Once Human

[h2]Great base building, but the survival grind will test your actual sanity.[/h2] If you are looking for an open-world survival shooter to play with a small group of friends, Once Human has some surprisingly solid bones. However, it also makes a few design choices that feel like they actively want to disrespect your time. [h3]The Good[/h3] (Why we stuck around): [list] [*] Snappy Combat: The controls and aiming feel incredibly responsive. [*] Top-Tier Base Building: If you enjoyed Fallout 76's camp system, you'll feel right at home here. The absolute best feature? You can freely move objects around your base after placing them. It's a game-changer for builders. [*] Server Costs: At the time of playing, I was able to rent a custom 4-player server for under $3 a month. It is hard to beat that value for a private co-op experience. [*] Progression: The leveling and tech tree are well-paced and satisfying. [/list] [h3]The Bad[/h3] (Why it gets frustrating): [list] [*] The "Sanity" Mechanic: This is just a dumb mechanic. It adds unnecessary frustration, traps you in miserable death loops, and causes excessive damage to your gear. It is the opposite of fun. [*] The Survival Tedium: Food and water drain way too fast. Combine that with punishing gear durability, and you are forced into a constant loot-farming loop just to keep your equipment repaired. [*] Missing Basics: We have this great building system, but there are no ramps in the building menu? Make it make sense. [*] Narrative & UI Flaws: The story and characters are very "meh." Voice acting is limited, and for the unvoiced missions, the text flies by so fast you literally cannot read it. Also, quest levels are frequently mismatched with the level of the area they are in. [*] Absurd Microtransactions: Cosmetics are entirely too expensive. I am not paying $40+ for a cosmetic base set when I can spend $20 on a complete indie game that includes far more building parts right out of the box. [/list] [h3]Final Verdict:[/h3] It is a mixed bag. The gunplay and base building are genuinely fun, especially on a cheap private server with friends. But be prepared to fight against tedious survival meters, annoying sanity mechanics, and an overpriced cash shop.

Still as much fun as it ever was!

I have mixed feelings about this game. You have the foundation of an interesting game, but the loss of identity that comes with the direction it took. This game is celebrating its 2 year anniversary and I just couldn't place what it was that was bothering me so much as a newer player. But I have come to my answer: Loss of Identity & MTX over function So the game you expect to see is this interesting creepy horror-themed shooter. What you don't expect to see is how...anime everything gets. It abandons groundedness very quickly in favor of pretty colors and goofy little guys. One second, your shooting weird TV head monstrosities and zombies. The next, your collecting your stuffed beaver toy that is alive and gets wood for you. Which sounds fine, til you realize the art style goes from 'reality' to 'cartoony' very jarringly. If the lil' guys you collect could be found roaming around in the polluted abandoned factories that are covered in black ooze, blood, gore, and etc you would see: A gnome sized Ginger Bread guy cleaning up with their licorice broom or a 7 foot stuffed dinosaur plushy cooking a steak in the local dilapitated cafe. TL'DR: Everything is gritty and nightmarish til you find your first metal boy or plump mushroom man in a completely different art style. My second issue is, well, turns out this game is also an extremely predatory gacha game. Now obviously with hindsight, this is a NetEase title. So don't think I need to expand too much on what that ends up bringing to the table. The map of this game looks enormous, til you realize that almost every single asset in the game is copy pasta. This game is extremely empty, and sure its one thing at launch, but were talking two years down the road and they've got some wild overlooked bugs and lack of map features. Every mob has either one skin or a maximum of 4, every location has a building in it you can find in every other location, the game feels jank as hell with some weird clipping or half-assed clamber system. It draws you in with the tutorial, and the first Monolith area, after that however it devolves into copy paste with larger health pools. Now, I can see someone saying 'Well maybe they don't make that much money' and I would retaliate with 'They have an anniversary perk (until the 2 week event ends) right now where if you spend over $700 USD you can get a special frame for your profile picture.' and one stop at the official Reddit quickly tells you there ABSOLUTELY are people spending that. There is absolutely no way to earn in game currency for the big ticket cosmetics, and there is also no way to get the big ticket items without the game currency. Oh, and to go back to having lost their visual identity, absolutely nothing in the shop looks like it belongs in the world that is advertised. TL'DR: This is a NetEase Gacha game that does not respect you, which to be fair is a redundant statement anyways. So...yea. Big bummer, was willing to try it out for the first person mode. I got my fun out of it, but I reached a point where I just couldn't justify wasting my time on it anymore. Maybe if the story was remotely interesting I could have been retained as a player, but the story is so generic I can't really be bothered. If you've ever heard of, watched, read, or listened to an Anime/Manga that has a 'dark theme', well you've already got the story for this game too.

优化烂1080全低40fps并且挂多的要死比apex都离谱

It became repetitive very quickly. I regret spending money on it.

Based on the many hours I spent on this game, clearly there were some positive experiences. Most of it spent during launch. The game have great potential, ability to hook players and decent, considering its free to play without P2W. However, Its been stagnant for awhile now, without any meaningful new material and with confusing new mechanics, putting the old players at great disadvantage. Today, I wanted to go back into the game after seeing the positive reviews that showcase massive improvement as it was under 'mostly positive' and today turned to 'very positive'. As I was going through the new reviews, weirdly enough the majority posted from today or yesterday. While there is literally no new content for sometime now, not even recent. The reviews also sound vague and awfully short as if those are from paid compensated review, I wont be surprised if there is an on going in game reward for leaving positive rating. It is dissapointing that the studio rather be lying to people than releasing new content, new part of the map. Assuming this is to hype up the soon to be released console materials. Ultimately, its the server wipe mechanics that leave the game repetitive, low populated servers, as we have wipe, permanent, different themed servers that each also divided into wipe and non wipe. Those old players still playing merely due to the high cosmetics investment in this game as they are super expensive. Hence, I feel the need to drop a real player perspective that have over 800hrs in game experience. I hope the game can be improved in the near future.

2 hours in and still couldn't figure out how to switch servers to play with a friend. This is the dumbest matchmaking system I have ever seen on a game.