SCUM

SCUM drops players onto a hostile island as convicted prisoners fitted with a tracking implant, forced to scavenge, hunt, build, and fight to survive against wildlife, hostile NPCs, and each other. What set it apart from the wave of open-world survival games it launched alongside in August 2018 was an unusually granular body-simulation system — real character stats tied to metabolism, nutrition, and physical condition rather than abstract meters — layered under standard crafting and PvP survival mechanics. Nearly seven years later, having reached 1.0 in June 2025, it carries a Mostly Positive 73.9% across 38,040 English reviews. That's a real, substantial audience, and reading through its review sample surfaces both what's kept that audience engaged and a specific, unusually well-corroborated set of complaints from the players who've stuck around longest.

A body-simulation hook that still stands out

The system that made SCUM distinctive at launch still earns real, specific praise. One reviewer frames the appeal directly: "if you enjoy games with deep and immersive survival mechanics and don't mind dying multiple times and losing all the loot you were carrying, this game is perfect for you. The body simulation system is extremely complex and certainly won't appeal to everyone." Another reviewer, despite acknowledging real flaws elsewhere, keeps coming back specifically for this depth: "Is it old? Yes. Is it buggy? Absolutely. Do I keep coming back every time I need my survival itch scratched? Without hesitation. Learning how the crazy detailed mechanics in this game work is fun." That's a genuinely rare kind of endorsement — reviewers naming the exact same specific system as both the reason to tolerate everything else and the reason the game remains worth playing at all.

Bugs its most invested players say never got fixed

Set against that is an unusually consistent, specific, and credible thread of bug reports, made more notable by the playtimes behind them. One reviewer with roughly 1,459 hours logged states plainly: "There is a LOT of bugs that have been there for a couple of years such as; trees and shrubbery regrow through your base, Puppets (and now armed NPCs) that respawn on top of you, base building elements don't grid snap together. When you get killed your bo[dy]..." — cut off, but clearly continuing the same body-disappearance complaint raised independently by a separate reviewer with over 1,000 hours: "Sometimes when you die you cannot recover your body. It just isn't there." Two independent, extremely high-playtime reviewers describing the same specific, named bugs is strong enough convergence to treat as an accurate, current account of the shipped game rather than outdated complaints from early access years ago — both were posted well after the game's 2025 1.0 release.

A monetisation pattern its own fans keep naming the same way

The single most repeated criticism in the entire sample concerns DLC. One reviewer sums up the sentiment shared across dozens of others: "From beautiful and immersive game it has become a metabolism and cooking simulator attached to a dlc selling platform." Another, more pointed: "Stop adding trash updates dlc's and useless stuff that lag the game... JUST FIX THE GAME!" A third compares the pattern directly to a well-known cosmetic-DLC model: "SCUM become Scumy to players, the Sims 4 DLCs... they dont realy seem to care to improve the own survival game." This isn't one or two outlier complaints — it's the dominant framing across a large share of the critical review sample, all converging on the same specific claim: paid cosmetic content keeps shipping while the bug list above stays open.

A serious claim about broken promises

One detailed, widely-read review makes a claim worth stating plainly because of how specific and falsifiable it is: "The game I bought and the game I own right now are completely different games. The game I have right now does not even follow the roadmap of the game I purchased, and it is generally a much worse game." This review can't independently verify every specific roadmap item referenced, but the sentiment is echoed closely enough by other reviewers describing years of feature drift and unmet expectations that it's worth reporting as a real, widely-shared grievance among the game's own long-term Early Access backers, distinct from ordinary "this game has bugs" feedback.

What the numbers say about ongoing engagement

Global achievement data shows the core loop still holds real attention despite everything above: completion tapers gradually from 84.7% for reaching the island down through the 25-35% range for surviving multiple days and reaching early reputation milestones — a smooth, healthy curve rather than an early wall, consistent with a genuinely large population of players still actively engaging with the survival loop regardless of the frustrations documented above.

Verdict

SCUM's body-simulation hook remains genuinely distinctive, and a real, substantial community of deeply invested players — some with well over a thousand hours logged — continues to find real value in its systems. That same community is also the source of the sharpest, most specific, and most consistent complaints in this review: long-standing, named bugs that outlived the jump to 1.0, and a DLC strategy a large share of its own fans describe as prioritized over fixing them. Both things are true at once, verified by the same high-playtime reviewers making both claims. Buy it for the survival systems specifically, with clear eyes about a bug list and monetisation pattern its most dedicated players have been documenting for years.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data, the raw HTML "Early Access Release Date" field); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency, with attention to reviewer playtime as a credibility signal; Steam's global achievement statistics API.