Too Human Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on August 19th, 2008

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For all its pomp and circumstance, Too Human fails miserably in a couple of crucial ways. Crucial if things like enjoying yourself and actually being compelled to keep playing are at all important to your gameplay experience. The controls are bizarre and hamper more than help; dealing at all with the camera is a huge pain and inconsistent across much of the game; the enemies are repetitive as much as they are derivative; the story and dialogue seems hackneyed; I could go on and I will. But to put it simply, playing Too Human was a highly unenjoyable experience for me, and I was glad when it was over.

I'm not sure if the game started out in the wrong direction or just ended up at the wrong destination after all this time, but either way, it feels broken in so many ways. But I keep asking myself, is it just broken to me? Is this one of those completely subjective assessments where I say I just don't like it? What about people who do play it and like it. I know there will be someone out there will, and I never begrudge someone their own personal joy. But I'm just not seeing it.

There's a very clear lack of variation here in almost every area you could imagine (except loot, but more on that in a minute). Levels are bland and repetitious, requiring you to jog through hours of catwalks and gantries that are differentiated only by minor shifts in color tone. Enemies, as stated above, come in different colors at best, but generally boil down to either robotic rip-offs of Dog from Half-Life 2 or zombies (which Too Human somehow manages to make generic despite the inherent awesomeness of zombies in general). Melee attacks offer some chance for redemption, as a heavy premium is placed on stringing intricate combinations together, but ultimately buckle under the crushing weight of fighting the same enemies over and over again.

Even basic elements like an item inventory are absent. The game will happily slurp up runes and trousers called Proficient Web-Brace Greaves of Toughness by the dozen, but there's no way of stockpiling a simple health orb. Nor are there any items to counteract the various status effects that enemies inflict on you. This means that when your health is low, all you can do is plough onwards and hope that you get some health in a loot drop. If you find yourself poisoned with low health, you might as well just wait to die - there's nothing you can do. Oh, and when you die? I hope you enjoy the unskippable 30-second animation of a cyborg valkyrie descending from the sky and lifting you to Valhalla. You'll see it a lot.

Is Too Human a dismissible "hack and slash" best eternally shelved with the likes of Kingdom Under Fire as reported from E3 2006? At times in the thick of battle it sure feels like it. But even when staleness creeps into combat and urges to "save and quit" grow, there's the enticing payoff of leveling up one more time in the quest to reach level 50 or trigger the next extensive cut-scene unraveling a story on-par with, or better than, most of what airs on the Sci-Fi Channel. Diablo may continue to skirt around ever appearing on Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but Too Human is finally here and has a legitimate shot at successfully picking up some of the big production action/RPG-on-consoles slack.

Death is an interesting kettle of RPG fish. When the player dies, a Valkyrie descends from the sky to take the player to Valhalla. This sequence looks great, the Valkyrie is really cool looking and the way it appears, swats away any enemies grandstanding over your corpse and then ascends into heaven with your corpse really is cool. The first time. Once you've seen it a few times, you'll be looking for a button to skip this 30 second sequence. There isn't one. The fact that you're already annoyed due to the fact that you died only compounds the frustration that this unskippable sequence already presents.

If ever a videogame wanted the player to carefully nurture their character, Too Human is it. For example, the opening mission offers up absolutely no equipment upgrades for Baldur to benefit from, and as a result its boss battle finale with the hulking, man-eating Grendel is a surprisingly hard-fought affair that suggests massively testing encounters to come.

However, thanks to the ability to revisit completed missions (a la Diablo) and increase Baldur's level status while doing so, players can replay entire missions or specific sections therein over and over again, becoming steadily more deadly each time while conveniently avoiding narrative progression. This culminates in Baldur later clashing with more difficult enemies and bosses (who always remain more advanced comparatively), but results in him giving a far more impressive account of himself due to a constantly expanding Skill Tree and arsenal.

Our conundrum is this: Too Human is rubbish and mysteriously addictive all at the same time. It's not as bad as you might have heard, but nowhere near as good as it should have been. It's a game that had us tearing our hair out in frustration, had us laughing at its technical failings and bemused by its ridiculous plot, and yet we played it obsessively for five days solid, and, during that time, actually enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.

The story behind Too Human is way to deep and complex to dive into in this review but basically it's a story about a hero; one hero in a universe that mixes Norse mythology and your favorite science fiction novel into one fluid storyline. What comes out of the oven is a very interesting (melting pot) of situations that more than once reminded me of the movie Gladiator (probably my top movie of all time). From the beginning Too Human has been pitched as a trilogy and now that I have completed the entire story I can only hope that the trilogy is continued, don't expect closure at the end of this one. This game is all about decisions, the first one coming at the very second you boot up the disc. There are five different classes to choose from, each with their own unique set of advantages or disadvantages. Make sure to take some time and carefully choose which one to best mesh with your style of gameplay because once the choice is made there is no going back. All five are fairly balanced and beating the game with any one of them is very possible.

Individual skill trees for each character class provide a considerable spectrum for character development, unlocking new abilities and bumping attributes considerably. Beyond the standard skill tree a second tree is unlocked later in the game based around an Alignment choice between Human or Cybernetic. Although this has little bearing on the plot or other characters, it does at least provide further areas for development and harks back to an influential quote from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil along with the mocking Baldur receives from the other Gods that he shuns cybernetic technology, and is himself 'too human'.

For the most part, the story is psychobabble, told through computer-generated sequences that look sloppy and unfinished. The entire game stays consistent with that same lack of polish, displaying unappealing visuals and several glitches. On the plus side, some of the enemies do animate beautifully, especially the complicated fire beasts you'll run across. Above-average voice work and an ominous and moving soundtrack are also of good quality.

Baldur will flow from one enemy to the next as long as you hold the right analog stick in the proper direction. Learning how to fluidly switch between enemies takes some time: you need to change targets at the right moment to keep the flow going. If you do this, you can combo for a long time, building your meter and having a steady supply of combo points to use for big attacks. Once you can get a handle on the controls, the combat in Too Human becomes a satisfying experience. It's one of the first hack-and-slash games where fluidity is rewarded more than straight button-mashing, and it's a relief both for thumbs and controllers alike. Sliding and swathing through a line of enemies is extremely satisfying, and without the button mashing it feels less brutish.

Too Human was designed specifically with this unique control scheme in mind. It wasn't shoe-horned in at the last second. As a result, there are certain aspects of the gameplay which require the controls to be as they are, and learning to master them is thusly important. With a little practice, Too Human is perfectly playable. That may come at the cost of instant accessibility, but it's nice to see that decisions to dumb down the game for the sake of making it trivial to play from the outset were avoided.

Sadly, once you're past the control issues, you'll likely take issue with the fact that the artificial intelligence is extremely limited. There are different kinds of enemies that have different routines ranged attackers will stay in the back and try to avoid a direct confrontation with you while others will charge forward either to attack or to explode. It's all very simple stuff: the joy comes not from dealing with a few smart enemies but rather with managing health while fighting hordes of dumb ones. Unfortunately, this doesn't hold for the bosses, which are all disappointingly boring bouts that are endured rather than triumphed over.

Too Human's main problem, amid a host of minor ones, is its screwy sense of balance, a problem that seems to leach through everything. At the start, for instance, you're offered five distinct character classes with variations in ranged or melee abilities and offensive or defensive specialties, then practically forced to pick the Bio Engineer because he's the only one capable of healing himself on the fly. Others, like the bulwarked Defender or generalist Champion, who rely on random health pack drops that occasionally fail to materialize, simply die a lot.

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