Pretty solid overall. The visuals are truly impressive, with stunning landscapes and an array of different biomes. There’s a lot to take in, like breathtaking mountain ranges at sunset or eerily beautiful fog creeping through ghostly towns, haunted by sounds that put you on edge. But there are some weird moments—floating bridges, rocks, and random items that appear in your path while you’re speeding on your bike. If they hit, it’s rough on both you and the bike, but thankfully, nothing game-breaking.

Character creation is decent, maybe a bit underwhelming in places. Combat’s fun, especially since you can aim down sights in first person. Armors and cosmetics? Mixed bag. Some gear looks fantastic and really fits the world, but most don’t. Even the good ones will set you back $15+ for the look.

Base building is enjoyable, with lots of customization, but the limits on the building system feel stuck in the past. Some basic building tools from other games are missing here, making it a hassle to put together your dream Hive base. And the limits are downright frustrating!

After sinking over 120 hours into a single build, the blueprint system has been a real letdown. The server structure, seasons, and Starcrom grind mean you’ll hit a hard wall once you reach endgame. With restrictive time gates and the frustrating grind to farm even a single blueprint fragment, it’s getting to where I’m wondering why my Hive and I are still in it.

Maybe raise the Battle Pass price if you need to, but definitely make the shop prices fairer. Ditch the build limits or boost them big time. Add blueprints and Starcrom fragments as drops from dungeons and bosses. And for real, fix that Motorcycle—it’s like handling a tank, even fully upgraded. There’s so much potential here, but it’s kinda exhausting.

Note, I did not try, nor will I ever try, the PvP elements of the game, so this review does not include any mention of that aspect.

Once Human has well designed environments, an interesting story, and satisfying combat and looting elements. Basebuilding, crafting, weapon and armor modifications, and even 'pet' capture elements all combine to give you plenty to do and are all at least relatively well designed.

Of games I've previously played, it reminds me most of State of Decay II, but with better base-building elements and the whole Deviation capture component of Once Human adds another enjoyable layer on top of the core game elements.

I'd definitely recommend the game to anyone who likes that sort of game design. It is free-to-play after all.

All of that said, however, the game has some deep flaws (imo) that reduce it's overall quality/enjoyment:

• The seasonal element: 6 weeks, and servers reset. While you do get to keep some of your hard-earned work, you lose most and character progression is set back to 0 at the start of a new season. Some people like that sort of thing....most people don't.
  
• The multiplayer aspect drags it down. I'm not saying it's bad to have multiplayer, but in this particular game I think they would be better served to have smaller peer-to-peer servers rather than their current approach of larger public servers. The route to every major story point and event looks like a refugee camp tent city and the housing of other players litters the landscape, literally everywhere. That greatly takes away from the spooky, post-apocalyptic vibe of the narrative.
  
• Over-reliance on gatcha mechanics for aspects of the game which are progression. This right here combined with the 6 week reset will be the main reason I don't play this game long term.
  
• Shop items are stupidly expensive. Though it's all (mostly) cosmetics and the like, it's still ridiculous what they are charging for the stuff.

tldnr: Overall, Once Human is a pretty decent PvE game, held back by it's MMO aspect and gatcha elements. Worth playing, for a little while, just to enjoy it but perhaps not worth a long-term investment or any real-cash purchases until (if ever) they address those aspects of it which hold it back.

At this point i'm four seasons in, i've played Manibus Novice, Hard, Prismverse Clash (PvP) and now Way of Winter 2 weeks in.
Am i hitting burnout? Sure, i've had my fun with this game and while i want to continue playing, it's grinding me down with how little has actually improved of the core game.

Don't get me wrong, the developers are putting in good effort to fix bugs and introduce QoL, new features that are cool but the problem is they always come half-baked and bugged laden, the newest scenario WoW is the biggest culprit with so many buggy map locations that include things like lava that can repeatedly kill you till you relog, invisible floating water bubbles that can also chain kill you, many poorly made geometry meshes that are glitchy to walk on, a handful of ziplines that lead in to dead ends making you fall off if you go on them, glitches bosses like Servitor that locks when with more than 1 person (They just fixed this, thankfully) and core issues like many new items not being available on the vending machine to trade and plenty of items not available on this server like apples causing people to use whatever method they can get their hands on to obtain them (Silver axes).

The new tower function is just poorly thought out, it's easy to place one down and reserve a location (Which is a whole other bag of worms) But you can't control who places what inside, you also can't toggle oil or pollution fields so if one person sets it to research when no one wants it, you're done. the defense is also poorly done and i dread when the Chaosweavers spawn because it's just going to result in bases being wiped left and right due to poor spawn locations.

But all this isn't even what the main problem is.

There's little to no horizontal content at the end game, and buildcrafting basically just amounts to slotting the two obvious weapon and unique armor pieces together with the obvious mods and not much else, it's too inflexible and lacking in depth. These two things can keep a game going for ages, yet Once Human lacks them desperately, it doesn't help that in the recent update they introduced two new weapons with unique keywords for existing keywords but only they have them and the new uniques are basically made to function only with them.

They NEED to update and re-balance older weapons to interact with new keywords, the builds need more depth other than more stats.

As for horizontal content, they're in between a rock and a hard place, you don't want to make it required because that will drive away casuals, but they are reluctant to add cosmetics to normal events and silos etc because that's where they make their money. I personally think they should keep the wacky and out of norm cosmetics to the shop while feeding us normal, setting fitting cosmetics from gameplay. We should also get weapon attachment paints and potentially wraps, even colours for a potential dye system would be great.

That's another thing- This game has an outdated cosmetic system that feels like it's a decade old, there is no actual dye system to change clothing colours, and the slots for cosmetics are limited heavily not allowing players to express themselves fully, i for one would be far more willing to purchase skins if i could change their colour to what's desired.

Anyway, i do not recommend this game for those looking for something to keep coming back to season to season, there's little here other than the hampster wheel of buying more weapons for starchrom and following the potential powercreep. However if you just want to step in for a season or two of fun, go ahead, the game lasted that long for me and i had my fun, so you probably will too.