SCUM
Gamepires
My friend and I drove our rusty compact car to the top of a grassy hill and jumped out to get a better look at our surroundings. It was a clear day and consulting our map, we could see that we were close to a small coastal town. We broke out our binoculars and took a closer look at the town from our elevated vantage point. We saw zombies lumbering around in its streets and knew that we’d have to be careful—larger mobs of zombies tended to inhabit settlements and they could quickly overwhelm any human interlopers.
We hopped back into the car and drove it straight down into the town. We wanted to ride in, investigate the centrally located police station for loot, and then get the heck out of dodge. As we approached the building we shot a few zombies shambling around the station’s entrance with our pistols and made our way in. We located some good loot—including a couple of assault rifles and some different types of ammunition types for them.
Not wanting to be too greedy, we exited the station and jumped back into the car. We were just about to leave the town when we heard the loud report of a rifle. Our car was struck and immediately began spinning out of control, smashing into a nearby building. We bailed out with our newly acquired assault rifles locked and loaded.
My buddy and I spied at least three assailants down the street in the second story of an abandoned house. One of them was wielding an M82 Barret—a large anti-material sniper weapon; that’s what had shot out our engine block. We commenced engaging in a bloody firefight until our enemies were dead.
Our rejoicing was short-lived, however; we came back to our car and saw that during the battle, and a couple of our tires had been shot out and were now deflated. Darkness was approaching and we didn’t have a repair kit. Things didn’t look good…
Survival games have been all the rage now for many years. And rightfully so—there’s just something really intriguing about starting a game with hardly any equipment (in most cases), having to gather resources, build a base, and constantly try to maintain and upgrade your belongings.
Gamepires’ SCUM survival gamewas a breath of fresh air when it first made its Early Access debut almost exactly two years ago. It differentiated itself from many of the other survival games out there, in that it felt more natural and organic overall. Not only did you have to monitor your character’s metabolic levels, you could also poop and pee and even throw up if you became sick. A locational damage system only added to the game’s immersion.
SCUM’s environments are also hostile on a different order of magnitude when compared to similar games. In games such as DayZ and Ark: Survival Evolved, I find that the AI enemies are pretty easy to avoid or destroy. Not so much in SCUM.
In this game, zombies not only run fast, but they can also damage you pretty quickly as well. Also, when you get wounded in SCUM, your health can begin to rapidly deteriorate if you don’t get medical treatment soon enough.
For instance, a gaming buddy and I were once looting a military base when a zombie came running at him out of nowhere and whacked him on his head. After dispatching said zombie, my friend told me that his head was damaged and that he’d sustained a concussion, even though he was wearing a helmet at the time of the attack. Since we didn’t have the right medical supplies to treat him, he became increasingly dizzy (his screen became blurry) and he was dead within a few hours.
SCUM’s latest update (Update 0.4.84.24699) introduces a whole new slew of content. Firearms can now malfunction if they are not cleaned and maintained properly. There are also different types of ammunition available such as crafted, tracer, and armor-piercing varieties. You can even check your magazines now just like in Escape From Tarkov.
As far as immersion goes, there are new weapon carrying and firing animations, as well as some cool new animations for your guns whenever you’re close to walls (instead of having their barrels clip through them).
With all of these new changes, SCUM is really ratcheting things up in terms of realism. It’s currently my go-to survival/crafting game on Steam and will hopefully remain so—granted it gets the continued support of its solid team of developers.
SCORE: 83%
SCUM has some pretty good looking graphics that make its survival gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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