To be honest, I didn't expect to get into a NetEase survival MMO, initially shrugging it off at as another mobile-first game that would keep me busy for about as long as it took for my fast food order to arrive. I could not have been more wrong. 

Once Human is far from perfect, but it is good. For a free-to-play game, it is stunningly good. Does it break new ground? Not one bit. It's like a less cartoony, more fully-fleshed out version of creature collector Palworld, in that it throws everything people like from other games into one giant bucket. Am I here for that? Absolutely.

Once you're done with the detailed character creation (hairline sliders, anyone?), you'll jump into the game as a “meta-human,” a new mutation of homo sapiens that have adapted to alien “stardust” which has turned most of the planet into monsters. The people who remain are either plucky rebels and pioneers, or evil guards working for the folks that unleashed this plague to begin with.

Blasting through an entire room of stardust monsters is satisfying, but not remotely difficult, at least during this first “Novice” season. Right now, the item collecting and crafting are what makes Once Human engrossing for long stretches.

Deep crafting layers

Almost immediately you'll begin crafting, using basic resources that are lying around in huge quantities. I had a house up and running in no time, which was incredibly easy to do, minus the proper adjustment of roof pieces, which were so finicky I impatiently went with a Sydney Opera House-on-acid approach and just got the danged thing covered with something to keep out the rain.

Like every system in Once Human, building is deep and complex, and players are already showing off incredible, sprawling multi-story estates online. You can see and visit others' houses in the game and use their machines; my friends leave notes for me on the whiteboard I put in my house.

That's part of the fun of crafting: Many of the objects are interactive, not just things you craft for the sake of crafting them. That whiteboard is one. There's also a mirror that lets you remake your character, a piano you can play for your friends in game, and a mailbox that actually gets mail. It's a great mix of these interactive objects, cosmetic items to spruce up your place, and hardcore upgrades for your gear, your weapons, or your home defenses and production facilities. Some come to you in funny ways—my Logging Beaver (more on that in a sec) just brought me a dining chair, for example. 

Every single system is layered deeper than you expect. Food you carve from beasts or harvest from fields expires quickly in Once Human, so you'll want a stove, and probably a fridge and a meat dryer. All of those require multiple layers of crafting to produce—harvest trees to make charcoal and smelt the ores and glass, disassemble the pre-apocalypse junk you collect for plastics and adhesives and the like, and craft the things. In the case of more advanced items, you'll need to set up a full power system as well, with a generator and wires and so on.

But wait, just having meat for the meat dryer isn't enough: You need salt, too, and to get that you're going to have to visit the sea, harvest sea water, and use the stove to turn it into salt. And then if you eat dried meat, you're going to get thirsty faster, because of the salt content… it goes on and on.

Resources aren't a blocker here. For the most part, they're readily available, either lying around for you to harvest or pick up or fish or farm for, or made from something else you can collect with ease. The fun comes from picking your priorities—what should I make next?—and seeing your plans come to fruition: sitting on that overstuffed chair you made, watching your auto-turret demolish an energy-hungry zombie in a ravaged business suit or energy-ball-shooting flying octopi, or killing an elite umbrella-headed monster in a dress with two bursts from your fully modded SMG.

This unexpected depth extends to Once Human's creature collecting: The Deviant creatures you collect and store in terrariums in your house can help you out—by collecting resources for you, or fighting alongside you, or helping you sleep better—but they also require their own things to perform at their best: lights of a particular color, or power, or music from a radio, or plants or flowers, or heat from a furnace. I love the gatherers, including the Logging Beaver, the Fetch a Lot Bunny and the Digby Boy, who are adorable and automatically wander out from my house to collect wood, plants, and ores, respectively.

Because resources are abundant at lower levels, nothing is too difficult to acquire or build. But it's one more minigame that keeps you engaged, and I can't count the number of times so far I've looked up from a “short” session to discover that another five hours had disappeared. 

