Aug 28
Review: Too Human (X360)
Microsoft’s fall line-up starts a little early this year. Originally announced as a four-disc Playstation game, Too Human gets its time to shine just before the frantic holiday buying season. Has ten years of marination inside the mind of Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack made Too Human too ambitious for its own good? Find out after the break.
The fiction of Too Human is a unique blend of science fiction and traditional Norse mythology. The player begins with control of hero Baldur who, despite the name, isn’t much more bald than any other space marines found in numerous cliche games throughout the industry. Semi-baldness in tote, the player spearheads the war with the machines. After a violent bar room brawl against a cybernetic version of Beowulf’s Grendel, although Too Human spells it Grendl, Baldur brings the monsters right arm back to the Aesir. Acting as a Jedi Console-like group, the Aesir command Baldur to find Grendl and destroy it. This triggers series of events that require the Aesir to follow the path of Odin and wage war on Hel. What’s your primary weapon in this war? It’s the right analog stick. That’s right! All melee combat is done using the right stick. This type of control method comes across as simplistic. But it’s not just about the size of your control scheme; it’s what you do with it. I was about five hours into the game before really taking advantage of all the different attacks. The combination of fierce attacks, finishing moves, gun combat, ruiners, battle cries and drone spiders becomes extremely satisfying. That being said, in order to succeed, you must understand your enemies as well.
This is where the combat gets strategic. Some enemies are immune to your attacks while others may take advantage of them. Enemies in Too Human have a color coding system representing its status effect. A simple example are the orange fire enemies. Finishing them off in close proximity causes the player to catch fire, quickly draining your life gauge. However, you can also use these status effects to your advantage. By destroying a fire enemy in a group of neutral enemies, the neutrals will start burning, draining their life and making them far easier to kill. Some enemies start with a neutral status and will change status to suit your type of attack. I still don’t know all of the different status effects; I just know that there are a lot of them. At higher levels you will need to use your entire suit of combat tactics to prevail, or believe me, you will die.
I found myself dying a lot anyways … achievement unlocked. Not to contradict myself, but this game gets very difficult. By the middle of the second level you’ll find yourself getting schooled. Adding cheap one-hit kills to the sometime-glitchy hit detection results in feelings of utter rage. Luckily, when you die you never have to restart anything; everything remains the same as it was right before you died. The enemies’ life gauges aren’t replenished, they don’t respawn. Think Bioshock, and you’ve got the idea. But every time you die you will have to watch a 30 second cut scene. As one can imagine, this gets very annoying, very quickly. Most of the time you will just want to instantly respawn and get back into the action. But you can use this time to do some inventory management and add to your skill trees.
Loot: the quest for more stuff. This is the reason to keep playing Too Human, even after finishing the story mode. Throughout the game you’ll be constantly getting more stuff. In addition to providing traditional loot, like armor and weapons, Too Human adds some other systems to keep players busy. The rune and charm system is the most over-looked and complicated process the game. This isn’t included in the instruction manual, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong. You will come across these different charms which require the player to fulfill mini-quests. Once finishing the mini-quest you must insert different runes into the charm to activate it. Upon activating the charms you will reap the benefits, adding many different power-ups to your arsenal. Along with loot, Too Human also gives the player the opportunity to explore two different skill trees, class and alignment. The class skill tree refers to the five different classes in the game. Alignment refers to a choice that you make during the game between cybernetic and human. As you play the game your character will be leveling up towards a maximum level of 50. Reaching the next level rewards the player with skill points that you can add to your skill tree to unlock new abilities. There is an option to “respec” your skill trees. If you make a mistake and go down the wrong path of the tree, you can use some bounty to reset it and choose a new path.
I’ve invested over 30 hours into Too Human and I’m still jonesing for more. After going it alone for my first play through, I’m still playing the four levels over and over again. I would’ve preferred another level or two for some extra variety. The levels are diverse enough in regards to the art direction; each looks unique and inviting. But the levels play very much the same. You’ll be walking though the same type of hallways, fighting hoards of enemies till your eyes start bleeding. Keeping it feeling fresh are the randomly generated enemy encounters. Every play through differs depending on what level your character is at. It gets truly insane if your character is above level 40. Even when you’re participating in the online co-operative mode, the game knows it and makes the encounters even harder. In one of the secret challenge rooms I fought over 300 enemies throughout the five minute time limit. Some areas seem too hard, like it was designed for four players. Many encounters have taken over 20 minutes to get through. For example, I was in a two player game, and we were stuck in the the second level, Ice Forest. We died around 15 times each, often from one-hit kills, each time having to watch the 30 second cut-scene. It’s so frustrating at times.
