Game Review: Too Human (Xbox 360)

After almost ten years of development riddled with exclusive partnerships, lawsuits, and hype, Silicon Knight‘s ‘Too Human’ finally hit the UK shelves. After playing through the demo a few times, I figured Too Human was definitely worth a look. Hopefully all the time that the game had in development hadn’t gone to waste.

In Too Human you play as Baldur, a cybernetically enhanced god, as he leads the struggle against Loki, who has turned on Baldur’s family, the Aesir. As well as Loki, Baldur and the other Aesir must deal with the advancing machine army, whilst protecting the increasingly disillusioned humans that they serve. If you’ve just read that and thought “that sounds like a great premise for a game storyline”, then I’d have to agree with you. Unfortunately, the end result is something of a train wreck.

Let me try and summarise it for you: Too Human is essentially a retelling of Norse Mythology, but with the Marines from Halo, and the Geth from Mass Effect. Whoever thought of combining these ideas should be sent a box of chocolates, but the dimwit who wrote the plot and accompanying dialogue should have that box shoved up his arse. The story is told through infrequent (which I suppose I should be thankful for) and dull cutscenes littered with cliché dialogue, full of stereotyped characters with about as much depth as Jamie-Lynn Spears autobiography. Oh, snap.

"Ew, gross."

Normally, a bad plot wouldn’t bother me that much, so long as the gameplay holds up. But when the gameplay is pushed aside purely to advance a bad story, then it annoys me. Even though you can skip the cutscenes by randomly mashing every button on the controller, it’s still such a chore walking (yes, walking. No fun involved, just walking) to the locations and waiting for the loading screens, you might as well watch the damn things in the end, since you’ve wasted over ten minutes getting there. I don’t think that a games story should be the focus at the best of times, since I play a game for the actual gameplay, but when a game like Too Human tries ramming a bad storyline down my throat, it puts me right off the game. Still, if the gameplay holds up, it becomes a little harder to criticise, so how did Too Human do on that front?

As an action-RPG, Too Human’s gameplay is split into two distinct elements of lightning paced combat and detailed role playing. Seeing as my reviewing OCD has kicked in again, I’ll go through both elements individually.

If you’ve ever played an RPG before, you’ll already be familiar with what Too Human offers. As with all good role players you’ll start by choosing a class, each with their own unique abilities and skills. As you progress through the game you’ll level up, increasing your skills and enabling you to use better equipment.

There are five classes available at the start of the game; the Berserker, the Defender, the Champion, the Commando and the Bio Engineer, each with their own unique traits and skill trees. While different classes don’t offer significantly different gameplay there’s still a decent amount of diversity, and it’s worth testing a couple of the classes before making a full assault on the campaign.

The Champion character class, wearing some gorgeous armour.

Each class’s abilities are organised into skill trees, which allows you to plan how you’ll level up, and create a character that suits how you want to play. I brought me back to the good old days of Diablo 2, when I’d play late into the night trying to level up experimental characters, and the only human interaction I’d have was walking into my brothers room and watching him do the exact same thing. I was so cool. Like Diablo 2, you won’t be able to fully level every skill, instead being restricted to one skill branch. While this is beneficial to the action gameplay, as each skill is mapped to a single button, I felt it took the edge off the role playing element, since there is no need for intelligent levelling beyond a certain point, and you can just fill every available skill before reaching level 50. I know that the general consensus among gamers and developers is that your average console gamer is less sophisticated than the PC gamer, but Too Human makes things too simple.

Too Human boasts a wide selection of armour and weapons. As well as different types of weapon, there is a variety of weapon and armour designs, all of which can be customised to your liking, either with statistical enhancements or a simple colour change. It’s surprisingly deep for a console game. Admittedly the interface isn’t the best, and at the beginning I was struggling to navigate through the inventory to find and upgrade different weapons, but eventually I did get used to it. Just don’t expect anything too user-friendly.

