Originally published at: Once Human – On the Alphagamer Want to Play list – Alphagamer
The recent monumental breakdown of The Day Before is resulting in an interesting side effect as it is generating a lot of buzz around the genre of post-apocalyptic games. One game in particular, the game called Once Human, is making good use of that momentum. Right at the moment when The Day Before was falling apart (and The Day Before was removed from Steam) the studio behind Once Human smartly jumped in and had some influential streamers play their game on Twitch and Youtube.
Looking at the Once Human gameplay it piqued my interest, so let’s have a closer look at Once Human and what it is about.
The Aberrant
The world, including plants, animals and humans are infected and transformed by Stardust and are called Aberrant. There are currently 5 different types of Aberrant:
Expected to have once been normal spiders but infected by Stardust, the Arachsiam likes dark and humid places mainly hiding in the mountains.
The Treant is an interesting type of Aberrant. It host 3 different lives, those of a mother, the unborn baby and a plant. The Treant can summan tangled vines and dandelions.
Different from other Aberrant, these aliens are drawn to earth by Stardust.
The Foul Shadowhunter has a machine gun as right arm and a bone scythe on its left arm. These Aberrant are a pile of bones held together by a yellow glue and are powered by Stardust.
This Aberrant is or was a plague specialist focussed on spreading plague.
Dependent on the stage of infection these Aberrant become more aggressive the longer they are infected. I will do a deep dive on the Aberrant in one of my next blog posts.
The Meta Humans
This is where the player comes in. A player takes on the role of Meta Human, Meta’s are given the ability to survive and harness the Stardust contamination. An important piece for that survival is a piece of equipment called The Cradle. The Cradle is a life support for a player, but besides ensuring a player stays alive it is also the source for talents.
Once you kill a boss a player unlocks new skill tree allowing upgrades to newly acquired talents.
Besides focussing on upgrading your character the game, as with all Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, offers a lot of team oriented goals as well. An example is building a base. A base can be used to store important items, use specific tools and recover/be safe. This is the place a Meta will call home. Creating a territory, as building a base is called in Once Human, can be done alone but can also be done as a group which is called a Hive. Building a base as a group or Hive has benefits, allowing faster crafting and giving combat bonuses.
There is a lot more to uncover about player factions, vehicles and types or terrain and maps. We will do this in future blog posts on Alphagamer. We also signed up for the Closed Beta, if that happens we will obviously write about it.
Did you get the chance to play Once Human already, please share your experience with us and let us know what you think about the game.