to keep an eye on what & how much you eat/drink, as well as your basic needs (including getting sick and metabolism.) After all, it is a survival game and a hardcore one at that. If you stay in the rain for an hour and have 3 layers of wet clothes on your character, expect him to get hypothermia. You would then have to treat it by removing the wet clothes and/or staying close to a lit fire. If you eat mushrooms, you might end up being poisoned and would need to take activated charcoal. If you get attacked by a zombie, you'd have to patch your wounds. You get the picture.

There is currently no base building or house fortification. You can place a shelter in an area of your choosing. Respawning on it costs -75 Fame points. You can also craft wooden chests for storage. But make sure that you hide them well, because anyone who finds them will be able to access the contents and steal your loot. Once crafted, shelters and storage chests cannot be moved, only destroyed. (I am hoping to see a change for that.) Note that you do not get materials back after destroying them.

If you get bored and are looking for some PvP, you can buy your way into PvP events (TDM or free-for-all) on various maps. In short, your character gets teleported onto an arena, fully geared with your weapons of choice. You can then PvP against other players on your server in the matter of about 10 min. It costs Fame points to participate in events. And you get said points by doing things in game - killing zombies & other players, performing tasks and crafting.

The best part about this game is its developers. I couldn't say enough nice things about them. They are simply awesome. Here's why:

- They are very active and do a good job keeping up with people's questions & suggestions - both on the SCUM Discord and Steam's message boards.

- 4 great patches with a ton of improvements issued in just 4 days.

- Most importantly - they communicate with their player base, which is something that many "survival games" developers often fail to do.

- Their vision for the game's direction and where they would like to take it sounds great as well.

All in all, SCUM has a lot of potential. It is engaging and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop further.

Here's what I can say after playing on a 2X gather & XP server for about 100 hrs:

First, here's the good:

* There is a wide variety of wild life, most of which poses an actual threat. Fighting various types of animals and dealing with the effects they might have on your character is entertaining.

* The sandstorms are a neat idea (although they currently do no harm.)

* The nights are truly dark. Food spoils over time. Water is hard to come by in certain areas and you have to gather materials in order to build a well. You can get poisoned (even severely) or crippled. All in all - you constantly have to find ways to survive.

* The graphics are pretty sweet-looking for an alpha game...

Now - the bad:

* There are a bunch of glitches and lag. I guess that comes with most, if not all survival games in alpha. So be prepared to deal with stuttering, getting teleported, annoying glitches, even losing X amount of things you gathered/built because the server you play on crashed and had to be rebooted/reverted. (The server I played on was US based, capped at 70, but typically had no more than 40 people on and got restarted multiple times per day. That didn't help much with the lag.)

* The current clan system needs work. Once someone is in your clan, they gain access to all of your bases and loot rooms. There are no codes on the doors and no availability for separate rooms. That could lead to potential problems with "recruits" or griefers.

* You are unable to upgrade building structures directly (the way you can do it in Rust.) You have to break whatever you built and replace it with a higher tier structure.

* I reached level 50. I am currently the highest level player on the server (according to its admin) and as such - the only one able to summon one of the Gods. I already have a tier 3 shrine and the priest required. So I can basically summon a God for 80 seconds and squash any base on the server that my heart desires - even ones that multiple people have spent hundreds of hours constructing & upgrading. That really seems highly unfair and turns the game into "who can grind the most and the fastest."

* There are unraidable designs. You can simply build on top of a high cliff, cover it with foundations, so that nobody can build anywhere near its foot/slopes... then destroy 2 sets of stairs every time you log off. Voilà - nobody can get to your stuff up there. No need to even build a base.

* Fights are entirely based on time spent playing the game. They are not skill-based. Whoever has put more points in vitality and in strength wins.

* There are currently no official servers. (Yes, I am aware that the DEVs are working on making such servers available.) But as of right now, everyone is forced to play on private servers and deal with admins' odd rules, favoritism, spawning random players stuff and so on.

* Dragons drop a random amount of dragon blood, needed in order to make dragon powder, which is needed for creating explosive jars (for raiding.) Once you kill a dragon, you may get 2 or you may get 60... meaning you might walk away with enough for 1 explosive jar or 30 of them. Having killed quite a few of these, I can tell you that the size of the dragon does not determine how much dragon blood you end up getting out of harvesting its corpse. It's based on sheer luck.

