Introduction

Once Human is a free-to-play open-world survival game with MMO and looter shooter elements. You can play solo, with friends, or use matchmaking to play with randoms. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by Stardust, a substance of alien origin that destroyed human civilization in an event known as Starfall. This was triggered by Rosetta, a conglomerate that had tried to fast-forward human evolution with Stardust.


The player controls one of the Meta-Humans who are capable of controlling Stardust, fighting against remnants of Rosetta as well as Deviations, violent mutants affected by Stardust. An underlying theme is the process of finding out more about the player character, other Meta-Humans, and Rosetta. Once Human offers the usual features found in survival games, such as base-building, gathering resources, and taking care of hunger and thirst, but also includes a ton of different loot players can get while exploring the post-Starfall remnants across a huge open-world map. Certain friendly deviations known as Deviants grant players unique abilities, helping in the fight against Rosetta and (other) Deviations. If all this sounds a little confusing, don't worry, we'll get straight into covering how the game presents graphically, before talking about performance.

Once Human was developed by Starry Studios and published by Starry Studios and NetEase Games, famed for Naraka: Bladepoint and Diablo Immortal. This is a DirectX 11 game based on the NeoX engine, NetEase Games' proprietary graphics engine that doesn't support ray tracing but does allow for attractive visuals, especially at higher graphical settings. The game is slated to receive a DirectX 12 update sometime in August 2024. Upscaler-wise, only AMD FSR is supported.

This PC gaming handheld benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Once Human on Steam Deck LCD and ASUS ROG Ally, talk about the out-of-box experience on SteamOS and Windows, and offer optimized settings for both devices.