Once Human

It's not to bad, Combat is a bit basic but exploration and buildings is pretty top notch

BUT PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOOD REMOVE SOME MENU's - As it stands you have 8 menu's for rewards/journeys, some of which have 2-4 sub menu's. That's around 18 menu's constantly flashing telling you to go into them for various rewards and progression. This seems to be a problem I've found with every single Asian MMO I've ever played.

Cant believe this is FTP, usually those games force you into a spend loop that bleeds you dry, this is just cosmetics. I would have been happy paying 40$ for this title. Still havent spent anything on this game and really feel I should buy something just to pay them back for all the hours of enjoyment I got out of it.

I have a few hundred hours from the betas and the discord people know me as the person that has a lot of negative things to say about the game.
Saying that... the game is pretty fun. If you arnt a rust player expecting rust... its great. Its kinda like the division, its kind of like rust with building and what not. Its got really cool looking monsters and progression feels fluid and fun, if you like survival/crafting/collecting/etc kind of games.
Its not super hard core, they have to go by chinese game laws which means no forced pvp. PvP servers feel more engaging, at least they did in beta. Accessing more of the map now may yield different results.
The big negatives you see are from people not reading before doing anything. They created a character on any random server, they miffed their character creation just to rush in... and then realized they couldnt have a character on another server, when they likely had a friend do the same thing and didnt coordinate with each other first.
It will be a while before we can make new characters. IDK why, i think its dumb... but its not worth review bombing over. There are other reasons that i would think might be logical to write negative reviews, but idk if they fixed a lot of that from beta.
Dont let the mostly negative get you down. Its not pay to win, its cosmetic only. Its got some bugs, but its not terrible. I feels good to play. Check it out, try it for yourself. Its free...