* You can only place down 1 bedroll (one-time use) or 1 bed (multiple uses.) Sometimes, your bed would glitch... and you'd find yourself respawning all the way down South. I hope that you enjoy running around naked for 20+ min. if you've chosen to base elsewhere.

Overall - the game is entertaining and provides a nice distraction... for a little bit of time. After that, it gets repetitive. The grinding is real. And so is the lag.

This game has a lot of potential... if the DEVs would only put their time, effort and resources into developing it further.

I've played H1z1 (Just Survive and King of The Kill) for 3,000+ hrs. and unfortunately even I can't recommend it to anyone at its current state.

For starters, there is no real survival aspect to H1z1. If you love typical survival games and are looking for one that provides any sort of a challenge, move on. Check out Rust or 7 Days to Die instead.

* Zombies haven't been much of a threat since last year. If you are lucky enough to find one (or a few) zombies, you can just stick around, loot near them and they'll mind their own business. The same thing is true about bears and most wolves. You can easily end a wolf's life in 5-6 punches with your bare hands.

* There are no weather conditions. That's right. There is no rain, snow, high or extreme heat, etc. Once upon a time there used to be fog, but the DEVs removed it. Basically, your character can't freeze to death or die from overheating.

* Your character is never hungry or thirsty. Bottles and canned food spawns absolutely everywhere. You can place 10 rabbit traps inside of your own base and they work by supplying meat every 15 min. BBQs work 24/7 once you light them up. And to top it off - cooked/raw food magically never spoils for the duration of the wipe (which usually takes 5-6 weeks in real time.)

* As I mentioned above - the wildlife (consisting of 3 types of animals) is a joke. Wolves and glitch bears are more of a nuisance than anything else.

Leaving the (lacking) survival aspect of H1z1 "Just Survive", what people hate the most is the current loot situation. It's as broken as it could possibly be. There are huge areas all over the map that currently spawn absolutely nothing and many that spawn utter crap. Currently, the only place to find useful loot (read: fertilizer & sugar for base-raiding, as well as an abundance of ammo) is to go to Pleasant Valley.

Now you have a choice to make as a solo player or a part of a small-size group:

You can play on low population (mostly dead) servers and pray that you even encounter anyone at all... or you can join a medium/high population server, which is inevitably overran by larger organized groups and gaming clans the members of which will kill you on sight and raid you quicker than you can find anything you need for an enjoyable game. Sounds like fun, right?

As far as decent population servers go, H1z1 has turned into this: who has the bigger/more skilled group of goons that can "lock down" a certain area and KoS everything that moves for a few hours, while they stockpile on fertilizer, sugar and ammo to raid everyone else with.

The cherry on top goes to all the hackers, glitchers and exploiters. If someone is hacking, your best bet is to record and report them by e-mailing Daybreak Game and hope that the cheater gets bannes. Glitchers and exploiters are literally everywhere. People walk and even drive vehicles through multiple gates of others' bases. I've seen people fly, teleport, walk through walls and so on.

Note:

I should point out that the DEVs and the new GM for JS have been talking about fixing some of the glitches and the current broken loot situation for over 6 weeks now. I'd like to believe that it's possible. So I jumped on the H1z1 JS test server last night and spent a good 2 hours on it... just to find out that many bugs still exist and experience ridiculous amounts of lag while looting.

That shouldn't happen to someone who has a PC with my specifications (including an Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz, Asus X99-DELUXE ATX LGA2011-3 motherboard and a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 with H1z1 being installed on a Samsung 950 PRO Series SSD) and an Internet connection of 114 mbps down/37 up.

Sure, they've added more loot in certain areas. One grocery store had spawned 14 regular and 4 military backpacks - enough for a small army. GG so far.

I hope that they fix the game to a playable state. But currently, it is so bad that even loyal long-time H1z1 players such as myself have ended up taking an extended break or given up on it for good.

Fast-paced loot & shoot mode - "let's kill each other until there's only 1 person standing usually in under 15 minutes."