I saw a negative review mentioning how this game, in short, was too linear of a zombie looter. I would make the strong argument that this game suffers from not being linear enough.
This game has strongly mistaken set pieces for setting, has mistaken tactical gunplay for gameplay and it has mistaken fetch quests for plot. It just doesn't know what the ♥♥♥♥ it wants to be, I'm not sorry, you have had YEARS to figure out what exact game you want, and it's JUST zombies.
Well okay, maybe a left 4 dead style horde shooter then, that could totally work in the scp universe!... No, it's a spattering of zombies here, a spattering of the flesh that hates there, a spattering of crabs, one entire section devoted to just a cognitohazard, etc. Again, SET PIECES of ideas. Why can't they give us actually HORDES of enemies in a game that clearly wants to be a horde shooter? Because that'd steer away from the Tacti-COOL gameplay,
ooooooh yeah!! Assault rifles, SMGs, Pistols, a shotgun, with the Acog, vertical grip, Wide-coned flashlights, Tight-coned flashlights, IR sights, laser sights, High-positioned sights, low-positioned sights, suppressors, universal compensators, special compensators, penis compensators, Weapon sway, Low-ready position, canted sights. Every weapon has a genuinely nice feel to it, the follow-up shots, the animations, the reloads, you can really tell someone thought that the DUMPSTER FIRE "Ready or Not" was just the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gospel, and clearly took their philosophy of: if you have REALLY sellable 1st person gunplay mechanics and pretty animations, that it magically makes up for the fact that you're shooting Re---ds who only ever become a legitimate threat when you get sloppy, or when the game just chooses for you to die, because all of a sudden the ranged enemies choose to have sniper rifles in their back pockets. Short of that, they're just DUMB, And not "mind-controlled" Dumb, not "zombies" dumb, just uninteresting to fight dumb, "I don't believe you even belong in this universe" dumb. Getting stuck on things dumb, move 5 steps, shoot, move 5 steps, shoot, dumb.
I haven't even gotten into the actual gameplay yet, but it's because there just isn't much to SAY. I'm a sucker for larger-than-life SUPER structures, especially research facilities gone wrong, And... Yes... This game IS that. But it's... Off. Portal 1 & 2, White Knuckle, Half Life, Resident Evil 2, they all have simple enemies, they all have linear gameplay, they all have Super Structures, and yet somehow with these games, I never felt "... Where the ♥♥♥♥ do I GO?" SCP5K stops being these beautifully-designed, believable set pieces of the collapsed facility, to just these big rooms artificially designed to waste your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time. You know who else had big rooms like that? Left 4 Dead, but they actually REWARDED players who took the out-of-the-way path with items, and you always had a general idea if you were just messing up and going the wrong way, and in fact you were punished for it if you weren't fast enough or got split up. Hell, I wasn't even punished for lagging behind my well-trained team of goobers, they were only punished by my foolishness of not catching up to them while I'm just kickin it, and by kickin it, I mean saying "Where the ♥♥♥♥ do I GO?"
Like yeah, my bad that I didn't read the teeny text in the corner of my screen that says "Do a thing" but "Do a thing" really means run around until you find this SPECIFIC dead guy like this SPECIFIC dead guy with a CLIPBOARD and that CLIPBOARD has a code and you take that code and you put it in a thing and then you move on and you... Do the same thing again and again, but ooooooo this time there's a cognito hazaaaard... Which just means this really annoying mechanic where you stare at a computer screen for too long, you die. Okay cool, but In SCP Containment breach, it was a temptation, a puzzle that you had to overcome. In this game, shoot screen, move, shoot zombie, move, find clipboard, open door, do thing.
Does that sound ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fun to you? Does that really sound like you're a specialized tactics unit designed to get to the bottom of the truth of these breached facilities, fighting for dear life with nothing but methodical, coordinated improvised tactics?
No.
Does it sound like a really intense, gory, resource-management horde shooter where you pick up supplies and face waves of the unknown using reaction time, Area denial, and teamwork synergy?
No.
You have fancy tacticool weapons with none of the tactics, You have gargantuan set pieces with dead ends and winding turns and twists, just to copy paste a code from a clipboard, while fighting like... 5 SCPs. Oh yeah that's right... This is an SCP game... With not enough SCPs. No seriously, the biggest threat in this game is 173, I am TIRED of 173. It has been over 2 decades, over 10,000, lemme say that again, TEN-THOUSAND SCPS, and we're still stuck with zombies, and a glorified weeping angel lovingly named "Peanut". If I forgot to mention the one of "many" listed in the description, it's because it wasn't memorable enough to actually affect gameplay in a game where you respawn anyway, and there's no real consequences for anything you do.
What I'm trying to say, is it's SCP... Without the SCPs.
So, without even getting into the BUGS and disconnection issues... Who the ♥♥♥♥ is this game made for, really? Because this game was CLEARLY not made for me.
