New multiplayer survival game Once Human shoots up Steam charts despite mostly negative reviews

If there were a game that sums up having a mixed launch, it would be Once Human. On one hand you have a player count that’s shooting ever upwards, with every refresh of the number showing a new high. On the other, you have its Steam reviews which are continuing to drop, heading nowhere positive. This really is the epitome of having both bad and good news all at once, a true mixed bag for the game.

To put the player numbers for Once Human into context, at the time of writing it’s sitting on 59,920 people in-game at the same time. That’s a huge number for any survival game, beating out other titles like Soulmask which despite being a big success, has only hit an all-time high of 46,833. Once Human does have a long way to go, however, until it hits the likes of Sons of the Forest or V Rising, both of which have had concurrency peaks in the hundreds of thousands. Still, it’s an auspicious start for the title, but not necessarily a surprise given how anticipated the game was prior to launch.

It’s doubly impressive as despite there being no obvious server issues affecting the game, there are severe complaints from the community affecting Once Human’s Steam review score. Currently sitting at ‘mostly negative’, there are several key issues that players are bringing up.

The first is the lack of controller support at launch, something that was previously promised by the development team over social media. Due to technical issues this currently is not available, meaning you’re looking at mouse and keyboard for input if you’re wanting to hop in.

This also leads to the second issue being reported by players – the inability to rebind all keys. “I do not like having spacebar as my jump, but if I unbind it to another key, I can’t bind the “linked” tasks to the same key and have to bind each one to a different key instead of the same one,” reads one post on the game’s Steam discussion forum. “It’s even worse for non QWERTY keyboard users,” replies another user.

The biggest issue affecting players, however, is one we reported on earlier related to only having the ability to create one character per account. Due to this restriction – and the apparent inability to delete characters – it’s not possible to start over or switch servers at the moment. “Cant delete character. who thought this was a great idea and you cant switch servers,” reads one highly rated review. “Can’t delete characters. One character per account. Can’t change servers,” reads another.

Despite all that, the game continues to reach new people and its star is definitely rising in terms of player count. At the start of this article Once Human was at 59,920 players and now it’s got 77,586 concurrently in-game, and that number is still rising.

Once Human is out now and you can play for free over on Steam. If you’re jumping in for the first time, you can check out our guide to all Once Human deviants and our Once Human bosses guide.

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