As the review from 2018 states, nothing much has changed in 5 YEARS. Developers still have zero direction and have created more bugs and glitches in this game along the development timeline that they do not fix, but rather focusing on PAID DLC for a game that will inevitably be milked and kept in "Early Access" for as long as possible.
Development company Gamepires was sold to Jagex in November '22'. Jagex purchased them to reuse code they developed for the metabolism system. Jagex doesn't even care about this game, they just wanted that code for their open world Runescape game they're developing. Carlyle Group, who owns Jagex, is even looking to sell Jagex as a whole now so the future of this game is already looking bleak. Game has become a cash grab with extremely high turnover rate with new players who end up refunding their game purchase through Steam because it doesn't even take the 2 hour limit on refunds for these new players to see how bad this game is.
In the last year alone, this games online player base has dwindled from 20-40k players average to 5-15k players. The numbers speak for themselves. If this game was actually improving towards full release, one would think the numbers would rise rather than fall consistently over the course of the last year. Developers have made many poor choices and decisions, choosing to either go in a completely different direction than the majority of the player base desired, each time, causing players to quit playing. The choices and changes being made to the game are so against the grain of common game development, its almost plausible that these developers are intentionally sabotaging their own game now that the company has been sold and checks have been cashed.
The community is toxic af. More so than your average COD lobby. Only what can be described as "koolaid drinking cultists" are the diehard supporters who make it their mission to attack and belittle anybody with a common sense or realistic opinion about the game, it's development, and any negative feedback given on the forums. Their Steam, Discord, FB, Reddit forums are all so heavily moderated by these supporters(and usually the same people) as well as the developers themselves, they have created their own "Echo Chamber" by removing any form of critical feedback or opinions that point out the glaringly obvious problems and issues with this game and its employees. The only recourse is for people to not play or support this game and leave honest reviews such as this on forums and reviews sites that cannot be silenced by their moderators.
Developers have started to enter the "Feature Creep" phase of development. They've maxed out their own customized version of UE4 and refuse to go to UE5, causing massive game issues in stand-alone as well as multiplayer environments. If more than 30 players connect to a server, the game lags, for everyone, regardless if you're playing on a potato machine or the highest tiered hardware available. Streamers that support this game get kickbacks, perks, etc from the development community, so don't expect an unbiased review from them either. For anybody considering even buying this game to "try it out", just save yourself the money, even when the games goes on sale for 50% off, it simply just isn't worth it, because instead of playing Scum, you'll feel like you've been Scammed.