Recent reviews by Peanut

I have quite a lot to say about this game, and after having played it for almost 500 hours, I have to say that a majority of it is negative.

The Pros
- The game has a pretty good atmosphere, and it can actually be quite scary when you're alone.
- Dodging and weaving past SCPs is great fun, and it has some harrowing moments. Using the right items at the right moment makes you feel like the protagonist in a horror movie narrowly escaping death.
- You build a lot of funny and strange relationships, war stories, and absurd encounters, many of which are memorable and worth sharing.
- It's free.*

The Cons
- Extremely unbalanced gameplay and lengthy wait times. You might die within the first minute, and have to wait 5 minutes until next spawn (and then die again immediately, then wait 5 minutes.) SCPs can kill you nearly instantly off very little effort, and if they work together, there are situations where it's literally impossible to escape. Some SCPs can kill you if you simply look at them, others have to be looked at or they kill you, some can lock doors so you can't escape no matter what. Having to fight all of them at the same time is frustrating. It feels like the game is trying to be fun for the SCPs and tiresome for the humans. SCP victories are the norm, Foundation victories happen somewhat regularily, and Chaos Insurgency wins are extremely rare.
- The servers and menus are ridiculously awful. Half of the time, servers will be full, even if they claim to have available spots, and refreshing them does nothing. You will sometimes be kicked from servers if they are full, even if you are currently playing on it, and sometimes joining a server will give you a blank screen. The game sometimes refuses to get the server list for you, requiring a restart, or to enable console to enter a code to have it function. If you finally join a server, you might enter a black screen, which requires you to reconnect, only for you to then reconnect and have to wait 5 minutes before a respawn wave.
- Rampant toxicity on certain servers, especially official ones, goes unchecked most of the time. Teammates will lock doors on you, call you slurs, steal your items, lock you into inescapable rooms, or try to get you killed. The N-word is getting plenty of use, even on official servers, and a report requires you to join a discord, send a command to a bot, and then provide video evidence, which a mod will then check out. At this point the guy has done more than their fair share of damage.
- A lot, and I mean a lot, of wait times. You have to wait for the game to load, which is slow, then for the game to get you the servers, which might require you to go into the console, at which point the first connection attempt fails. Then you try to join again, and it gives you a black screen, so you try again. This time it joins, but the game is under way, so you have to wait 3 minutes. Then the game ends before you spawn, and as it attempts to rejoin, you're kicked immediately because "the server is full." 15 minutes wasted.

Conclusion:
The game is fun, and it can be a ton of fun. The problem is that you have to wait a long time for that fun, and even then, it's only 30/70 that it turns out to be as much fun as you had hoped. However, all that it offers (funny interractions, ridiculous roleplaying, interesting situations and new friendships) can easily be found in other games, which don't have the massive baggage that this game comes with (long wait times, unfair and unbalanced games, and a general aire of toxicity). Some will argue that the game being free excludes it from this criticism, but it's not really "free", you pay with your time. You can only play one game at a time, and if you choose to play this game, you're locking yourself out of playing another game for the duration spent.

So to sum it all up, the foundation for a great experience is here, but so much is bad or janky, that it's not really worth it in the end.