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Once Human review: waiter, there’s some brilliant creature design in my big bland survival soupHaunted fridges buy you a lot of goodwill, honestly
Haunted fridges buy you a lot of goodwill, honestly
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio
But, look. I’m on the way back from the hospital when I notice a small robot furiously drubbing the road with a pick so fast that its blocky head vibrates, and so rapidly I can’t work out if it’s a glitch or not. I jump off my motorbike and interact with it. My character pats the robots head, after which it disappears. I’ll find out what this robot’s deal is a few hours later, and while it kills the mystery for me, that initial encounter serves to prime my tired eyes for enough additional oddness and creativity that I can’t help kind of liking Once Human, even if I never plan to play it again.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio
I kill my first boss solo, but there’s a team gathering menu accessible beforehand where you can rope in temporary allies like aDestinystrike. The boss itself is a giant idiot, a lumpen mass of tissue and metal. It fires angrily at me with a gatling gun fused to its flesh, and when it stops to reload I stroll out of cover, pop off a few shots, and repeat these moves until I win. As a reward, I get a yellow slime with googly eyes I take back to my base and pop in a little containment facility, after which I can deploy it during fights as a big slimy barricade I can duck behind, still with the googly eyes. Travelling around after the boss, I encounter a giant six-legged bus that shimmers with phantasmagorical light. I climb inside of it and my yellow gel friend and I take in the sights as it shambles around the map.
I… god, I’m so sorry. I… think you should play this game?
It’s notgood. I need to make that clear. But it’s got a strange sort of soul and even a little sinew, even if they’re both shrouded in a lingering distrust that the player will appreciate them if they aren’t dolled out as rewards for feverishly studying its moth-eaten stacks of proprietaries like a tormented librarian.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio
Getting my first gun involves a crafting pipeline obnoxious enough to inspire eco-saboteurs. Furnace. Charcoal. Ingots. Disassembly bench. Scrap. Need more scrap. I’m given a map marker then sprint for three solid minutes to get there. Open some chests. Shoot one (1) zombie. Teleport back to my territory. I start working my way up the crafting tree to build a shotgun. At one point, I need to craft 30 or so charcoal from wood. It takes 30 seconds. I wait. Copper ingot next. It’ll take two minutes. Suppose I better click on some rocks, then.
And yet…
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Starry Studio
Sometimes, games are all about finding our own personal happy place within their many systems. My other favourite activity in Once Human is that thing where you press each of the WASD keys in quick succession so your character moves in perfect circles. I often did this while I was waiting for items to craft. I highly recommend it, but although Once Human is free, is it a 50gb download, and I suspect you might already have something in your library that lets you do this.
I dearly hope the creature designers and whoever was responsible for the more dense environmental locations get to work on a project that’s confident enough to charge upfront, so that everything good about their work doesn’t have to be doled out piecemeal to support such an obtuse and elaborate live service. Ditto a crafting and building system that feels so detached from everything else I can’t take it as anything but trend-chasing.
