Wide and Shallow. That's how someone described Fallout 4 on here in a review and I think it says it best about this game as well. I sat down for several hours and saw the majority of this game. Quite a bit to say of it.

SCUM is a nifty idea for a game. I had been in the mood for a little S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so thought i'd check this out thinking it might be in the same ballpark. It's somewhat close in a sense. SCUM is an open world MMO (with the ability to play solo). It's somewhat inspired by battle royale games but mostly it reminds me of my days playing Ark Survival Evolved and (especially) my brief stint with Day-Z and Unturned.

SCUM's main claim to fame and selling point is the deep character aspect of simulating your health statistics. It looks like some kind of megamod for fallout new vegas on steroids (Primary Needs). Everything from what you ate it, when and when it's coming back out of you. and your vitamin counts.

I'd imagine that the demographic of people who can appreciate this level of detail here is a bit limited. It's still very cool and for the most part you don't have to actually look at it all that closely.

Perhaps overtime that can become more interesting to see what happens if one were to say, develop scurvy. Which indeed might be... As it seems your main food in this game is actually zombie meat as they are easy to find and the occasional deer or elk. There are ways to maximize your food->nutrition efficiency (by cooking it, smoking it etc) however, everything about this game is geared such that you cant really build or amass resources. While Ark always had you losing what you built up, at least you were able to get things going. SCUM is much more temporal and short-lived in this sense and you simply wander from one town to the next scouring through cabinets and getting a bit more clothes and equipment until you cannot carry more and then die. You can build a camp outside of town and stuff, but at this point, you've pretty much seen the most of the game short of actually getting into a military base and getting end game weapons to hunt other players.

So, in closing SCUM is an interesting idea for a game with the deep stat tracking and an actually pretty nice character stat/creation system, it even has a very large and rather nice game world however its plagued by a lot of mechanics issues, a tedious interaction with the UI (and containers) and a general lack in satisfaction by actually playing/managing to survive in the game.

It's certainly worth looking at if you like the genre of survival games, as it has some great ideas, but the game has further to go I think. It got old for me pretty quickly after I managed to actually get food equipment and the rest and then more or less saw it was time to look for better guns. It will be interesting to see what game comes along and gets it all right and perhaps offers indeed an authentic STALKER MMO type survival experience.