Unfortunately, there are some things holding Too Human back from rolling with the big dogs, namely, the repetitious nature of the game. With my primary character, the kill count is at 8786 and the death count at 134. You do a lot of killing and dying. Collision detection is hit-or-miss, literally; sometimes you’ll hit when you should miss and vise-versa. Boss battles can be an exercise in frustration. The game’s story is, for the most part, entertaining, especially near the end. It’s told in a cool way by letting you play through flashbacks with great characters and solid voice acting. However, a few of the action scenes are poorly done with bad effects and a lack of general polish.
I’m still having fun playing Too Human. After writing this, I’m going to go back for more. It feels fresh in this world of first-person shooter army games. The more you put into it the more you will get out of it. At the same time, providing satisfaction for a quick pick-up and play. If you’re looking for something different, do yourself a favor and try Silicon Knights’ Too Human.
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I don’t think I could disagree with this review more. This is the worst hyped exclusive since Lair. The combat system is one of the worst I have ever played in any game. The story is pretty terrible and the animations are just bad.
I guess if you are a parent and your children are terrible you could buy this game to punicsh them. I promise you they will be reading the bible tomorrw just so you will return the damn game. Anyway beside for child abuse I see no reason to even waste your time renting this game.
Hellraiser, fuck you.
I’m now nearing 40 hours playing this game. Take from that what you will.
I think I’m one of the few who was not even interested in this game from the outset. All I’ve been hearing is that “it is long”. I have plenty of shit to do myself.
This game is fun. Looking forward to playing it more and can’t wait for Too Human: Rise of the Giants.
One of my buddies has been playing this a lot. He likes loot games.
/shrug.
I can say that while the combat system might at first play seem unnatural, seeing as nothing has really had this type of control before (No not even Geometry Wars although it is a similar idea only because your right analog initiates your basic melee attack), I grew very accustomed to it and feel that it is very intuitive and offers a lot of control with a minimum amount of button work.
After playing through the game with a friend of mine, we were disappointed that we entirely missed out on the story in multi-player and I wish they would have at least gratified the end game victory with a cut scene in multi (Diablo anyone?).
Thinking back upon Too Human I am a bit disappointed at the fact that it is not four player…a feature which would have given it much more value, and the fact that you cannot play more than one player on a single system…a facet I believe is missing from far too many games which turns out is a part of many of the most popular games recently ‘Halo, Gears of War, Smash Brothers Brawl, and the more recent and my currently beloved Castle Crashers’ - and no I didn’t necessarily like any of the aforementioned titles, but yes Smash Bros Brawl was awesome.
Looting in game is one of the most streamlined loot systems I have ever run into, simply giving you the option to sell things from your inventory, and allowing you to auto-sell certain loot varieties (common, uncommon, rare, etc.) and the ability to salvage certain item types on the fly is fantastic…just got that new rare and definitely don’t need the blues in your inventory? Auto-salvage!
However, I did have a lot of fun playing through some of the game in both single-player (just finished the Ice Forest) and multi-player….even if I never managed to achieve the valkyrie’s folly achievement as of yet, I may be able to acquire this coveted item soon.
Primarily this game reminds me of the original Diablo, except that running in and out of the dungeon to sell loot is unnecessary, there isn’t as much of a variety of spells although there is a greater variety of melee attacks (and combat revolves around combos and juggling/plowing through enemies instead of clicking your left and right mouse button over 9,000 times)….and as apposed to the more common fantasy realm in the loot-game action RPG genre it is a sci-fi fantasy mix which made it appeal to me as it made it feel a bit more fresh.
Yes, although the enemies do level with you (think Oblivion…..) It simply makes it so that you can enjoy any part of the game (after I completed multiplayer and was level 34 I believe it was I went straight on to single-player with that character) without having to have a separate character. Rather than having obsolete loot every few levels you have to decide which loot is better and for what reason, personally I chose the class with the most health, and maxed out (There is a lot of variety involved with the socketing/rune system in game and can mean the difference between a great character and a mediocre one) his health/armor stat, and then pushed my base weapon damage to the extreme.
