Once Human, Always Boring – Review

As somebody who typically likes playing survival games and looter shooters, you’d think I would enjoy something that brings both of these together in a single experience. Enter Once Human, a free-to-play survival game with a rather peculiar seasonal system that’ll be a recurring issue as I share my thoughts about this game.

If you are on the fence, I’m not gonna tell you to dismiss the game entirely. It does have some fun stuff in it. Unfortunately, I’m gonna start off by enumerating everything I dislike about it. Strap yourself in, cause this is gonna be a long one.

SEASONS? IN A SURVIVAL GAME?

Let me preface this by saying that I did enjoy the first couple of weeks of playing the game. Unfortunately, that enjoyment faded quickly over time, and it has a lot to do with how the seasonal system works, which I’m starting to think is just their way of hiding the fact that it’s an undercooked mess of a game.

You see, every server in Once Human lasts for a few weeks (around 5 to 6). A pretty short “season”, if you will. Each week, new stuff is unlocked as the server enters another “phase”, and while that sounds interesting on paper, well, it isn’t.

It’s basically a forced time gate that locks out players from doing certain activities or even stepping foot in pretty low to mid-level regions of the map. This should have been a sign that something is gonna go wrong later on, but I gave it a chance.

At first, it seemed like a way to subtly tell players to slow down and not rush to the endgame. So, “fair enough”, I thought. Within the first half of the week, my group had already exhausted the content in the starter regions, so we waited until the next part opened.

“WAIT… THAT’S IT?”

Well, once the “second phase” started, the rest of the map opened up. Well, at least the rest of maybe a quarter of the whole world map. That’s all we’re getting for the rest of the season, and the worst part? It’s the epitome of that old phrase “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle“.

Yeah, sure, you have all these POIs and safe zones scattered around the map, but there’s pretty much nothing to do there aside from shooting at the exact same generic enemy types from the game’s three different factions. I guess you can also reopen some of the equipment crates in each POI, which don’t even give you gear. It’s all just mods and junk materials.

This becomes a recurring theme as each week passes. In the third week, we just get a new difficulty level for instanced content, which made farming them beforehand completely pointless due to the crap drops. Unfortunately, that was cracked by everyone in less than 24 hours too. “Hard” difficulty just adds maybe a simple mechanic to the key bosses in the map, while dungeon enemies just had a slight bump in HP.

With how fast everybody, even people who played casually like me, were clearing the “new” content that dropped every week, I’m left wondering what the point of gating them even was. This was pretty much the case with “Pro” difficulty, which took almost an entire month total before it released.

The only actual “challenging” content were the so-called prime wars, which… aren’t good. That deserves its own little subsection, so let’s move this along.

PRIME WARS, AN EXERCISE IN TEDIUM

Prime wars are essentially world bosses that you can summon in certain areas, and these are server-wide events that are supposed to be tackled by multiple players. There are a lot of things wrong with its implementation, and it’s one of the main reasons why I believe this game has a massive identity crisis.

You see, in order to beat even the easiest versions of these bosses, participants will have to go through the painstaking process of gathering a ton of resources to craft special ammunition and build defensive structures and turrets.

These turrets are pretty much the only thing that can reliably break a prime war boss’ shield, and a single shot is hilariously expensive. Coupled with how hard it can be to organize complete strangers, these tend to be a complete shitshow. Don’t even get me started on how the game’s servers can barely handle this activity to begin with. Half of the time, prime wars are just an unplayable, laggy mess.

So, “where does the identity crisis part come in?”, you may be wondering. Well, picture this: prime wars are how you can get some of the best mods in the game. If you are trying to min-max your builds, you need to do a lot of these.

Now, if you want to do them, you will need to spend hours doing mundane tasks and crafting in order to get the resources needed to make the special turret ammo and build defensive structures, and that’s just for a single attempt.

With that in mind, you’re essentially spending a ton of time on the least interesting aspect of survival games for a chance to get something useful out of a single boss fight. Got bad RNG? Do it all over again, if you can even organize an entire group to help you.

Like, there has to be a balance here, no? Somebody else put it better than me: “Prime wars feel like you just spent $100 to get $5 in return“. This is supposed to be the endgame activity, but not only is the prep for it insanely slow and daunting, the rewards often feel like a kick in the nuts even if you get mods with god rolls.

I mean, you put in all this effort to min-max your build, but then what? What’s the maxed out build going to be for anyway? More prime wars, where your build hardly matters because the special crafted ammo that has a set damage number is the only important part? Pro difficulty dungeons and bosses, which drop worse stuff than prime wars?

I think you get the point by now. Let’s move on to something a little more fun.

