300+ Hours

6.5/10

Once Human offers a deeply atmospheric survival experience set in a haunting post-apocalyptic world. However, despite its strong start, the game struggles to maintain engagement in the long run. Here’s what stands out and where it falters:


Immersive World-building: The game’s dark, dystopian world filled with mutated creatures and creepy locations makes exploration engaging and tense. Its atmosphere is one of Once Human’s strongest points.

Combat Flexibility & Build Variety: Players can customize their combat experience through a variety of weapon mods and gear. Whether you prefer long-range sniping, explosives, or close-combat builds, the game offers enough flexibility to experiment with playstyles.

Prime Wars & Raids: Late-game activities like Prime Wars and raids allow you to test your builds in challenging scenarios. While these add some replayability, they quickly devolve into resource management rather than offering new challenges.


Shallow Endgame Content: Much of the endgame revolves around farming mods with perfect stats, which can be repetitive and unrewarding. Players are left grinding the same content, hoping for the right drop, which feels more tedious than engaging.

Time-Gated Progression: The game enforces a weekly cap on important resources like Starchrom, artificially stretching out gameplay and turning what could be a smooth experience into a slow grind. Players feel that the developers designed the game to stretch out progression by forcing players to wait for new seasons or updates. Instead of offering fresh, engaging content, Once Human relies on time-gated resources like Starchrom and controller currency, creating unnecessary barriers.

Grindy Resource Farming: Beyond mod farming, grinding for resources like ammo and repair materials is necessary to continue participating in Prime Wars and other high-end activities. While some may enjoy the grind, it quickly becomes a chore, especially as content plateaus with little variation

Limited Exploration After Max Level: Once you unlock most areas, the map feels relatively small. There’s little to explore after completing the main regions, leaving players with less motivation to venture back into the world​.

Seasonal Wipes: Every six weeks, the seasonal wipe system resets key progress, forcing players to replay the main and side missions. Although some items and upgrades carry over, having to redo missions after each wipe becomes tedious and discouraging for long-term players.

Lack of Optimization & Building System Issues: Since Once Human is still relatively new, it suffers from poor optimization. The game is buggy and experiences frequent lag, even when players lower their graphics settings. Additionally, the building system feels unrefined; placing certain structures and items can be a hit or miss, as the placement mechanics feel unhinged and often unintuitive. It definitely needs improvement to make base-building feel more satisfying and less frustrating during the gameplay.


Once Human has potential, with its strong atmosphere and flexible combat systems, but its lack of meaningful endgame content, grind-heavy progression, and frustrating seasonal wipes make it difficult to stay invested. Combined with poor optimization and performance issues, the overall experience feels incomplete. It’s not perfect, as most things aren’t, but it is well enough to play for how it is.

Surely there are other issues that I may be unaware of or know of but forgot to mention, but these are the highlights of what I’ve experienced over the course of 300+ hours. If you enjoy survival MMOs, give it a try—but be prepared for some frustrations as you reach the later stages of the game.

Pros:
-The world and atmosphere are amazing.
-Combat is enjoyable.
-The building is nice and the fact you can relocate your base soo easily is also a big thumbs up.

Cons:
-The enemies are not a threat, it's embarrassing how easy and boring they are.
-Building can be frustrating at times.
-Grindy and time-gated.
-A season wipe? Who thought this was a good idea?

im going to be honest here i enjoy the game.... until i get to the building aspect. ive played alot of survival games where you build and the building in this game is horrible. something as simple as placing a roof should not require me to fight with the build piece every single time i attempt to place it. it will snap anywhere but where i want it to go, i disable grid snap and it still uses grid snap. im love to build in survival games so im just gonna westle with it but i have to say i am hopeful for some tweaks in the future, other than that the game is great! especially with friends it can feel a little linear at times but im still in early game. one world solo and one with a friend.