Once Human
The apocalypse changed everything. Human, animal, plant… all are infested by an alien creature – Stardust. As a Meta-Human, you can survive the contamination and use the power of Stardust. Play alone or join others to fight, build and explore. When the world is in chaos, you are our last hope.
Survive in the wilderness
You wake up in the middle of nowhere. You’ll have to brace yourself for the cruelty of nature (from monsters to lack of food); however, Stardust’s influence does not restrict to living things, it also affects the soil and water. Eating polluted food and drinking dirty water will reduce your Sanity. When your Sanity drops, your max HP would drop accordingly. To eat or not to eat, it’s a question.
Fight against monsters
Battle numerous enemies that are once human, and challenge bosses from another dimension to gain powerful items and ease Stardust pollution. You are not only fighting for yourself, but also fighting for the survivors.
Customize weapons
With about 100 gun blueprints divided into seven categories for you to collect and craft, every loot grants you something new. Did I mention accessories and gun perks? Right, they are the heroes here. If our current weapon cannot satisfy your need, you can add different parts and perks, upgrade your firearm to your heart’s content.
Build territory
Use Territory Core to build a house of your own. You can keep a practical style, jamming everything needed in a small room; or you can design a townhouse with a patio, kitchen, garage… The best part is, you can relocate your territory any time you want!
Find out the truth
Delve into the truth of Stardust, find out where it came from, and what it wants. In the journey of seeking truth, you may feel alone, but you are never alone. There are several factions in the world, some can be violent and hostile, others might be friendly and helpful. Explore human settlements to learn their stories or exterminate bosses without leaving a name for survivors to praise, the choices are yours.
Steam User 1969
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.
Steam User 1582
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.
Steam User 2474
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.
Steam User 1204
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.
Steam User 201
after playing this game for 35 hours and reading the TOS, I will discuss the gameplay and the TOS that many people afraid of.
when you start the game dreading the game of being grindy and very confusing, well its not. The game has beginner goals that reward you when completing them that will guide you to the basics of the game. the Deviants mechanics can help you from making your crafting shorter or they can mine ores for you while you are out and about. The gun gameplay kinda basic and sometimes you can obliterate enemies with the right mods.
Visually the game is detailed but can stutters at times. When first playing for me the amount of player bases scattered throughout the world can be bothersome, like when you see that one perfect spot that you like but there are already someone there or there are random unfinished building blocking your space. The "WISH MACHINE" or the gacha side of the game requires the currency STARCHROM, you whack a mole and every time you whack you can get random blueprints BUT you don't have to gacha for the weapon or armor that you want. You can just buy them outright with STARCHROM skipping the gacha entirely. The game gave STARCHROM very generously, you can get 500-1000+ by doing some simple missions.
Now the scary TOS people talking about. when they say they gonna take your ID and name, IP address etc, yes they can take those BUT IN SELECTIVE COUNTRIES like China where they limit playtime of games. If you still afraid they going to take your social media information, they can do that IF ONLY YOU LINK THE GAME TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA. In the game there are survey and and option to link your social media for a reward, so if you don't want to give them your data then don't link them to your game.
Also you can go fishing.
Steam User 630
this game is lit for a FTP play game, I have to say this is the best FTP I have come across in 25+ years of gaming. I haven't felt the need to swipe money at this time, yes there is a shop and a BP but that is to be expected with a FTP game. You will def see the integration of a lot of games like the big one - the division, state of decay, obviously survival craft, I got some RDR2 vibes from some player houses I've seen and the addition of player houses to the empty space of the game makes it feel so unique, I guess that comes from archage. All in all try it out if you don't like it then uninstall. It's def worth checking out at least!
Steam User 197
Basically, Once Human is like a mash up of State of Decay, Fallout 76, and The Division, with some Secret World influence.
The game has its issues and a bit janky, but it's just so much fun filled with a lot of content. You've got main quests to follow, side quests that you can find in settlements and the open world, as well as side activities and public events. Main quests are fully voice acted, but side quests are mostly not. Combat is a bit too easy so far, but I haven't progressed that much compared to others. Enemy varieties are at least very robust, you'll always find new enemies as you progress through the map and story. Progression is very natural, and the game doesn't give you new gear at every opportunity, so each upgrade feels substantial. Besides combat, you also progress in the survival aspect to unlock more recipes and building materials.
The game is very very generous for f2p lots of stuff that could've been paywalled are totally free in this. Most of the stuff from gears to building materials are free and unlockable via your skilltree. Inventory limit is very generous, and you can build as many storages as you wanted to. You can change appearance for free with a mirror, you can buy your item of choice directly instead of RNG with gacha, there's no premium perk or anything affecting gameplay, etc.
Most of the negative reviews came from character creation limitations at launch. Like people couldn't delete theirs and move to another server, leave negative review, and left. The devs fixed it quite swiftly, but the damage is already done. There are also a lot of confusions about the seasons, even though not everything will be wiped. The devs posted a FAQ on it to explained it better, since lots of stuff can be carried over to the new season including gears, mats, cosmetic, and many others. Reviews are moving to positive side nowadays.