Once Human

“The story is a nonsensical, garbled, disjointed mess.”

“It was so bad I googled it and turns out the devs recently changed a logical, reasonable and well thought out story and just replaced the beginning of it with something that makes zero sense without even tying it into the rest of the quests or progression, resulting in this idiotic abomination that I had the misfortune of experiencing.”

“Trying to follow the main storyline is a mess; it's the same NPCs carbon-copied at every town, the quests start pushing you into areas that you cannot actually spend time in due to 'pollution', and some of the crafted gear required to go to polluted areas you are nowhere near obtaining without hours and hours of farming and leveling up your workbenches, gathering tools, trying to get that last ingredient... while there is little to no in-game explanation on how to achieve any of this besides asking in chat.”

“Aesthetically, the ugliest game I've ever played, between Nintendo DS, mobile...”

“The tutorial is awful, the graphics are 12 years out of date, the monetization is obnoxious and irritating, the server system is a confusing mess of nonsense that is impossible to parse for a new player.”

“The cutscenes and music are really high quality, but the game graphics itself is very 2016-ish; I don't know how this got released in 2024, pretty disappointing.”

“It's a shame they decided to full-on shoot themselves in the foot, ruining an ambitious, post-apocalyptic open world shooter with an interesting premise, a huge map, beautiful graphics, nice controls, tons of customizable weapons, vehicles, skills, tames, dungeons, events, challenges, bosses, farming, fishing, and even building in your own private pocket dimension.”

“Trying to follow the main storyline is a mess, it's the same NPCs carbon-copied at every town, the quests start pushing you into areas that you cannot actually spend time in due to "pollution", and some of the crafted gear required to go to polluted areas you are nowhere near obtaining without hours and hours of farming and leveling up your workbenches, gathering tools, trying to get that last ingredient, while there is little to no in-game explanation on how to achieve any of this besides asking in chat.”

“Players spend weeks grinding and collecting items, only for the server to reset and cause most of their hard work to be lost.”

“The idea of the game is amazing, the combat, build system, everything but it is horribly optimized. I have seen games by indie companies or even solo devs do a much better job at that than this company.”

“If you have a powerful machine (4080 super 7900x3d) the stuttering in this game is awful (Linux isn't the problem as numerous people have the same issues on Windows).”

“Game is horrifically optimized which is ultimately why I cannot recommend it.”

“Game freezes and crashes my PC; despite high-end hardware, it is unplayable.”

“Way too many glitches and crashes; my character freezes every five minutes, and reconnecting crashes my whole computer.”

“Every time I try to load the game, it freezes at 100% and is stuck on the loading screen.”

“Horrible RNG on purpose, basically a cash grab, worst gacha system ever.”

“Once human is so unbelievably blindingly generic and middling it circles back around to being frankly offensive that coupled with an frankly egregious amount of monetization and a poor co-op experience means that I cannot possibly imagine why anyone would want to play this.”

“After putting in 350 hours I realize that this is one of the cash grabbiest games I have ever played... all new weekly content is locked behind loot boxes and gambling mechanics that cost hundreds to open just to get repeats, super reliant on FOMO practices to keep you spending.”

“Almost all the action takes place in such a dark atmosphere, you can't see any detail... just darkness... you get a 34 inch monitor to play in a circle from the flashlight, the rest of the screen being almost black.”

“The game nails the eerie, Lovecraftian horror atmosphere… and then throws in completely absurd skins that ruin immersion.”

“The world also feels cluttered with unfinished, abandoned houses, taking away from the intended horror and survival atmosphere.”

“The in-game music is terrible, and the gameplay is shallow and repetitive.”

“Unfortunately, the production of the game does not show much interest in renewing the story and creating scenarios but in selling consumables, skins, etc. Another bad thing is the music of the game, which remains the same from the beginning and does not give you the opportunity to put your own, but you are forced to listen to the same Korean shame for 450 days that I have been playing the game.”

“The only good thing about this game ends at the point where you name your character and the music, because the only artistic thing about this game is the music and the VFX, otherwise... meh... the shooter deforms the character, if you don't mind those things.”

“This game is so bad it's not funny.”

“It is as if the dev was not sure what sort of game they wanted to make. It's lucky this game was free; there are so many simple small things wrong with this game it's not funny.”

“Resource gathering becomes a cakewalk and more of just a time sink than others. Then you have the acid problem; late game needs so much acid for crafting it's not funny.”

“The game has a good idea but fails in almost every aspect. Boring story, easiest early game I've ever played, everything worthwhile is time gated.”

“From the horrible optimization that causes the game to not properly load in enemies and areas for minutes at a time (while said invisible enemies are attacking you), to game-breaking bugs, to boring story, to voice deliveries that sound like they got random people to read lines instead of actual voice actors, this game has nothing to give you.”

“First you have a kinda sad tutorial area where the game is set on a linear path, but nothing fancy actually happens there, just a really boring story that is all over the place - you meet the aliens, there is a random anime girl, you shoot the aliens, you get to a random anime girl's house, and collect wood and stone, then a 50 meters high alien pole thing spawns and you defeat it by shooting in its head (which is a meta satellite dish) with a crossbow.”

“Takes roughly 2-3 years to add content with any level of replayability at all.”

“Once you play through the PvE content, there is no replayability.”

“The core gameplay remains lifeless and devoid of replayability.”

“The character design feels like it was bought from an asset pack in Blender Market, because all characters feel randomly generated and placed as main NPCs. Character design was given zero attention by the developers; it's just there "to be there."”

“The plot can feel disjointed and the character development is minimal, which makes it hard to become fully invested in the world.”

“The story, animations, and character design leave something to be desired.”