Ready, aim, one-shot 

When it's time to shoot, Once Human is dead easy: With fully upgraded gear and weapons, everything in the open world can be offed with a single headshot, and bosses are mostly sponges. Enemy AI is fairly stupid and slow, especially far away, and part of why this survival game isn't scary is because nothing can truly hurt you if you don't let it get to you or are prepared to melee. “Alert” sounds or dialog make jump scares, well, scarce. The only death I've had so far in the game was due to a bug, when I fell through the world after ducking into a densely packed corner to escape a sniper's line of sight. There's a Sanity mechanic, which I'm sure will be an issue someday, but it hasn't played much of a role for me so far.

There is PvP, with opt-in events even on PvE servers that can provide important, rarer materials such as acid, but you can almost entirely avoid it if you don't want to engage—even on PvP servers. For an MMO, there are very few encounters that truly require playing with or against other people, though you'll see them everywhere, and their houses, and the temporary tents they're using as respawn points. Many dungeons can be done solo. It'd be a shame to do them all that way, because co-op brings a new level of fun to Once Human, allowing you to blaze through enemy areas with even more prejudice.

I don't hold the low difficulty against Once Human for three reasons. First, I'm having a stupidly good time blowing things up. Successfully sniping four enemies in as many seconds imparts a powerful feeling—I'm fine with inhabiting a fantasy world where I'm extremely badass and regular monsters are just bubble wrap bubbles to pop. Second, there's a season wipe coming at the start of September, and I'm not going to be done with everything there is to do by then, so blazing through content is not a problem yet. Finally, all the servers currently available are “Novice” servers, and I suspect that's going to ramp up in future seasons.

Rough edges

There are drawbacks to the “bucket of everything” approach that Once Human uses. For starters, whoever designed its menu systems obviously struggled with where to put all of that “everything.” Character tasks and progression are separated into at least five different trees, which are frequently buried frustratingly deeply in menus.

Weapon base upgrades are separate from mods, which are separate from calibration, which are separate from other augmentations, in another example. It's not always clear how everything is going to affect your power until you've already sunk the resources to build or modify it.

In some ways, this is all part of what makes the game fun: every little thing has five or six minigames built into it. But finding all those minigames when you know they exist and you don't remember which menu tree/tab/option they were in gets old.

Some players have experienced bugs that I haven't run across myself: NPCs not loading, the physical Whisper “flowers” that other players leave behind not displaying correctly (though I wonder if that last is a deliberate phase in-out cycle to avoid too much item collision). My game experience has been largely bug-free, aside from that one death… knock on collected wood.

Driving me crazy

While there are teleport towers sprinkled around the map that you can use to zip from place to place, you'll spend most of your traveling time in vehicles. Some of these are incredible. One of my teammates jumped ahead in the crafting tree just to make us a Jeep-like SUV, which we could all ride in, swapping seats and listening to the radio—and leaning out the windows to shoot enemies. The Mean Girls-style “get in loser, we're going monster hunting” vibe when he first rolled up made me truly laugh aloud.

Unfortunately, driving vehicles is not as much fun as being a passenger. While operating your character is remarkably smooth—I could hurdle small obstacles and parkour up buildings fluidly, all while zooming in on monsters with my sniper rifle and blowing their heads off—vehicle navigation was created by the devil.

By default it's WASD with no mouse control, which is just as clunky as it sounds. It also has collision (and repairing and fuel, because of course it does), but exactly what it'll hit and mow over (monsters, amusingly causing damage) and what'll stop it dead (tiny pebbles, some-but-not-all bushes, a 4-inch curb) is unpredictable.

Several other things I would have complained about have been resolved at the time of this writing, including the ability to make multiple characters and have cosmetics account-wide. In both cases, Starry Studio (a subsidiary of NetEase) quickly saw the issue and pushed fixes live (and free). Regarding monetization, the $10 and $24 Battle Passes are just for cosmetics, and not having one does not affect player power or progression. This game, which would be a decent buy at full price, truly is free to play.

You do have to accept two hard-to-kill PC processes that run in the background as part of Once Human's security layer, and it insists on running in Admin mode, which it does not really have an excuse to do. You have to run voice comms programs like Discord in Admin mode to use push-to-talk every single time you play as a result, which is irritating.

But in the grand scheme of things, those are minor annoyances for a game this deep, this engaging, and this free. Sometimes games don't need to reinvent a genre to become a favorite spare-time romp.