I am really trying to get into a groove with Once Human because there’s a lot to like here. The exploration. The setting. The atmosphere. The building and crafting. The way Once Human does these things speaks to me, you know, but then it goes and buries them all beneath layers and layers of substrate.

The first gripe is the settlements-per-square-inch issue. As you can imagine, if you land on a pristine server you will have your pick of excellent places to build your settlement, like in a resource rich area. Soon others will arrive, though, and box you in so now no one can expand their territory. Eventually, the entire server will be filled, making the act of moving your plot elsewhere a non-issue. At some point, there ends up being more player plots than explorable zones, and whatever carefully cultivated survial horror atmosphere that NetEase was aiming for and had spent a lot of time crafting, no doubt, goes out the window.

My second gripe is with the layers of “click button, get gifts” that is, it seems, the hallmark of Eastern games. This is not how we do it in the West, but because of the success of other games like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, et al., we’re coming around. Still, there are so many different “bins” within Once Human that it’s almost like the survival-shooter aspect was tacked on to the collection minigames. There’s gifts for doing things we’d do anyway, like building things (every craftable item seems to have an achievement award when built). There’s the in-game mission rewards, which we also expect. Then there’s milestone rewards, seasonal rewards, rewards for joining their Discord, for inviting a friend, for grouping up with people and exchanging special codes. Of course there’s a cash shop as well, so now we’re bringing real world money into the mix along side several different in-game currencies that are awarded like someone got a trailer full of them at a fire sale and can’t hold on to them any more, but I’ll be damned if I have found where I can spend them.

That’s the third gripe: knowledge. The game starts with discreet missions to build a base, craft a smelter, make a copper pick, and so on. What it doesn’t tell us are the things we would find useful in the course of playing the game proper. All of that is relegated to an online “survival manual” that adds entries when we encounter things in the world. I was getting gear mods through exploration, apparently, but I didn’t know it until I did a deep-dive into my inventory, and then had to click around to find out how to use them. Rather than telling us to craft a new home item every time we complete building the last one, why not use the tutorial powers towards helping players understand the game?

Yeah, maybe it’s just me, being old, but I’m really annoyed because I want to play the game not be forced to read an online manual for basic gameplay mechanics, and I sure as hell do not want to have to watch community-created YouTube videos to explain what the game designers don’t. I’ve been playing these games for decades now, and I quickly got the hang of, you know, the actual game, but why is the lion’s share of Once Human broken out into and hidden behind a dozen different screens with just buttons to click for vague and unexplained “rewards”? The game is better than that.