 Too Human for Xbox 360, 9/25/2008 | | | Reviewer: JoeBob (, ) |
When I think about Too Human, the game’s extremely lengthy, convoluted developmental cycle is what immediately comes to mind. Silicon Knight’s ambitious action RPG has been in development for nearly a decade moving from Playstation to Gamecube to Xbox 360, and now it is finally complete. The first part of a planned trilogy, Too Human seems eerily similar to another ambitious Xbox title, Advent Rising.
Unlike the semi-enjoyable Advent Rising, this game has almost no good qualities. The player is immediately thrust into an opening cutscene that is impossible to understand, and the story only gets more muddled from there on. From what I could discern, it has something to do with a small nation led by mechanized Greek gods who are on the brink of destruction after being constantly attacked by strange mechanical forces, you can’t get much more clichéd than that. It’s like someone threw The Matrix and God of War in a blender and then threw up in it. While playing the game I desperately tried to make sense of the story but to no avail; And to think that they are going to make this into a trilogy!
Although the story is horrible, I still had faith in Silicon Knights, as they created one of the best horror games of all time, Eternal Darkness. I naively thought that maybe the developers skewered the story in order to spend more time creating some amazing gameplay, but I could not have been more wrong. The game, like any other 3D action title, focuses on third person combat. The main character Baldur is as unoriginal as they come. A typical 3D action game archetype; he looks like Kratos from God of War and uses a weapon scheme similar to Dante from Devil May Cry, for he uses both melee weapons (swords, hammers, staffs) as well as well as guns (pistols, rifles, canons). One of the main problems is the controls. In order to perform melee attacks you must randomly wiggle the right analog stick which causes Baldur to perform a flurry of random attacks in a tornado like motion. Moving the physical combat controls to the right analog stick immediately destroys any hopes of intuitive comboing and close combat battles become nothing more than repetitive joystick mashing. The gun controls are no better. The right gun is controlled by the right trigger while the left gun is controlled by the left trigger. This seems perfectly fine, and it would be fine, if the game didn’t copy Grand Theft Auto 3’s targeting system. There is an overall lack of precision as your ranged weapon of choice automatically targets the nearest enemy. This is extremely frustrating as often times the most threatening baddies are placed in the back of the area. These guys will just sit back and fire missiles at you from afar and the worst part is that you are forced to fight all of the enemies around you before you can even think about eliminating the only legitimate threat in the region. To top it all off the camera angles are atrocious. The game does allow you to center the camera, but this feature never pays off, especially in the heat of battle.
Perhaps the worst characteristic of this massacre of a game is the difficulty. The game might be challenging if it allowed the player to die. Instead of dying when you run out of health you are instead lifted up by a cybernetic valkyrie and placed exactly where you were before your health ran out. Every enemy you damaged before death is still damaged the same amount and the character takes no penalties, there is not even a dock in experience points. The valkyrie sequence is extremely pointless as it lasts a good chunk of time and is just downright annoying. This sequence alone would be enough of a gripe for me to knock two points from the score of an otherwise great game. The fact that the bosses are extremely simple only hurts the game’s difficulty even more. Each boss attacks in an embarrassingly methodical pattern. Every boss seems to just run at Baldur blindly allowing you to simply jump out of the way and shoot it. Even if one of them could manage to drop your health to zero, you would only reappear with all HP replenished.
This game’s main weakness in my opinion is the fact that it splits its focus between RPG and action elements and ends up doing neither well. The RPG component is significantly better than the action component though. There are five different character classes to choose from and many different weapons and armor sets to be found. You level up your skills in a way very similar to Baldur’s Gate or Champions of Norrath. Overall the RPG elements are the game’s strongest feature. The sad thing is that although there are some cool skills to gain, none of them are useful in combat, you’d be better off just randomly moving the right analog stick.
One good thing I can say about Too Human is that the graphics and music are actually not too bad. The voice actors are actually very professional which is why it’s depressing that they have to deliver lines like “Permission to kick ass sir?” and “The bigger they are the more I like killin’ em’.” Luckily the art style is very sleek and original and the music fits the action pretty well most of the time. So at least the pile of crap that is Too Human is wrapped up in a pretty gift box.
All things considered Too Human is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Despite decent art and musical direction as well as some good RPG elements the game still manages to be worse than I could ever imagine. I am amazed that a game that has been in development for 9 years could truly suck this badly. Thanks to this game I finally have a significant theory on how the world will end. Someone please stop Silicon Knights before they complete the trilogy, or else. |
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