Now, before any PC purists reading this grab your pitchforks, Mac gaming is a thing or else this site wouldn’t exist. With that quick disclaimer out of the way, let me tell you about what a Mac user (and gamer!) has to say about the latest free-to-play multiplayer survival game – Once Human.
Is Once Human Any Good? (the Opinion of a Mac Gamer)
To be fair, open-world survival titles don’t excite me as much as they used to, but all the hype around Once Human got me curious. I quickly checked the possible options to play it on my Mac and realized there are at least three valid methods to do that (more on that in a bit). The availability of workarounds and the fact this is a free game was more than enough for me to give it a try and see what the fuss is all about.
Around 40 hours in and here’s what my current impressions of the game are: Once Human tries to lure you into its impressively large, alien-infested sandbox world with the promise of a rich survival experience. Picture a colossal 256-square-kilometer map where 4,000 players can scavenge, fight, and build. Yes, we’ve all seen this before, but, to be fair, I actually enjoyed the world. It’s moody, with a good amount of variety, and a fitting atmosphere. It almost made me forget and forgive that everything in it is trying to kill me.
The customization options are also adequately realized – they let you craft your little slice of dystopian paradise… if your idea of paradise involves constant threats to your sanity and well-being.
But I do need to be fair in my assessment, which means I can’t overlook that the story and visuals, while competent, won’t set your world on fire. They’re functional but about as exciting as a beige sofa.
And then there are the technical issues. Bugs, glitches, connectivity problems, and everything else you can think of. To be fair, those are par for the course at this point with big new gaming titles, but this doesn’t make them any less frustrating or excusable. If anything, it makes us, gamers, even more tired and fed up with the blatant lack of polish in so many newly-released titles. But I want to be an optimist – let’s not forget, many great games started as flaming disasters before turning things around. Titles like “No Man’s Sky” and “Cyberpunk 2077” stumbled out of the gate and eventually found their footing, so there’s hope yet… I hope.
But if we dismiss the technical problems as the result of tight schedules and incompetent planning, I just can’t find an excuse for the privacy issues with this game. Let’s put it this way: The game asks for more personal data than an overzealous census taker. The devs knew what they were doing here but they guessed wrong and consequently, for humbled by the backlash and had to promise to clean up their act. I’ll take this as a positive sign, but the proof will be in the pudding.
Despite its warts (some big ones indeed), I actually believe “Once Human” has potential. It certainly doesn’t lack ambition and I think the groundwork for a solid gaming title is there. It just needs to be cleaned from all the clutter that’s holding it down at the moment. But If the devs keep ironing out the kinks and listen to player feedback, it might just evolve into something special. Keep an eye on this one; it could be a diamond in the rough, but for now, it’s more rough than diamond.
How to Play Once Human on Mac
If you are a Mac user and my brief review didn’t dissuade you from wanting to try Once Human for yourself, there are three valid solutions: Boosteroid, GeForce Now (these two are cloud gaming platforms), and Bootcamp (only works on Intel Macs).
We made an entire video where we show detailed instructions on how to set up each of these methods and we also provide some additional information about them, so check it out if you are interested.
And if you are already familiar with these methods and want to directly give them a try, here are direct links to Boosteroid and GeForce Now.
The Boot Camp Assistant tool for the third method comes preinstalled with Intel-based Macs, but you’ll need to download a Windows 10 ISO file to use, so here’s a link to that:
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