Too Human Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on August 18th, 2008

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Baldur maybe a little bland and walks around like he's got something pointy in his boots but put a crowd of enemies in front of him and he suddenly turns into an Olympic speed-skater. With simple rotations of the analog sticks, you can send Baldur flying across the screen like an angry hornet, doling out punishment with bright sparks and the satisfying clank of metal on metal. The combat system is pretty slick, letting you launch guys into the air and then juggle them with gunfire to rack up combo points for devastating "ruiner" attacks, or leap up to get out of the fray and bash them silly. I personally loved every minute of it. The targeting system is less helpful when using guns because it stubbornly "sticks" to one particular enemy when you're frantically trying to target another, but the action is intense and enjoyable nonetheless.

As for the dangling story threads, the disappointment is compounded by the thin narrative that leads to them. Too Human is a retelling of Norse mythology with a cybernetic twist, in which the the gods are bionically enhanced humans protecting common men and women from the onslaught of Loki's army of machines. There's some backstory to wrap your head around, and Too Human drops you into the world with little sensible exposition. A good narrative doesn't need to spoon-feed plot points to you, but Too Human would have benefited from a better introduction to its unusual universe. The game does offer a few meaty moments, many of them involving Hel, Loki's beautifully twisted daughter. Yet ultimately the story rings hollow because developer Silicon Knights expects you to fill in the gaps on your own.

Too Human makes use of a dual analog stick control scheme in which one stick controls Baldur's movement and the other launches attacks. Those familiar with shooters such as Geometry Wars will recognize the concept, but this is no arcade shooter. Too Human is a third-person action-RPG that draws heavily from games like Diablo where collecting loot is paramount. This setup can take a short while to get used to, but it won't be long before you grasp the simplicity of it. Just point the stick towards whichever enemy you want to attack and the game does the rest. There's no need for memorizing complex combos here even the advanced moves don't require more than a couple of flicks on the stick. Rounding out the attack options are special moves mapped to the face and bumper buttons and guns, fired using triggers.

These controls are simple enough for anybody to master, regardless of your gaming skill level, but come with a cost. With both analog sticks occupied, there is no direct way for the player to control the camera. Some might say this adds to the cinematic feel, but I'm of the mindset that if you take camera control away from me, it had better be perfect. The camera in Too Human is not perfect. If you walk in a straight line through the game from one enemy encounter to the next, it performs pretty well. It has troubles when you backtrack, get close to walls, or try to walk in a direction the camera doesn't deem important. You can reposition the camera behind you with a button press and adjust how close or far it sits from your player, but neither of these is enough that you won't still find the camera annoying occasionally.

It's like Diablo in space, only with a better story - a real looter's paradise. Accessing Cyberspace in the game is a way of opening up pathways in the real world, as well as about gathering yet more loot. There are special (wells) scattered throughout the world that transport you to the golden forests of the NORN. Here you perform tasks to affect the real world, such as knocking down a giant virtual tree, which in reality unlocks a mechanised bridge. Some of these diversions verge on puzzles, but your time spent in Cyberspace is brief and mostly revolves around opening up bonus areas or listening to a bit of story. Oh - and grabbing that sweet loot. In Too Human, all roads lead to loot.

There's a lot of customization that can be done to both your character and your gear. First, there's the skill tree, which is different for every class. There's also a secondary skill tree that opens up later on. You can slot weapons and armor all over your character, and the game does a good job of making a lot of the wearables look different, so it's likely that no two Baldurs will look identical. Also, the weapons and armor come in different forms. So you might find a sword that has "of rooting" on the end, which has a special ability that makes your targets immobile when it activates. You may also find weapons with empty rune slots on them. You'll find runes along the way with different bonuses, such as Total Armor +5% or Soothing +10% and so on. Fitting these runes into slots on your weapons and armor lets you further beef up any area where you feel like you're lacking, but as a rule, adding to your total armor never seems to be a bad idea.

Runes also come into play with charms. Charms are items that you often find in cyberspace, and they act as little miniquests when equipped. Each charm will have a task that must be completed, such as "collect 10 blueprints" or "kill 200 undead." When you complete that task and feed the charm a specific set of runes, it activates and gives you a listed bonus, like a chance for your attacks to put enemies to sleep or the chance to add lightning to your strikes at random, and so on. While this ensures that you'll almost always have something to work on completing, even after you've finished the game numerous times, most of the charms aren't interesting enough to make repeated trips into the game's four areas much more entertaining. Also, the creatures scale up in level just as you do, so the level of challenge doesn't change much over the course of the game.

The thing that's supposed to keep you coming back is the game's online cooperative play, which lets another player join you over Xbox Live. Players can trade items when connected and combining players from different classes can mix things up a little bit. For example, the bio engineer's healing abilities offset the berserker's utter lack of defense to some degree. While it may be tempting to jump right into co-op and forget that the single-player campaign even exists, you should know that none of the game's story is present when playing online. Also, all friendly AI-controlled characters don't appear at all. So you won't be fighting alongside chattery humans and you won't see them wandering around the game's town area having random conversations, either. No cutscenes, just raw combat. Considering that the game's story isn't so hot to begin with, maybe this is a decent trade-off, but this mostly makes the game feel dated--most modern story-driven co-op games have found a way to integrate some portion of the story into multiplayer play.

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