Another issue that some might consider a fault, is that instead of being extremely lucrative to go straight down a skill tree, it may in fact be better to simply max out individual skills near the top to increase base damage and the like, which at points was definitely an issue in the beginning to which I respec’ed (costing a minimal amount of bounty - unless you do it many times) to learn which skills were truly the most beneficial. Also don’t forget the second tree which in many cases is as important if not more important that the one you start with enabling you to increase the rate of increase of your combo meter for example.
One more touch on the combat is that in order to succeed in many occasions you MUST use the dodge roll mechanic, as it avoids damage/getting knocked over constantly (example: artillery enemies are one of the most dangerous enemies in game). Knocking enemies into the air, cutting through them and plowing down into another enemy is very satisfying and if you have a handle on the controls, for the most part, you go where you intend to. Keep in mind the “advanced” combat skills are necessary to survive, toss one of the double forward on both sticks attacks at a suicide enemy ahead and he will explode and kill all the others around him. Increasing your Combo meter is also vital as it allows you to use your special abilities.
With all of the touches that were thrown into Too Human I feel as though the final product was enjoyable and definitely worth at least one romp through with a friend. With all that in mind (if you bothered to read my comment at all), I’m sure you can all make your own decisions as you’ll enjoy what you enjoy, seeing as games are similar to movies in that regard, I just like to ramble. obviously.
At a basic level, I appreciated your review Finjitzu and definitely see a lot of fun can be had with Too Human.
I’ve sorta hit a wall in Too Human. I’ve been playing with my lvl 50 Champion for about 8 hours now, for a total of around 40 hours with one character. I still haven’t gotten a epic piece of armor. I’m finding myself going through levels over and over again looking for my epic set but not finding it. It’s starting to get frustrating. I’ve been looking at some boards and I’ve only seen one dude who has their complete epic set, after 100 hours. So do I want to invest 100 hours into one character? Not really, not with only 4 levels. So I think I’m gonna start maxing out my other characters.
Best of luck on that, if you are looking for someone to level with for awhile, I have a few characters at different levels, and I might have some time to throw down some monster slaying….however the chances in the next week or so are very slim, ask Wonko for my gamertag, I’m just paranoid about abuse when you post any of anything anywhere on the internet.
I’m surprised you read an unbiased review on this game, from a slightly independent gaming website. I’ve gotta agree, I love the game, and it’s hard to state why. It’s just a very unique game for me, because I’ve never played something like Diablo or any loot games, but I’ve always noticed I’ve loved loot in RPGs (KOTOR, Fable, Oblivion) and hack/slash gameplay is awesome.
My only big problems with the game are, some of the bosses need some clever design to them, like Zelda. The Giant Troll on World Serpent is just fucking lame, he’s not even a Troll you can mount. I would’ve loved to jump on his back, dismember his limbs, or at least disable his fucking arm sentry guns. However, Garm (Helheim) and Grendl-1 (Hall of Heroes) were a lot of fun. I loved Garm, because of his nostalgic use of Ikaruga-like waves of throwing projectiles at you.
And next game, I hope they get the collision detection better, so it feels more like DMC/Ninja Gaiden than Diablo. They can at least do that, without sacrificing making the game an action RPG, instead of just an action game with no dice rolls.
ya know its funny, had I come across this review a few weeks ago I would have agreed with Hellraiser to the fullest. I DLed the demo and played it and I lasted 5 minutes before I said “screw this horrible game”, however whats seems random enough to me I had a friend that rented it from gamefly and he made me start a character for him and I played it again this time with severe boredom on my hands and you know what… I was HOOKED once I figured out the melee mechanics, in a world of button mashing fighters like Dynasty Warriors, Smash Brothers, Tekken, Devil May Cry, God Of War .. etc. I found Too Human to be a breath of fresh air, I mean I played hours upon hours and I wasnt bored, my fingers didnt hurt I dont have to worry about carpal tunnel, I can simply hand thousands of baddies their asses with the flick of a joystick!!! My friend is now hooked too and I bought the game myself afterwards.