Once Human Review in Progress

ign.com:

Once Human is surprising. It’s a free-to-play open-world survival crafting game, a word salad of flavor-of-the-month genres if ever there was one, and it takes those well-worn ideas and simplifies them into relatively basic forms. And yet, here we are a few days after launch and I find that I can’t put it down. It’s still early, but so far it’s so fun, and so weird.

There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic survival games out there, whether you’re talking about Fallout 76, Rust, 7 Days to Die, or the many, many other options. But Once Human makes its take on that setup feel unique and interesting by wrapping the end of the world around an alien infestation rather than your classic zombies or nuclear war scenarios. It’s a fun approach that, in hindsight, seems underused in the genre, and Once Human puts it to use in some really clever ways.

This alien organism has the ability to turn basically anything into a grotesque monster, living or otherwise. Sure, that shuffling and snarling person may seem like a zombie, but then it turns around and reveals it has a blinding stage light for a head. I’ve fought lightbulbs that have turned into giant spiders, evil trees, and even a bus that sprouted a really unfortunate number of giant legs and trotted up and down the road like the biggest, yellowest, and strangest centipede that has ever existed. I did not see those enemies coming, and that has kept Once Human full of surprises.

Your weaponry is fairly basic, consisting of simple melee weapons like blades and bars, as well as your general pistol, rifle, and shotgun small-arms options. They are pretty unremarkable, but it’s hard to be bored with a baseball bat when you are beating on a monster with a traffic cone for a head or trying to snipe at a massive shadow-beast boss that just as easily could have been fighting Kratos in God of War. Sure, most of the fights are resolved by flailing your melee weapon or running around in circles and shooting as you drain health bars, but the