A quarter of the way through the game, you’ll be given a chance to follow a path which will further enhance your character. You’ll have to choose to either enhance your abilities with cybernetics, or to remain “Too Human” and use your natural abilities and spirit in battles. It sounds good, but it didn’t develop as I expected. I was hoping that, after every mission or certain about of level ups, you’d be given the choice again, allowing you to build a character that was either well balanced or completely extreme, but the choice can only be made once. I can’t help but feel that the character development would be significantly deeper if Too Human allowed us to play around with the cybernetic and human sides with just one character.

Follow the human path and learn how to summon giant f**king ghost bears.

On occasion, Too Human does cross the line between “detailed” and “random”. Some of the weapons and armour sound like they’ve been named by a random title generator, and it doesn’t help that, for no obvious reason, each type of weapon has about four different names. You’re not fooling anyone, Too Human, we can all see that a ‘falchion’ and a ‘blood eel’ are exactly the same f**king thing. They might as well have called every item “The Great Thing of Pure Awesomeness”, and left it at that. Yes, I know it’s nitpicky, but it’s true.

While you’re playing Too Human, the majority of your time will be spent smashing, slicing, and shooting your way through hordes of enemies. Thanks to the intuitive control scheme, this is arguably the strongest point of the game.

Explosions, guns, and manic swordplay are all commonplace in Too Human. And they're all awesome.

Melee combat is fought purely with the left and right analogue sticks, and despite it’s simplicity is surprisingly deep. Ranged “Fierce” attacks, finishing moves, and air combat are all incredibly simple to master, but the variety of attacks and weapons allows you to develop your own flexible fighting style. Or just sling it around like a mad ass, whatever works for you. Admittedly the melee combat never really evolves or develops, even if you’re playing as the Berserker, but it doesn’t really need to. Because of how effortlessly satisfying it is to hack your way through a hundred enemies, you probably won’t give a damn about evolution.

Gunplay doesn’t work quite as well. Yes, it’s fun throwing enemies into the air and juggling them Devil May Cry style, and firing two pistols in different directions is still one of the coolest things ever, but the target system is so fiddly that managing to do these things is sometimes a monumental feat in itself. There were times when I’d try and target an enemy adjacent to the one I was already shooting, but attempting to target it with a simple flick of the analogue stick resulted in Baldur flinging his arms around, wildly shooting everything but the horde of enemies in front of me. Thank god there’s no friendly fire.

This gun crossover looks cool, but £5 says that the other laser is firing at a wall.

As well as melee and ranged attacks, each class has it’s own unique Spider Abilities, War Cries and Ruiners, which can be used in a battle to devastating effect. Thanks to the simple controls, these abilities can swiftly tilt the battle in your favour with a quick button press. There’s something about being surrounded by vicious hordes of enemies, pressing ‘Y’ once, and watching everything explode instantly that I really enjoyed, it was just so satisfying causing mass carnage with just one button. Maybe I should look into a career as a pyrotechnic.

Individually, these combat elements would make for a decent action experience, but because it is so easy to combine and alternate between different types of combat, Too Human can boast a very good, albeit slightly flawed, action experience.

While Too Human’s gameplay is good, it’s constantly upset by the balance. Considering every class, except the Champion, is a specialist class, it can make the game almost impossible to play against some opponents. For example, when I was playing against one of the later bosses, I found that the only way I could do any noticeable damage was to stand off and shoot, because going too close would either have me killed, or it would be impossible to land the hit. Normally, I’d be fine with this, except I was playing as a Berserker, which meant I couldn't use the melee attacks I’d specialised in, and because I was so piss weak with ranged weapons, I died about eight times before managing to actually beat the thing. Because of the balance issues I found myself constantly frustrated, and dying far more often that I should have - which is a really annoying process as well. While Too Human lets you keep all your experience, and all the damage you’ve done stays on the enemies, you’ll have to watch this painfully slow cutscene of a ‘Valkyrie’ slowly dropping down, picking up your body, and flying it to Valhalla, as some whiney orchestral music play in the background. Apparently soldiers bring violins to the battle, who knew? Watching this every time you die is so annoying it’s untrue, it’s as if the game never gets tired at laughing at your failure and wants you to suffer that little bit more humiliation. The Valkyrie might as well drop down, teabag your dead body, then slap you round the face.

