Once Human is the first release by Starry Studio, a new development house owned by NetEase Games. With that in mind, it is a very ambitious title, promising to be a horror-infused survival MMO with seasonal content, bombastic world events, and genre staples like team-focused gameplay, plenty of crafting, and intricate base building. It is a lot for one title to juggle, as countless other survival games have discovered. Once Human does an admirable job of doing so, but it does ultimately struggle to stick the landing.
The most attention-grabbing aspect of Once Human for players and non-players alike is its visual design, so let’s start there. The world of Once Human is an interesting blend of futurism, tactical military gear, and, well, Fortnite costumes. Where it really shines is in its hard science-fiction elements.
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From the horrifying monsters threatening humanity to the hand-wave specialized gear players use to face them, many of the designs are thought-provoking. The most interesting of the monsters, known as deviants, are non-Euclidian horrors of swirling black matter that has merged with everyday items. We’re talking about deviants with colossal limbs jutting out of school buses, towering titans with radio towers for heads, and lumbering beasts merged with trees. The deviants are contrasted by deviations: strange cartoon beings that players are able to carry in special clear backpacks to use their special abilities like keychain-ornament Pokémon.
Unfortunately, the other elements of Once Human are universally mixed in their quality. One prime example is the story. Players enter the game’s world as meta-humans who are freed from a generic evil science corporation and have some mostly unexplained abilities when it comes to interacting with deviations and deviants. The start of the story introduces a lot of interesting mysteries that it could have slowly peeled back the layers of, but it fails to.
Once Human is instead content to rest on its laurels and continually tease the player with small fragments of lore that never coalesce into answers, anyone who makes the mistake of becoming at all interested or invested in the story will find themselves strung along without any meaningful developments to speak of.
The other systems and mechanics of Once Human are a tangled mess that needs to be unwound. The primary game loop of Once Human centers around crafting. Players begin by establishing a base anywhere in the game’s world out of the standard resources gathered from throughout the world such as wood, iron, gravel, etc. While Once Human‘s building mechanics is missing the complexities of a lot of its competition, the selection of items and their design are more appealing than what one expects to find in most survival titles.
Rather than building rundown shacks that are more rust than structural stability, Once Human allows players to build beautiful homes of various architectural styles if they are willing to put the time in to do so. This helps make investing one’s time in developing their base much more enticing and satisfying. All of the time spent at one’s base is soured a bit, however, due to annoyances like crafting timers, some serious lag issues, and a lack of common quality-of-life features that would make building a smoother experience.
Building up at least a rudimentary base is necessary to place a variety of crafting tables to craft and upgrade gear. Getting the resources to do so is the main gameplay of Once Human. To do so players go to named locations that are clusters of buildings with random junk, crates, and enemies scattered throughout them. To put it bluntly, going through these areas quickly becomes a bore.
The majority of enemies within them are zombies under a different pretense that are quickly dispatched with one or two strong melee attacks. They quickly become an exercise of right-clicking enemies once to get rid of them and sprinting around as quickly as possible just grabbing everything in arms reach. Any other approach is really just a waste of time.
The game’s combat systems do shine when it comes to fighting the larger boss deviants, especially at higher levels where they can hit hard enough to be real threats. Their sheer scale gives the encounters some great weight and their designs really shine in the height of combat. Combat is frequently hindered by some serious technical issues, though, that can ruin even the most exciting of fights. The issues cause frequent lag spikes, disjointed visuals, glitchy hit detection, and player rubber-banding that is endlessly frustrating.
The final pillar of Once Human is its live service elements. There is the normal cosmetic shop filled with gaudy costumes, weapon skins, and a battle pass in case you want to help support the game’s development since it is free-to-play. Most of the cosmetic vary wildly from the game world’s established tone and visuals, but that’s a matter of personal taste more than anything else.
The really interesting part of Once Human here is its seasonal system a la Diablo. Every so many months Starry Studios is planning on updating Once Human with a new season of various bits of content, resetting players’ progress in the process except for their unlocked cosmetics and crafting blueprints. Exactly how these seasons will pan out remains to be seen, but they do have the potential to give dedicated players plenty of reason to come back to the game every once in a while.
The calculus of Once Human‘s overall quality as a package is a bit murky. Every element of it is so evenly split between the good and the bad that it inevitably fuels very mixed reactions. Many players will undoubtedly love its grindy resource gathering, quick simple combat, and pretty but simplified building.
Others will dislike all of those elements but enjoy its horror content, interesting visual design, and larger combat encounters. While the quality of every game is ultimately subjective, Once Human is unique in how, other than its serious technical issues, all of its problems or strengths are contentious ones that it is easy to imagine every person feeling differently about. For many, however, I suspect that it will end up being such a mixed bag as not to be worth sticking with in favor of a more focused and refined competitor.
Once Human is available now on PC.
Once Human
TL;DR
While the quality of every game is ultimately subjective, Once Human is unique in how, other than its serious technical issues, all of its problems or strengths are contentious ones that it is easy to imagine every person feeling differently about. For many, however, I suspect that it will end up being such a mixed bag as not to be worth sticking with in favor of a more focused and refined competitor.