If you scroll after serious reviews, this is another one of those.
Recommended: I would recommend this game for people who want to enjoy a journey, not a sweat-fest because there's not enough content for it yet. The race for season 6 does not exist, there's just a continuous multi-season exploration.
This is why:
-Max level is 50 (you can reach it in 3 weeks out of the 6 total before the game reverts back to stage one while keeping everything important that you farmed for in the first run, if you play casually and if you spend at least 8 hours every day playing it)
-Tech tree is relatively cheap because every week there are challenges and commissions which boost you. This means if you have knowledge of the game, you can reach the high-end tech in less than a week or two (I'm side-eyeing the crafting-gear tabs).
- Grinding is super easy. You start with a multipurpose axe, followed immediately by electric tools that immediately cut everything giving you the full yield in the 0.5 seconds it takes to gather. (for referrence 1k of one type of resource will last for 2-3 days (1 or less in the case of tungsten or aluminium), and you can make 1k of each resource with the electric tools in less than 20 minutes).
- It is easy to farm. If you think of dungeons (monoliths) and mini-bosses (silos) and extra-mini bosses (elite units)...they are semi-balanced, and guarantee what it says they drop in at least 6 runs. And if you want the best gun parts like optics or magazine...they are one simple puzzle away that takes maybe 5 minutes to get there and 1 minute to do what is necessary. Puzzles are unique and fun, sometimes as simple as shooting balloons or posing for a picture.
Now an intro to the game:
You can shoot in 3rd person and in 1st person. Most enemies are slow and easy to take out until mid-late game. It is also both PVE and PVP based on preference.
You can build a house anywhere, edit it personally or in edit mode and transport it fully built to any other desired location. Houses can be: nomadic (truck-van), base (fortress looking with guns), modern, basic or castle (yes you can build a mini castle). And where you settle...matters. Every area (3 main based on difficulty with a total of 6 regions) has resources based on the necessity of each difficulty. Some areas have petrol (black ground) that can produce oil for cars, jeeps, trucks and bikes (the only transportation so far) or running rivers, pollution or waterfalls for electricity. The most resourceful are usually occupied by tryhards while most beautiful and unusual by casuals. In terms of variety you have mountains, beaches, islands, mainland, desert, jungle, swamps and valleys.
Are you a hoarder? Great, grab everything, dismantle, and be amazed at how you will always have everything you need.
You have a tech tree to unlock different building necessities, gear, munitions, farming, weapon tiers, electric panels and wires, tools and even the gatcha that people talk about. The farming can be done in boxes or naturally on the ground in soil (that you also have to craft). It requires light, irrigation and fertilizer. This is pretty complex at first or it might seem intimidating but the further down the tech tree, the easier and better to care for crops is.
Weapons and gear are of 2 types: obtained from drops and crafted. What's dropped you have to disassemble, what's crafted is what you invest in.
The only thing worth investing in is the battlepass, as it isn't as reapy as the others, all you lose are cosmetics if you don't pay the monthly 10$ for each battlepass.
Character customization is not as impactful because the fashion of the gear and mask cover most of the character.
In terms of story-line, 99% is skipable but the environment tells more about the story and what happened than anything.
There are familiars that you can own to farm for you resources or crops or animals while offline or online or even to use in combat.
They can range from a bowl, to an onion bulb, a teddy bear, cats, baloon dogs, dolls, maidens, fairies, black holes, energy orbs, to secret agent looking bunnies who kill around for fun to get you food.
Another major turn-off, aside from how horrible it is to build up-hill or down-hill, is the trade system. The price is up to you, there's no global market nor need to trade due to the early energy links from rewards and late crafting and farming that can get you to 240k Energy Links a week. The in-game currencies are starchrom (gatcha, buying blueprints and house cosmetics from shop), energy links (teleport, crafting, tech tree, upgrading), stelar planula (special shop stuff), cosmetic tokens (certain cosmetic shop stuff), crystigin (in-game real money for general shop purchase) and mitsuko marks (other special shop stuff).
Trading is mostly with strangers (it can be done socially or introvertly through vending machines). Between friends, you can share everything and even in crafting, you don't need to sit with items in your inventory, everything that sits in your territory's chests, can be used from any position and bench and person that you allowed.
The gatcha DOES NOT use real-life currency, it uses a rarer in-game currency. And if you do not like gatcha, you still have to / opt to build it for blueprint shop which can give you directly the blueprints for the legendary gear and weapons you desire.
This is literally everything important that you need to know about the game before you try it. It's not perfect surely, IT STILL has many bugs from territory to bosses missing, But their team as I've seen is very dedicated, they give rewards each time they fuck up, communication is great between them and the community and the players are super-friendly at least in my world (there's a world and server system).
The rest I leave up to you to explore to decide if it's what you desire to play or not. For me, they did what million dollar companies never did and for a free to play game, it gives way more quality than others that I paid 60$ for.

A very mediocre thumbs up.
The game is free and worth the price. There is no Play to Win. The cosmetics you can buy are terribly overpriced, but some of them are nice enough that I threw a AAA-game's price tag worth of money at it. And I enjoyed what I got.
The promotional video pretty much shows all the best parts. Instead of a truly bizarre world with a fantastic apocalypse, we get a reskinned, low-grade zombie apocalypse with a handful of truly wonderful monsters. The open world is vast. The building system is serviceable. It scratches that Open World Survival Crafting itch.
But the game is shallow. It is another MMORPG that counts on the multiplayer experience to make up for how cursory everything is. The missions are boring. The lore is bland. There is no "Ultimate Truth" worth uncovering because the story isn't deep enough for that. The fact that the last story missions require four-man teams is telling.
Couple this with a menu system that is hard to navigate and a lack of explanation as to how a lot of things work (along either bad translations or initial bad writing for what exists). The game is not something I would actively recommend, but also not something I would steer people away from.
Because even with its downsides, I can enjoy cruising around on my motorcycle (which you can get quite early and upgrade the quality of several times) through a somber and beautiful landscape. Dotted with uninspired but graphically solid ruins tended by loitering corpse-monsters. I can run around looting areas, come home, and break down the trash I have picked up for useful parts that fill my storage chests until I have use for them. And I can enjoy my player home (especially thanks to a few purchases).
And when I'm bored but don't have the energy to do anything productive, that's not a bad way to waste my time.