Yes, I'm dead, I get it. Now f**k off.

The majority of the balance issues that Too Human has are almost fixed in the co-op gameplay, which I thought worked really well. I tried the co-op campaign with various different players and character combinations, and it’s a big improvement on the single player. Working co-operatively, you and your team-mate will have to play to each others strengths to take down the oncoming hordes of enemies as well as the bigger, tougher beasties. It’s surprising tactical, and when playing to each others strengths, it’s incredibly satisfying. With the ability for the guest to drop in and out of the game at will, it’s arguably one of the better co-op experiences I’ve played online.

The main problem I have with the game’s co-op is that it’s limited to two players which, after playing through the four player Halo 3 co-op, feels incredibly restricted. I can’t see why they’d limit it to only two players, when four players would only enhance the tactical co-op gameplay. You could argue that the game might be too easy with four players working together, but I’m sure that just increasing the difficulty or the amount of enemies could have solved that problem. I think that the developers really missed a trick by limiting the co-op gameplay. While it is still an improvement on the single player, there’s still room for improvement, which I can only hope will come in the sequels.

Considering the undeniably epic scale of Too Human, the graphics are pretty damn impressive. Carving your way through a mass of enemies is brilliant to watch. As enemies are hurled into the air and colourful armour dashes around the battlefield, you can’t help but be at least slightly impressed. That said, the environments you’ll be fighting in are hardly the most inspiring. Apart from the Aesir headquarters, which you’ll visit after every mission, every single environment is dark, boring, and ugly. Admittedly the world is supposed to look like that, it still doesn’t change the fact that the Too Human world is uninteresting, generic, and lacks variety.

If in doubt, paint it grey.

While the gameplay looks impressive, the cutscenes aren’t nearly as fluid. Apart from a select few Aesir, every character is so generic that you’ll probably end up disregarding them as unimportant, even the ones that are supposedly relevant to the storyline. The animations in cutscenes also feel incredibly slow, and the opening cutscene almost put me off playing through the rest of the game. Maybe my standards are too high, because I was constantly comparing them to Devil May Cry 4, but it’s just so slow, robotic and rusty. It doesn’t absorb me like other games have managed to do.

The Too Human musical score is probably the strongest feature of the game besides the action gameplay. The music, ranging from heroic orchestral scores to fast paced guitar solos, is excellent, and never rarely you out of the moment. Hell, it actually ploughs you straight into the moment, and it’s the first time in a while I’ve felt so involved in a game, purely because the music sped up. If anyone remembers the part in Halo 2 where Breaking Benjamin starts playing, and how that spurred you on to a mental killing spree purely because that song kicked ass? Too Human did that for me, admittedly not on such a high level, but it’s still damn good. There is the occasional slip-up, but on the whole it's a damn good soundtrack.

I think it’s fair to say that Too Human is not as good as I expected it to be. There are too many niggling flaws with the game for it to be the great game I was anticipating. Amazingly, despite ten years in development for various consoles, Silicon Knights have still managed to make this feel rushed. Maybe they were just absolutely sick of it.

Still, Too Human is by no means a bad game. It’s a good game, with too many flaws, and far too much hype to live up to. I’d probably put it in the same bracket as Mass Effect, with games that promised so much but didn’t quite deliver everything. The casual players should probably stay away. This game isn’t user friendly, it’s incredibly fiddly and detailed, and unless you’ve got a lot of patience or experience, it’s probably not for you. However, Too Human is definitely worth checking out for gamers, and I’d at least recommend having a quick play through the demo. If it’s your kind of game, you’re going to really enjoy it. Just don’t yell at me when you’ve got the garbage storyline lodged in your trachea.

7/10

See the trailer here.