izigame.me

Introduction

I cannot recommend this game for everyone. But I will recommend it for some.
I'll try and explain this briefly
So here's the thing, if you aren't into survival games, you probably wouldn't even be reading this review, but if you aren't familiar with survival games, you should probably go look into other games than this one not to scare you off, I recommend something easy to get to know like Rust.
Now, to explain this to everyone else who don't know what the game is about, basically it's survival games taken to the "extreme" to be short. You have an excessive amount of options for maintaining your body and health. This includes vitamins, extensive cold/heat system and an very well done but also advanced weight system. I'll explain everything further in this review if this sounds interesting to you or if you're just bored.
So lets start off with the positive(these could also be seen as negatives, depending on how much you're into survival games)

Pros

A very extensive health system. You have literally have 13 vitamin bars to see how many vitamins you have been ingesting through the food and drink you either find, hunt or grow yourself. Adding onto this, you also have 10 mineral bars to make sure you're getting all your minerals. This is just SOME of the things you have to take care of about your own body. The whole games is almost built around the "metabolism" screen. You have to make sure you eat healthy, go for a run once in a while etc, otherwise you get fat and get the negative things that come with that. I really don't want to go into detail more about what this whole metabolism system is on about, you can go watch YouTube tutorials for that or try out the game.
You have a good variation in animals & enemies in my opinion. Boars, Cats, Wolfs, Bears, Sharks, Regular zombies, military zombies, suicide bomber zombies. Even robots! You can kill and eat basically any living thing in this game with the right tools, and regrets (looking at my cannibal homies)
Detailed world. The map isn't randomized like many other survival games, and the devs made sure to fill this with detail. There is an abundance of things to discover. I personally haven't played the game that long, but from what I have seen, each small town feels different enough compared to the other ones to give you a fresh feeling. The big city was a huge game changer when me and my buddy had spent over 40 hours in the same area/areas, making a base and getting better and better gear etc. We went to the biggest city not expecting much, but darn were we surprised. The graphics are also really good for a survival game, I half expected something like Rust or Ark that has this sort of "cartoonish" style to it.
It's best with friends, and enemies. I only played a bit of co-op with my friend, and this was sort of boring since we never found any other players cause we played on an empty server. This wasn't the most fun experience, but, I feel like it was a good way to learn the game together with someone. If I had to learn these gameplay mechanics myself, I would most likely get frustrated. I can understand why the singleplayer mode is in this, and it is helpful for people who unfortunately don't have other friends to learn the gameplay mechanics with on a server. And it would most likely get frustrating going into a populated PVP server and ending up getting owned by seasoned players who take advantage of you not knowing the game. When all that is said, this game is perfect for PVP. As I will get into riiiight
Now, gameplay. The shooting and weapon mechanics are extensive, not as extensive as in something like Tarkov, but it's very good. Bullet drop & travel, realistic ballistics (bullet penetration depending on material, weapon, ammo type etc), weapon degradation (I should state that basically everything in this game has degradation, bullets, food, scrap, clothing, everything). You might have a top notch condition shotgun all in perfect working order, but your weapon could still jam and f**k up your day if your bullets are in sh*t condition. This makes the game feel tense, cause anything could be the ruin of you at any time if you don't prepare extensively. Lemme tell you, having your rifle jam while there is a suicide zombie running towards you is NOT something you want. And if you have a weapon that uses magazines then you will also have to manage their health. You'll have to reload magazines yourself before you can stick them in your weapon. Everything from aiming, weapon maintaining, running, weight carry etc all goes back to the previously mentioned metabolism system. Get your clothes wet? Well water weighs you down. That's straight up normal stuff you sometimes forget when playing survival games. Here, getting your backpack and all your clothes wet by going for a random or forced swim, or maybe an unlucky rain cloud hit you, this could all be the bane of your existence. You can only carry so much on your character, and it all depends on your metabolism, your strength, dexterity etc. So imagine you pack up as much as you can carry, you're already having a tough time just walking with all the stuff on you. And now a rain cloud comes, and you forgot your rain jacket. So now you just got maybe 30 kilograms of added water weight to your body. The main aspects this game wants you to remember is, prepare and maintain. This is why this game can be a really tough PVP game, cause everybody is on a struggle to keep themselves alive/in their best health. You can be a beast of a man, but you'll have the brain of a chicken. Or you can have a 900000IQ Reddit moderator brain, but you'll be as physically fit as a Reddit moderator. This all depends on how you choose to make your character to begin with, and how you choose to play. Intelligence affects a variety of things you'd expect, awareness, survival, engineering etc. Strength affects boxing, handguns, melee weapons etc. And then you also have dexterity and constitution. This can make this survival game almost RPG'ish. You can make a small shelter, and like in Rust, you can bury some storage chests if you have a shovel and want to live the rouge survivor style, where you have a small camp and stay in the forest hidden away. Or you can board up an existing house if you want to go that road. You can also, of course, build your own small - medium - big base of your own design.
This is where I'll end on the positives since this review is getting long enough as is. On to the cons.

Cons/bugs

Some of these will vary in how much of a con they are depending on what you want from a survival game
Medium to high learning curve. The whole metabolism part is just one of the things you'll need to learn to survive effectively in Scum. The PVP/PVE can get punishing as a result of the realism this game is trying to achieve.
There are of course bugs, first of all, the game is still in early access, so some things wont be working exactly as intended, I'll list a couple of bugs and issues I encountered in my as of writing this 58 hours of play time
-Zombies and animals glitching through objects such as wall and surfaces. ( Had 2 Wolfs enter my base through the wall, as well as a bear. Also when we went to the main big city, we went to the sports hall and zombies started appearing up through the floor. The glitching through objects thing was varying in when and where it happened. I never saw zombies glitching through walls, and through the floor only happened to me in the sports hall )
-A few things can feel unfinished, most likely due to the scope of this game. An example would be I had a very hard time finding a car battery that had any charge, and as far as I could find out there was no other way to charge a car battery without another car battery.
This is where I'll end my review as its already too long. But yea, pros pointed out in this review can also be seen as a con. Basically, it's DayZ. But good.