Recent reviews by OneStep

Performance absolutely unacceptable.

Suit for Hire accomplishes what it sets out to be and knows its target audience well.

Incredibly fun, polished and greatly designed.

A really satisfying top-down shooter that embodies the spirit of the john wick movies well. The mechanics push you to perfection and speed, however, there is no specific playstyle enforced and you are free to complete the challanges as you see fit, be that casually, run and gun, tactically or try hard chasing the best score possible.

It also gives you the option to play in third person, but it is very evident that the game was primarily designed with the top-down perspective in mind and should be played like that for the best experience.

In an industry that is now defined by profit margins, pleasing shareholders and trying to appeal to as many people as possible its very refreshing to experience a game that is just that, a fun, well made, original game that is meant to be played and enjoyed.

Bought this game when it initially released in early access and played it a good bunch, mostly enjoying my time and looking forward to the future. Now, a few days ago they finally released 1.0 so I decided to give it a shot again.

Well, it is pretty much the same as I remember it and feels just as buggy and unpolished as it did back then, stuff I expected and tolerated to some degree, but obviously not now considering that this is supposed to be the release.

To me it seems that they at some point lost direction and kept adding/changing/removing stuff no one asked for, ignoring core issues and community feedback. WIth the game being stagnant and little to no new traffic and revenue coming in it begins to make sense as to why they decided to slap a 1.0 label onto this:

The 1.0 version of SCUM feels like an effort to generate a quick buck instead of a proud release of a product that has been in development for years.

Running low-med settings at 2k on a highly optimized system sporting an SSD, 4090, 13900k, 64GB DDR5.

From a technical perspective the game is an utter catastrophe. Pre-alpha blah blah, early access blah blah, updates gonna make it better blah blah. We have had a few updates by now and the performance did not improve, it actually worsened with the last big update which is mind boggling.

Highly inconsistent frames, stuttering, random CPU spikes to 100%, running on UE5 with all its TAA smudgefest glory and relying heavily on AI upscalers.

This right here would be the defintion of UE5 slop if it wasn't for the half decent milsim oriented gameplay. (PVE only perspective - supposedly PVP is highly flawed)

The idea is there, the implementation defintely is not.

EDIT "Dev" Response:

Stop misleading and insulting the intelligence of your (potential) customers by using soulless copy paste support responses to suggest the performance problems are due to user error instead of an inherent issue with the product.

Must have for VR. Performant, modern UI and most importantly a very pleasant UX with and decent customizability all around.

Must have software for steamvr.

Unfortunately, the developer seems to have abandoned this project - very curiously only after making it paid. I did actually pay before that using the donation dlcs, and don't get me wrong I certainly got my moneys worth - but the support/compatibility as vr games and software continue to update is getting worse and worse.

In short, abandoned - get it for free somehow like it used to be.

Incredibly useful, must have for mixed virtual reality.

Loved the first one, got this one as soon as it released in EA - it was very rough and as a result I became quite skeptical of how it would turn out.

Fortunately, it got more polished and enjoyable as time went on, each update slowly but surely improving and adding upon the game. As of right now, the game feels quite good, content wise less than ITR1, in terms of polish this one is already beating the first one.

If the quality of the updates keep up this game has serious masterpiece potential.

The infrastructure is there but the game is severely undercooked. You can feel the passion and direction the developers were going for, but greed got in the way as it tends to do. Check again in a year or so.

Basically unpolished terrorist hunt with half-baked swat mechanics.

Design incoherent, featuring a weird mix of tactical and arcade elements that don't work together, as if the game is in a constant identity crisis. AI is unpredictable in the sense that you cannot read their current state of mind based on voice/animations ect, but predictable in the way that you know you will have to shoot them the second you see them if you don't want to get aimbotted or wallbanged.

Maps are gigantic mazes filled with literal armies of military-grade crackheads.

Game is overall worse than it was in early access, feature and content wise. The DLC is just a set of 3 maps and guns, most with reused assets or new ones bought from the unreal store without touching any of the core issues. Updates are very few and far between, communication from the dev team has consistently worsened.

Overall, another unpolished "tactical" shooter with terrible design, half-baked features and apparently going nowhere.

UPDATE Dark Waters DLC:
The new weapons and maps this time around are much better, but the new animations for the them are definitely done by a different animator and slightly worse in terms of crispness. The best additions so far are the QQL improvements, especially the movement/leaning and the new weapon handling. However, the biggest problem - the AI - is still terrible for what the game is trying to be. It is slightly better, but the same problems persist and everything goes to ♥♥♥♥ as soon as the AI enters combat mode, which more often than not they do. The new maps just confirm to me that this is a glorified terrorist hunt instead of a swat successor, which it was originally advertised as.

So in short, overall, the update/dlc is a small improvement, but not a fix. Honestly positively surprised with the update. Expected much worse. Overall still a big no though.

UPDATE Pending console release:
Well, looks like they are now going back on their word and censoring their game for the console market, choosing to affect the PC version as well. The changes from what I have seen are mostly visual, so there is no excuse to bring the PC version down with it.

UPDATE Stories from Los Sueños (console release):
AI feels pretty much as terrible as it did before, animations still very choppy and unreadable and as soon as they enter combat they will snipe you across rooms through a gap in the wall. The performance improvements in this update are very welcomed, all maps run much better, but oil rig is still unplayable with how unstable it is. The new maps this time around are very enjoyable and fit very well with what I perceived Ready or Nots original vision to be.

Only really playable with AI mods that tone down AIs reaction time, accuracy and make them less likely to enter combat, making the experience more similiar to Swat 4 where not every situation ends in a john wick shootout if you happen to not want to use gas all the time. Gunfighter mod is also essential, as it gets rid of a lot of the artificial balancing this game is plagued with.