End Game Thoughts On Once Human: Finished LEA Research Labs

 I recently completed the endgame dungeon for Once Human's first season: LEA Research Lab. It was the toughest content I've faced in the game, requiring numerous attempts and different teams to conquer. Now that I’ve finally done it, I wanted to share some thoughts.

One of the LEA Research Lab bosses

 In my initial posts about Once Human, I noted how easy the game was. I was using the same gear I started with well into the later levels. I didn’t upgrade my gear until long after clearing all the normal mode max level content. Nothing in the open world or instanced dungeons (silos/monoliths) seemed to put up much of a fight. It’s worth mentioning that PvP is terrible in this game, so that didn’t push me to upgrade gear either.

 I did eventually upgrade my gear when the hard mode versions were released with phase 3 of the season. But honestly, I didn’t really need to, as hard mode was still too easy. With max-calibrated armor and weapons, hard mode felt no different than the rest of the game: easy.

 Phase 4 of the season introduced the pro modes. At first, tackling the pro mode silos/monoliths I’d done before didn’t present much of a challenge. I could solo them fairly easily, and playing duo with a gaming friend made them even easier. Pro mode initially seemed like just another way to burn through resources for bullets and repair costs.

 Then my buddy and I took on the big phase 4 content: the Forsaken Giant and LEA Research Lab. The Giant took a few tries, but the failed attempts were more about learning the mechanics (we went in blind) than about gear. Then we ventured into LEA Research Lab and hit a wall. We couldn’t finish it as just two players. We managed to get through three of the four challenges, but not the final one. Even when grouped with four players, our first teams failed. Had we finally encountered challenging content in Once Human?

 I’ll give a hesitant “sort of” in response. The lab is laid out in progressive stages, with fights that teach the mechanics for the final stage. The final stage then combines all the previous mechanics, along with a boss that, as my buddy put it, “won’t leave me the f!*$ alone” throughout the fight. It’s a long battle with overlapping mechanics, requiring solid coordination and fully upgraded gear to succeed.

 However, even with good gear and coordination, the unpolished nature of Once Human starts to show. Quirky movement, unreliable button presses, no line of sight for enemies hitting you, janky animations, desync between client and server—these issues didn’t matter much when the content was easier, but they rear their head in this final fight. This means a lot of the challenge comes down to battling the game itself rather than the actual encounter.

 Perhaps the most frustrating part is that by the end of the fight, even with max upgraded gear, all your armor—and sometimes weapons—are broken. No armor means everything kills you in one hit. A broken weapon means no damage. In theory, you could bring an entire extra set of gear or portable repair potions (if you’re lucky enough to have access to them, which I’m not), but that’s not a viable strategy in the middle of the fight. The gear damage happens way too fast. You shouldn’t start a single boss fight at 100% durability and end up at 0% and broken before it’s over.

 Another source of frustration is the line-of-sight and battlefield visibility issues. In the final phase, a lot of ranged attackers spawn, conveniently sitting in corners and behind walls, plinking away without line of sight. All you know is that you’re taking damage, often from something hitting you through the floor because they’re in a pit on the other side of the map. It doesn’t help that there are flying enemies throughout the fight as well, and with no way to get a wider view of the battlefield, you spend a lot of time not knowing what just killed you.

 Then there’s the hit detection issue. Guns are hitscan, so in general, they’re almost foolproof for hitting targets. But if you switch to melee (assuming weapon swap responds reliably), it’s a lesson in frustration. You might as well rule out ever being a melee-oriented build in this game. But that only applies to players—enemies, on the other hand, suddenly have massive range and hit detection well beyond where their attacks animate. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been hit when it looked like the enemy swung at the air. The animation is horrendous (which is easy to overlook in the rest of the game when you’re killing things in a few hits).

 The issues with the interact feature also rear their ugly head. For PC, this is the F key. In parts of the fight, you need to pick up objects to throw them at targets. It can be maddening trying to get one to pick up, and the animation is so slow that more deaths than not come from simply trying to pick up the item you have to pick up! Then mix in how terrible F can be when trying to revive teammates, and it’s just a big F in chat.

 If that wasn’t bad enough, the problems with weapon swapping come into play. Sometimes weapon swap works, and sometimes it doesn’t—or maybe it swaps, but then you press fire, and it swaps back to the other weapon. Even worse is trying to swap between a tactical item, like a grenade, and back to a weapon. More often than not, you end up throwing several grenades before realizing your weapon never came back up. They need to get tactical items off the hotbar and onto a dedicated button, like in any other shooter game.

 The inconsistent registering of actions extends to everything, it seems. Reload your gun? It regularly doesn’t register that the reload finished, and your next action cancels the reload. Apply a healing activator and the animation finishes, but the healing doesn’t apply until a second later, which means you accidentally cancel the heal, thinking it’s done. As mentioned, tactical items like grenades are very quirky.

 I’ve posted before that Once Human has no right to be as popular as it is. Any mainstream developer would get torched over how buggy, unfinished, and unpolished this game is. Yet the gaming community and players keep giving Once Human a pass. Even I am giving it a pass. I keep logging in. I keep playing. I keep fighting the game as the primary challenge, with the content’s difficulty level coming second.