Once Human review – mediocre action limits a cracking open world

On the face of it, there’s not much in Once Human that hasn’t been done a thousand times before. Better, too, in some instances. Seemingly the very epitome of design-by-committee, it’s everything you may expect a free-to-play multiplayer open-world survival horror to be, down to its garish shop and two-track battle pass. There’s about eleventy gazillion menus and items to track, your UI is painfully cluttered, and in some places, the game simply feels unfinished; you can’t use a controller for example, and your character seemingly only communicates by waving their arms about wildly, like improv semaphore.

And yet here I am, at 3:30am – that’s real-life time, not the in-game clock, I’m embarrassed to say – creeping around this abandoned hospital because I have just one more crate to find to “complete” the stronghold, and I think there might be a fabulous gun hiding somewhere inside.

Once Human may be a drop in the post-apocalyptic survival games ocean, but it’s an intriguing one. Rather than struggling to survive in a world ravaged by war or plague, we’re fighting to save humanity against the deadly otherworld organism Stardust that turns everyday items into bloodthirsty fiends. The more of the world you explore, the more you’ll find yourself exclaiming, “What the hell is that?!” as an animated satellite dish or drooling suitcase or a bunch of colourful balloons sticking out of where a gorilla’s head should be lurches towards you.

More interestingly still, Stardust doesn’t just magic up things that want to kill you. Other “deviations” become collectible creatures that vary from aggressive butterflies to paper house elves to brooding gingerbread houses. Your job as a meta-human – which apparently just means you’re mute and walk around the world with a Death Stranding-esque backpack strapped to you – is to rid the world of the former, and collect the latter. You know. Like Pokémon. Pokémon you store proudly in little glass display cases in your home.

If that all sounds a bit SCP Foundation-y, that’s because it is. Once Human’s inspirations here are very apparent, from its sprawling Far Cry world, Rust survival gameplay, and the Elden Ring-esque player messaging system that only really excels in getting in your way (you know when someone leaves a note in Elden Ring at the bottom of a ladder, preventing you from climbing it? Yeah. That). It never gets old, though, gently chugging alongside a sun-dappled river, watching the fawns frolic as a clumsy eight-legged bus scuttles towards you.

The combat itself? Meh. I’ve had better. At first, the game is criminally easy, leaving you feeling grossly overpowered as you hack through hordes of aliens or snarling suitcases. Enemies are, for the most part, slow and stupid, although I’ll admit my first encounter with a human foe pulled me briefly out of my comfort zone. I currently have around 35 hours in the game and I’ve yet to die, so make of that what you will.

The challenge ramps up a little about halfway through, but even then, boss fights don’t feel hard as much as they feel tanky. My brother and I went into the Level 20 dungeon to take on “Treant” over-levelled and with over a thousand bullets each, but we’d barely dented his health bar before we exhausted our supplies. This meant we had to finish up the fight under the creature’s legs, battering its ankles with machetes. I think it gave up and died from boredom. Christ knows I almost did.

And it’s too much at times. There are too many items to collect, too many skill trees, too many menus, too many things to unlock, too many resources, too many icons flashing angrily in your face. If I covered every one of the million things your character has to unlock or understand, you’d still be reading this on Christmas morning. It’s interesting, then, that I’ve managed to level up my character, weapons, deviations, and home base just fine without knowing what half the things in my backpack do. It’s less interesting, though, that I spend more time grappling with my backpack than anything else, endlessly moving things into different crates and storage devices to lessen my load enough so at least my character can run. Oh, and forging ingot. My God, the time I’ve wasted huddled over my furnace.

It’s thanks to that furnace, though – not to mention the myriad of crafting benches and resource management tools you’ll unlock early on – that you’ll not only get to forge assault rifles with barely more than a blueprint and an empty toilet roll, but you can also enhance them, mod them, select different ammo, and do a whole number of things to keep fighting feeling fresh. Again, it’s a lot – there’s so much I still don’t understand, not least why I can repair the weapons I create but not the weapons I find – but at least Once Human’s over-forgiving combat gives you plenty of time and space to experiment.

Its survival elements, too, are gloriously forgiving, and I say this as someone who struggles to find enjoyment in stopping for a sandwich halfway through a frantic boss battle. Once Human has masterfully balanced the need to survive with the need to keep things fun. There’s a sanity system, yes, and the requisite skills and cooking recipes to learn, but even building your base is thrilling and accessible in all the right ways. As someone with neither the patience nor the imagination to build great gothic structures or glass-walled cathedrals, it’s kind of surprising how much I’ve enjoyed building my own base and being inspired by those of others (even if the build UI is monstrously finickity and difficult to master).

Developer Starry Studio has even mitigated frustrations with getting around the vast world, too. Whilst there’s no instant fast travel system per se, you can unlock teleportation towers, and there’s plenty of them around to make it easier to get about. You also unlock the world’s wobbliest motorbike early on, too, which makes exploring exponentially quicker (just remember to take spare fuel with you). Later, you and a pal will be able to jump in a jeep to go exploring, too. Meta-humans are also blessed with a second-sight-esque power that enables you to see collectibles and places of interest in the local environment.

But it’s Once Human’s living, breathing, dynamic world that’s undoubtedly its biggest draw. While it’s true that, if it’s a popular server, the environs can be horribly overcrowded by other players’ bases and temporary camps (especially at strongholds you’re forced to camp at), there’s something remarkably satisfying about watching the landscape around you change as other players unlock new skills and building materials. As you grow, so too does the world around you, and the more you’ll uncover of Once Human’s secrets, from the crates secreted in rocks, to PvE public events, PvP modes, to what’s waiting for you in the belly of that walking bus…

Because that’s where the magic is. Exploring and adventuring and indulging your curiosity, scouting across the mountains and the beaches and all the bits in between. Yes, there are monsters, but there are also deer and crocodiles, too, and plenty of resources to discover. No, the wilderness isn’t quite as lively as those you’d find in a Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed game, admittedly, but I don’t begrudge that. There are so many crops to find and seeds to sow and resources to harvest that you can lose an entire night without going anywhere near the main campaign – in fact, I have lost an entire night without going anywhere near the main campaign. I don’t know if I’m suddenly a survival game convert or if there’s just something special about Once Human, but it’s a testament to this comfortingly cyclical gameplay that I’m in no rush at all. (Which is very unlike me, too.)

And perhaps most surprising of all? It’s free. And I do mean free. I mention that not because any game is inherently better or worse because of its price point, but because it’s so strikingly unusual these days to see free-to-play done well, especially when it comes to live service games. Of course, the value of a game can never be determined by its upfront price and yes, Once Human is indeed stuffed with cosmetics and microtransactions. But crucially, nothing you can buy with the game’s bewildering assortment of currencies is pay-to-win. There are no loot boxes or “helpful” time savers, or any of the usual nefarious methods we so often see used to funnel players down a path that ends with you forking out money. You don’t have to bypass page after page of up-sell efforts just to get into the game. It’ll be interesting to see if Starry Studio and NetEase’s position changes in the weeks and months to come.

Surprised? Me, too. Not for one moment did I expect a F2P live service offering to be anything other than an unmitigated slog stuffed with the pitfalls and unforced errors of every other game I started and stopped playing, so wildly over-saturated is this genre. But here I am, late at night again, fashioning myself a Slippery When Wet sign to put beside my water tank.

Eurogamer sourced its own copy of Once Human for this review.