As someone who's put nearly 200 hours across the betas and tests. There's a severe abundance of misinformation being spread about the game so let's hit all the main points quickly, shall we?
- Within hours of launch, the team fixed the ability to create characters on other servers
- The terms of service and privacy policy issue: one guy read it and everyone else is vomiting that information based on that person's findings. These terms are no different from the majority of other modern games you accept today.
- The gacha "Wish Machine" is used to unlock blueprints of some powerful weapons and it is a gamble. THE ONLY TWO WAYS of receiving this currency is playing the game, and available in the FREE battle pass tiers. There's literally no way to exchange real money for this currency. You have to earn it.
- Spyware/cryptominer claims is just baffling
If you dislike the game because you don't find it fun, having performance issues, or connection problems. Then those are some valid reasons to dislike the game.
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A bit of an actual review of the game now
The game is mindless fun.
It's not a masterpiece by any means. The combat is slightly janky, and not very challenging. Base building has some slight jank to it. The enemies aren't very engaging most of the time.
But damn the game is fun
If you're looking for something you can turn your brain off to and not need to try very hard but you're looking for a sense of solid, consistent progression, you should give this game a try.
One thing I will glorify the game for however. Is the ability to craft from storage containers in your base. When you enter any building menu (base build menu, furnace, weapon workbench, etc.) it will automatically pull resources from all storage crates you have in your territory. No more forgetting where you put those copper bars, or metal scrap. It's all accessible to you at any time.
The game also does a really good job at drip feeding you enjoyable content. You play a little bit and get tired of running everywhere, hey here's a quest to unlock a motorcycle and fast travel. Getting tired of collecting wood for charcoal? Here's how to setup electricity and eliminate your need for charcoal for furnaces. You've been doing a lot of looting but want to spend a little more time in your base, here's a new system that you have to build defenses and waves of enemies try attacking your base for some nice rewards. Tired of collecting wood and ore and just want to shoot stuff? Here's how to unlock an auto logger and auto miner that will passively gather things for you while you're off exploring.
This is one of those things that gives me hope for the future of this game. There's a lot of attention to detail and innovative stuff when it comes to core survival game systems that we've seen unchanged for so many years.
The one criticism I've been seeing pop is the seasonal reset stuff. If that's a turn off for you that's totally fine, it's not for everyone. But people thinking it's the end of the world need to relax a little. Rust does this every month, and that game came out 10 years ago. But it still consistently remains in the top 10 most active players on Steam to this day. The devs have said for this game you'll keep your blueprints on reset, which is arguably way more time and effort to farm than chopping some trees and hitting some rocks to make the weapons/armor. On season resets your materials (wood, ores, etc.) will be moved to this thing called "Eternaland" which is basically a big private oasis you can invite friends that's separate from the main game. Personal player housing that won't reset.
Personally I'm using this two month period as a trial run. How bad will I feel during next reset when stuff gets wiped. Will I still be motivated to play? We'll find out in two months.
The combat isn't difficult, there can be some downtime, but damn the game is fun.
It's free, just try it and decide for yourself. Stop reading reviews. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't, and that's okay <3

All the reviews complaining about TOS either can't read or are copy pasting takes from people who can't read.
Game has nearly every single quality of life enhancement I can think of. Long range looting so you don't have to be super precise with your scavenging of POI's, creative flight with base building, crafting from base storage, automated gathering, inventory sorting and auto stacking, almost 0 food/hunger drain at your base.
The game incentivises you to completely loot POI's by giving you a list of all the important boxes and checks them off as you loot them, as well as giving you a reward for 100%ing them. The bosses are engaging, the combat/gunplay has a lot of weight and everything from melee to archery to gunplay feels good to do.
Some people dont like the seasonal wiping, but you dont lose anything important from the wipes. All important currency and blueprints and whatnot you keep regardless. But one of the most important things about the seasons to me is that they ensure that the majority of people are playing the same content. What happens in most MMO's is that a large amount of content is released and then people blitz to the very end, so theres very few people playing any of the content before it. But with the seasons, they are trickling more content in on a week by week basis, so the playerbase isnt being immediately divided by no lifers; which is extremely common in survival games and MMO's.
I have not played pvp, but this game is without a doubt one of the best PVE survival games on the market, and it absolutely does not deserve the amount of negative reviews it has.