Let me start by stating that I have 159 hour(s) and counting and here's my thought about this game.

- Let's first go through the whole conundrum that is multiplayer - specifically playing with your buddies. Game launch and everybody jumped on the hype wagon and immediately joined servers. The game gained traction and people started noticing and inviting their pals to play with them only for them to be greeted with a full server message on their buddy's server. They then joined other servers thinking they could just 'switch server', which is true but not really. Let me explain: There's a thing called server and worlds. Each server holds multiple worlds that you can switch around BUT not the server. They go in, took the tutorial phase, joined the world in their server only to find out they won't be able to play with each other. This all boils down to how the information was shared from Netease team. Most people are not familiar with mechanic like that. However, to be fair, on the next season this will be fixed and addressed. Although if you play later than your buddies, you both have to finish your phases on your respective server and select the same server as you transition to the next season.

- Let's talk game mechanic in general. Gameplay, although becomes repetitive, there's a lot to do. You can do SILO runs and get that juicy mods for your armors and weapons. You can team up with other people to do so - and this is made easier by allowing players to share their team invite via world chat, just open up the chat box and click the join link and viola. If you don't find a team on that world, go to any teleport tower and switch world! Aside from that, there's a handful of world events that you can participate in, PVP and PVE. The firefight is good imo, it's like a crossbreed between TC Division and B4B. Different difficulty levels on bosses as well to offer easier or harder challenge that tailors your current character status. There are prime wars as well if you are one of the lucky ones that got to play with their buddies in the same server. You can farm, and the farming mechanic is decent and will be improved in 1.1. They've introduced new features like animal taming and more. So playing solo or a team, there's plenty things to do.

- General mechanics and UI experience: Most players, myself included, had a hard time understanding the UI and where each thing goes or where to find certain options. The UI are clunky at best, not a lot of information out there (there is, but you really gotta dig). The game does not offer P2W (thank goodness) and only offers purchasable skins BUT these skins typically are expensive AF. Compared to other similar games that already made their name, OnceHuman's prices demands you to shell out large sum of cash or your kidney (whichever you prefer). As a personal example: There's a new skin that got release called Psychedelic Skull set which is literally ghost rider theme. I wanted to get those but the only way to get it is through a form of gambling where you have to open chests/crates for a chance to get those skins. I shelled out $190 just to get the whole set but I've seen people on reddit stating they've spent $300 to get it. That being said, the skins are cool af but it should not be that expensive for something that you can't even trade nor sell to other players unlike skins from games like CS2. The 'game-locked, char-locked' skins are most times more expensive than a handful of AAA titles you can buy off of steam. There's also an ingame curreny you can use to purchase blueprints called Starchrom. But this is really difficult to come by and there are times Netease will slap you right in your noggins by nerfing your build after you've grind for so long for the BP for sets and weapons and farm mods that you've always wanted.

Devs are trying to make it work and they're doing a banging job. A lot of the concerns that players had was addressed in 1.1 and added more features that players weren't even expecting. Although they have introduced sharing code with other players so they could join your server, it would be nice if they work on having the server with unlimited or even a higher cap on the number of registrations and just cap the amount of players online at any given time - pretty sure RUST shares the same mechanic. Because right now - and I can only speak regarding my server, a lot of dead accounts are wasted because people created chars on my server and switch to another. Those 'dead accounts' then accounted for the limit of chars created in the server, thus not letting other people in and leaving only few online.

All that being said, my time with OnceHuman, although solo, has been great and I have a lot to do and still things to try like prime wars (hopefully with my buddies) in the next season! I highly recommend trying this game out in its current state given as it's free! Try it out, join the reddit and discord server, meet some friends, die couple of times in game and try again.