Once Human review: Slick survival sim is worth your time

When it comes to crafting and survival games, it’d be fair to say we’ve seen pretty much every type. We’ve seen the Pokemon-alike Palworld, dinosaur-riding Ark, and sci-fi No Man’s Sky.

Perhaps it’s smart then that Once Human offers variations on a theme, rather than setting course for anything already charted by its contemporaries, then leans into it with a polished gameplay loop that’s constantly moreish, even in its slower moments.

The Last of Bus

Once Human arguably starts off a little too rote - players create their character, a metahuman, and they’re brought back to consciousness during an attack on a laboratory that serves as a whistle-stop tutorial.

It’s not wholly original; shades of red thrown against surgical white corridors has been done to death, really, but things take a turn when you stealth kill your first enemy. The mechanics are nothing unlike you’d see anywhere else, but the enemy itself is… a floodlight.

Once Human’s greatest trump card is that many of its enemies are based on inanimate objects brought to life by an organism called Stardust. Within 15 minutes, you’re tackling a Siren, a huge creature with a satellite dish for a head, and it never really lets up from there.

That, combined with the less-than-subtle otherworldly red filter on the skybox makes everything feel a little like Stranger Things meets bizarro Prop Hunt. By the time you’ve spent a few hours in its constantly evolving world, you’ll feel strangely nonchalant about a school bus with insectoid legs just over the next hill.

Making friends at the end of the world

Aside from the setting and enemies, however, Once Human feels very much like any other survival title from the last decade, albeit with much more polish.

In my time, I didn’t experience any major technical issues or bugs, and the gamer’s UI, while often cluttered, becomes second nature within a short timeframe. In fact, I’d say the ‘Journey’ objectives that gently guide you along are genuinely some of the more helpful ones I’ve seen in a crafting title like this.

Having food and hydration items on your hot bar makes consuming those a breeze, and I’m already impressed by how helpful the community is. That includes the Soulslike notes that players can leave for each other - I’ve definitely found a few more item chests than I would have without them.

Other players aren’t your only allies, though. Deviations are similar to Pokemon, able to be snapped up when the moment arises (complete with a capture percentage). They run the gamut from the earliest butterfly that deals surprising damage, creatures that morph into cover or help you accumulate resources in your base, to Deviation-adjacent mechanics like using a bird as a glider to get down from high spots on the map.

It’s not as crucial as it is in Palworld, but it certainly adds an extra layer of whimsy to an affair that could otherwise have felt a little dour.

Feels right

What really kept pulling me through my time with Once Human was its stellar loop of hunting, gathering, and crafting new things to hunt and gather with.

It’s nothing new to the genre (or any other genre) but here it feels pitch-perfect. Just as I started to get tired, I found another objective I could tick off and a new weapon or gear item to craft that had me frantically clicking away until the small hours.

The best part is that none of this requires you to spend all that much time scouring the map for resources. Within twenty minutes of starting the game I had a crossbow that could dish out immensely satisfying headshots, and even after I got my first pistol I still found myself returning to it occasionally just for fun. 

Fast travel options are plentiful and it doesn’t take long to get a motorcycle, and that removes much of the open-world tedium you’d otherwise experience.

Searching for a place to call home

One of my biggest issues with spending any time in a survival title such as this is that there’s no real permanence to anything you do, and there will always be some kind of server wipe or event that seemingly sends you back to the start.

While you’ll have to start fresh if you want to play with a friend on another server, and that can be frustrating if you’re squadding up, Once Human remains fairly flexible - even for those that can’t devote dozens of hours a week to it.

It’s fun to experiment with building your homestead, and the construction system is relatively simple but effective. Your home can be turned into a blueprint to place it somewhere else, which means once the server is wiped, you can drop your home just about anywhere and work to pick up from the same point.

Eternaland is unlocked late in the game and offers a nice low-stakes area you can build in, and you won’t lose it after a server wipe, either.

The Verdict

Once Human might be the first crafting game I find myself coming back to regularly thanks to solid combat fundamentals, a perfectly-tuned crafting loop, and a level of polish that’s often all too rare in the genre.

4/5

Reviewed on PC. Review access provided by the publisher.