Reviews - Xbox 360

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There are three parts to making a Video Game.  Number one is the Engineering, writing the code, and making sure that the game will fundamentally work. Number two is the Artistry, making sure that the textures are beautiful, and only take up as much memory as the system can take at once. The third is Design, basically everything else, making sure the story is good, and makes sense, levels are the right length, the controls are right, and the game is generally fun is down to the Designer.  Silicon Knights (the developers of Too Human) seem to have two of the three steps absolutely perfect, there is no fault in the way that the game runs (so the engineers have done their job) and the art in the game is absolutely stunning (so the artists have done their job).  All this suddenly goes to waste when you realise that the game has some major design flaws. Although ridiculously addictive, Too Human has more than its share of problems.  

Warning: Strong language after the Jump

The first problem that you will notice (and you will notice it) is that the camera is broken.  Third person games should use the right thumb stick as the camera control, Too Human doesn’t. Instead it uses the right bumper button to awkwardly swing the camera into the direction you are looking. It is the system.  Actually, it is the only system that works.  Silicon Knights seem to have some kind of God-Complex, in that they think they can mess with the fundamental rules of games and expect people to still bat half an eye as they delete the Demo, and as such have taken the approach that they wanted to make a game that was different, unfortunately different doesn’t always mean good.  There is no control over the camera and, after having that control for nearly a decade, it is something that you naturally expect. The camera in-game points in the wrong direction, constantly, and the missing element of control means that you are often simply firing at a computer designated.

The fights in the game are pretty cool, although once again, they are annoying.  You will find yourself thinking up tactics like “go and kill the guy who has a rocket launcher attached to his back”. A great tactic, but the crap controls make it really difficult to do anything besides stand in the centre of a horde of enemies and pick them off, one by one. The boss-battles are ridiculously easy, but long winded, and if your character is shit with guns you will find yourself shooting for a long time.  The basic tactic to killing a boss is, run around it in circles for a long time, shooting at his/her legs/arms, and avoid whatever small annoyance that they send flying/walking over to you.

The punishment of death in this game is to bore the flying shit out of you.  The punishment should never be a 30-60 second un-skippable cut-scene, and if you must make it that long you could at least make it interesting.  Some bitch of an Angel floats her way down (apparently with no kind of rush what-so-ever) while your men are being completely destroyed by the mo-fo who killed you.  You come back to life about 30 yards away from where you died, with less teammates and damaged armour.  I feel that the game wants me to hate it at this point because you return to battle, and die again, watch the cut-scene, return with weaker armour and even less men. Why make it more difficult? The only reason that I can think of is that the designers really don’t give a shit about selling Too Human 2.0 to anyone.

The armour system is great, but the problem that is attached to it is that you pick so much crap on your way around the game; there is almost no point in using it.  5mins after picking up the Über-Sword of your dreams, something better comes along.  This leaves the feature in the game heavily under-used.

There are other small annoyances in the game, like the fact that it jumps between Final Fantasy/Lost Odyssey style camera to Gears of War/Rainbow Six style camera, to a whole new kind of camera that can be called “balls”.  Other annoyances include the speed that you walk, it’s fine to stroll at the speed of a 90-year-old-zimmer-frame-bound-Sloth when you are killing every single fucker in the area, but there are sections where you find yourself wondering through a forest, trying to solve the simplest of puzzles that apparently add to the depth of the game. Although frankly, the game must be pretty shallow if that is how you make it feel deep.

All of the previous faults would be acceptable if it weren’t for the failures of the story.  A crude re-hash of ancient Norse Mythology that would make Odin rip out his soul and feed it to Sleipnir (just Google the words you don’t know).  You play as Baldr, the Norse God of light + beauty and being a whiny little pussy-assed-bitch (can I say that?), and you are hunting Loki, the Christian Angel of Death[?]/Norse God of being a total Bad-Ass. I’ll give you a little background on real Norse (this is probably a spoiler for one of the later games): Loki hypnotises the brother of Baldr into killing Baldr, with mistletoe. A lot of the time the references to Norse Mythos feels tacked on to remind the player that you are in fact not playing Diablo, in 3D.  A really cheap kick in the balls arrives fairly suddenly when you realise that the game has ended on one of the worst cliff-hangers in history. Not only was it crap, but it didn’t make me want to know what happens next.

All-in-all Too Human is a brilliant concept, poorly carried out.   It’s still worth a purchase, if not for playing online in a hack-‘em-up-all-out-brawl with your friends, at least for playing a single player hack-‘em-up-all-out-brawl without any of your friends.  It is still good fun, but it was crap enough that I could write another few thousand words on its faults (I won’t bore you though).   Don’t come here looking for the epic masterpiece that Dennis has been promising for the last 10-odd years, but by the same token don’t dismiss it because Meta-Critic says that it’s bad.

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