Once Human Review-In-Progress: Brilliantly Weird And Totally Confused (2024)

Once Human is a fascinating game. There’s no other way of putting it. It’s a multiplayer open-world survival crafting game with a Ubisoft-style quest system (go here, clear an outpost, find hidden chests), a Pokemon-like creature collecting aspect with Palworld animal-workforce undertones, with Rust - or DayZ-esque - PvP and seasonal wipes to boot. It’s an eclectic hash of all these games, for better, and for worse.

The World

You’re thrust into this strange apocalyptic world as a Mayfly, someone who is able to synchronize with Deviants (those Pokemon-like creatures I mentioned), and are tasked with saving the entire world. Progression is simple and linear. Go to this outpost, kill everything there, find hidden chests, think about the Ubisoft formula again. Okay? Done? Good job. Go to this other place and do it all over again.

While that might sound dull, I actually found myself caught up in this simple task. Once Human is a gorgeous-looking game, especially for a free-to-play title, and the environmental design is varied from location to location. There might be a ruined high school, a deserted factory, or a wealthy hillside town. It’s incredibly detailed for a game of this size. Shops have individual menu boards listing off cakes and drinks from a bygone time. There are arcades, factories full of defunct machinery, children’s bedrooms with eerie murals on the walls. You explore the entire world on your trusty motorcycle and glider. The only thing that would make this better is a grappling hook. Overall, this world feels lived in, or at least, previously lived in, before everyone was turned into a zombie.

Combat

They aren’t ordinary zombies, though. During my 15 hours with the game, I’ve fought zombies with lanterns for heads, zombie demons enshrouded in tarpaulins that act as armor, zombies that spit at you, floating zombie bugs, a giant zombie boss with balloons for a head (pop the balloons one by one to take it down), and regular old humanoid zombies that are somehow the most terrifying of all. There’s an impressive level of mob variety in this game, and each area I unlock seems to have more and more.

I touched on something there that I really wasn’t expecting in Once Human: this game is spooky, man. I’m not a horror person. Ever. I watched The Ring once by accident when I was a kid and have never looked back. The way that the zombies lurch at you, how dark some of the environments are, and that uneasy feeling that comes from not knowing what sort of freaky creature you’re going to run into next just puts me on edge. It’s compelling. In the years to come for this game - and I do hope Once Human has legs - the crossover between PvE scares and PvP chaos is going to be a delight.

The underlying fear means that whenever I find someone else in the open world, I latch onto them. It doesn’t matter what task I’m doing, I’m just gonna follow this other person. Companionship is safety. We might not speak the same language, but in this moment, we’re just two weirdos with butterflies in our backpacks, killing zombies and collecting loot. I’m on a PvE-only server, so thankfully no one can shoot me on sight. I like this. In truth, Once Human is a game best enjoyed with some friends, but thankfully, there’s usually someone else running around completing tasks alongside you.

The Deviants

So, the butterflies in our backpacks. Or a cat. Or a giant frog. The Deviants (Pokemon) are one of the strangest parts of this game and as a result, one of my favourites. So far I’ve collected a butterfly that deals damage, a frog that sits on top of my smelter making weird squelching noises and speeding up production, a cat that just sits on my roof but apparently also helps my character get better rest, and the delightful little Digby Boy, who, you guessed it, mines copper and tin for me. All of these can be upgraded, utilized in different ways. I’ve barely scratched the surface of this system and I’m intrigued to where it might go when you’ve got thirty people in the same base with dozens of Deviants running around.

The Mixed Steam Reviews

It’d be remiss of me to not briefly touch on the Mixed Steam reviews. A lot of these reviews are targeted towards three key problems:

• Performance
• Character creator and server limitations
• Terms Of Service/EULA

Performance has been fine for me, but then I’ve got a top-of-the-range computer. A few players have reported high CPU temps for the game, as well as stuttering and rubberbanding. Again, the game is free-to-play, so the best way to check the performance is to try it.

There was also a lot of uproar about character creation and server limitation. On the first day of launch, you could only make one character, on one server, and you couldn’t delete the character or move it to another server. This was quickly fixed by the developers - within 12 hours, actually - so those reviews can largely be ignored.

And the Terms Of Service and EULA issue, about the game asking for your government ID, address, and more personal details, is right to be met with some criticism. But NetEase has released a full statement on its privacy conditions, and generally a lot of this is par for the course for modern games. Still not brilliant, but the game isn’t spyware, at least.

But with these myriad systems, no matter how good they might be, comes some confusion. I’m not entirely sure what kind of game Once Human is trying to be. The biggest factor in this is its seasonal wipes. These occur every six weeks. Most of your progress is erased, and you start back at the beginning, holding on to the blueprints you’ve acquired, any cosmetics you’ve earned, and maybe a few other items. This is where I think the game will really struggle. While I enjoyed exploring the map the first time, collecting chests and stuff, do I want to do this all over again? Absolutely not.

It's clear that the developers have thought of this with a similar design ethos to Rust and DayZ. Rust has seasonal wipes that constantly level the playing field, which is great for new and returning players alike. But in Rust everything is so temporary. In Once Human, it really feels like you make a mark on the world - you can decorate your house with bookcases, collect Pokemon, form alliances and groups. There’s a lot more effort involved here than in games like Rust. Resetting all your hardwork back to square one is an instant vibe-killer for me. Some players will love it. Others will hate it.

We can speculate on how Once Human will handle these seasonal wipes - as I understand it there’s new content introduced, new mobs, new zones, and so on - but until I see it in action, I will enjoy the game in this six-week chunk and judge it on this experience. That’s fine by me. It’s free-to-play. And I will play—for many, many more hours. Depending on how much is wiped when the first season rolls over, I may or may not be back for more.