This question comes up a lot - particularly when the game goes on sale.


If you have at least several friends interested in taking the plunge as a group and casually checking out the game together, it's probably worth $20. Otherwise, nah, but maybe revisit it in a couple of years. Most of the longtime players/fans that I run with find SCUM to be a true headbanging experience more often than not - but not at all in a "metal" way, if you know what I mean. You have to have a particular kind of personality and/or friend group to work around that and get something out of it - and even if you can, it's probably healthier for you not to unless you've got friends to keep you sane and laughing.

With a group you like, you'll still almost certainly encounter enough super frustrating and/or totally broken stuff in relatively short order that you'll burn out and maybe not come back ever or for years - but because it's with friends (particularly if you take the time to find a non-official server that you like), it'll just become one more of those weird/funny things you all did together that one time, so even if you only get a few dozen hours together, you'll ultimately get your money out of it.

Most of us are just running out the clock on our sunk cost fallacies together in our community server support groups.

The official server experience is the epitome of toxic and completely disrespects your time; stay away from that mess, even if you aren't an adult or otherwise have no responsibilities.

Multiplayer as a solo is only practical if you can play 20+ hours every day, or if you play on a well-curated PvPvE server with very strict (and enforced) offline raiding rules. Otherwise, you'll never even get to defend your stuff; you'll just log in to regularly find it completely gone, and your base obliterated. ("Welcome to SCUM!" as certain pathological devs love to say).

Pre v0.6 or so, this had great single player value and was a ton of fun. Gameplay and features have overall regressed massively in the last several years since. There's more "stuff," lots more "content," more "mechanics" - but less and less "meat," much less to do that's both fun and non-stressful, and much more frustration to deal with at every level of gameplay. Puppets are no longer an interesting and configurable challenge - they're either a horrible tedium to be completely avoided/circumvented by all possible means, or they're meaningless fodder that might as well not exist. The world feels especially empty without regular animal spawns in it. Vehicles are in a worse state than they've ever been... with every new release - and there are fewer of them now than before. Bugs still get fixed, features still get added, and mechanics still get tuned - but the quality and FUN of the user-experience is still going backwards OVERALL despite that, so that's something to be aware of. I don't know how else to accurately and politely quantify it except to say that it's still "very stereotypically early access," and that there's an increasingly familiar dimension of successful game theory that might be entirely missing here, and/or that there might be an excess of "excessively weird and likely unsustainable personality energy" in SCUM's historical roadmap. It's a particular kind of dysfunctional even when it's working.

Graphical fidelity is generally good, but hasn't changed meaningfully for at least 4 years - and unfortunately the game's performance has become MUCH worse and worse over time, so "the graphical fidelity everyone can actually play at" continues to regress as the game moves forward. If you have an average or above-average rig, even if well-optimized, you are more or less constrained to switching between "potato mode" (to ensure your 1% lows don't kill you every time) and "utterly unplayable cinematic mode" (for screenshots when you're not actually playing). Proper Photo Mode is also locked behind a paid DLC, so if you don't have another way to capture in-engine cinematic shots and don't like the idea of paying for a quintessentially-base-game feature, you'll be stuck with screen captures anyway. Sunsets and sunrises can be pretty, but not enough on their own to justify buying the game.

SCUM has a longstanding, constantly-worsening identity crisis. It can't seem to decide if it wants to be a SIM, or a GAME - and the result is that it gets progressively worse at being BOTH with every major update. Some simulation-like systems and mechanics are overdone to the point that they are even more tedious than the same in real life; some are so basic and non-impactful that they might as well not even exist - while also being a "required" component of gameplay. "Fun gameplay" is constantly superceded by "harebrained developer pet-projects that never should have left the concept stage." The result? It's hard to find the FUN in the game - and once you do, and if you then start to enjoy that fun... a patch or two later, whatever you enjoyed will very likely get broken, removed, or nerfed into the ground.


So, should you buy SCUM?

- probably not, at least from a rational perspective. This game won't be fun for most reasonable, self-respecting adult people, and most of the folks currently having fun playing it A) started back when it still was a lot more fun, B) are doing so despite—rather than because of—the constant struggle that their persistence requires, and C) are doing so solely or substantially because of their friends who also play/suffer along with them.

If you were expecting a qualifying "... BUT—"
...there isn't one.