SPEAKING OF BUILDS…

As a survival game, gear isn’t the only thing to talk about when it comes to builds, we got structures too! There really isn’t that much to talk about when it comes to items anyway, as the gear sets are fairly straightforward and the variety mainly just comes from the handful of item keywords and mods that change them.

Anyways, base building is probably one of the few things that this game does right, at least to a certain degree. Barring some jankiness, there is a lot of room for creativity when building stuff in your territory. It’s kinda like Fallout 76, but with a little more freedom in structure placement and a few extra mechanics when it comes to setting up passive resource production and crafting stations.

One minor gripe is that it also borrows the concept of decorations being locked behind recipes or the cash shop. Unless you get lucky with your looting runs or swipe the ol’ debit card, you’re stuck with crafting stations and basic wooden furniture.

I haven’t brought this up yet, but the game also features deviations, which are pretty much just pals from Palworld. They make your base feel alive, as the majority of them just kinda walk around your territory and occasionally do random animations as they passively generate resources.

While I do love messing around with base building in survival games, Once Human’s seasonal system rears its head once more to ruin the fun. Your entire build is going to be meaningless once the last phase of the season is over, because, well, almost everything resets.

Sure, you can save a blueprint of your base, but you’d be rebuilding nothing but a barebones skeleton of your original build unless you wait until the later stages of the new season. Not to mention all the resources you’ll need to gather… again.

IN COMES “ETERNALAND”

If you are more of the creative type, you’re in luck… kinda. See, in between seasons, you can still access a special permanent zone called “Eternaland“. This is pretty much just a glorified “creative mode” zone, but with the really unfortunate twist that you still need to rack up resources to build stuff.

Imagine Minecraft‘s creative mode, except every single block costs a certain amount of special currency to place, and you earn it by selling stuff you gathered from survival mode. That’s essentially what Eternaland is.

Ideally, this would be a place where you can let your imagination run wild and build whatever you want without fear of it getting reset when a new season starts. But for some reason, you still have to work for it through the regular seasonal servers. Everything the game offers so far just feels like a giant time sink with very little payoff.

Another purpose of Eternaland is that this is where most of your stuff is sent after the season ends. Within a certain limit, you can send over a small care package to your character in the next season that mainly consists of stuff you had from the previous one.

Sounds good? Sure, I guess you can bring along some decent tools and maybe bits of gear that you can’t equip until level 40 or above. But again, let’s say that you can bring some of your endgame setup with you, what purpose would it serve?

Like, congratulations, you can clear the same or similar content you were doing last season at maybe a slightly slower pace. Then what? We’re back at the whole prime wars gameplay loop issue again.

JUST AN OVERALL UNSATISFYING GRIND

To sum up the entire Once Human experience, it’s like the game wants you to go on these seemingly excessive grinds just for the sake of grinding. Like, you’re not really participating in the dull gameplay loop for any worthwhile reward or mega rare gear piece. You’re just doing it cause there’s nothing else to do.

Nothing in the game is even inherently challenging. It’s just bullet sponges galore. The “hardest” bit of content excluding prime wars is just a longer dungeon full of generic enemies that are around 10 levels above the maximum your character can reach.

The worst part about the unsatisfying looter shooter style gameplay loop is that you’ll have to deal with survival game mechanics as you do them. I don’t even mean hunger and thirst, I’m talking about weapon durability and ammo crafting. Imagine running dungeons on the highest difficulty and breezing through them, only to be sidetracked ever so often by the need to repair your stuff and/or make bullets from scratch.

That “longer dungeon” I mentioned above? A common complaint is that people have their weapons and armor come close to breaking after the first encounter. The worst part is that the rewards for completing it are a complete joke and worth way less than the resources you’d spend repairing your stuff afterwards. It’s like finishing an entire raid in an MMO and being rewarded with two bear asses and some pocket change.

I’ve already dragged this on for too long, and there’s still a lot to talk about, such as the fact that you need to spend a relatively rare and limited resource to even get any loot from any significant activity. There’s also the completely RNG-dependent character specializations that can alter your overall experience, which I am definitely not a fan of.

I’m gonna end this long-winded review here because I can go on all day with my ranting. The thing is, I want to believe that there is a decent game hiding underneath these confused and conflicting mechanics. In my opinion, Once Human just needs to lean in a little harder on either the looter shooter or the survival game aspect, but definitely not in the middle.

Right now, it’s just hard to recommend Once Human over something like Palworld or Fallout 76. If you’re looking for a looter shooter, Borderlands is right there, or even Warframe and The First Descendant if price is the issue (they’re both free).