Not Human Enough
October 19, 2008 8:53 pm Games for Fun, Gaming
Well, if the title is any indication you can guess where this is going.
I picked up Too Human with an open mind, and thought it might be decent. Sometimes you see opinions on message boards which tend to be overreactions. Someone I knew told me they were enjoying Too Human, so why not? I didn’t have anything else lined up at the time.
I fired it up and was actually drawn in right away. The introduction was decent. I like spacey stuff and as it turns out, you coming in off a drop ship with some other military types to search some cave in some remote region that everyone is scared of. You play as “Lord Baldur,” and you soon learn that the entire game’s story is based on Norse mythos, set in some techno-future. Okay, points for originality.
The combat isn’t bad to start with. I knew beforehand there would be lots of melee attacking, so I went with the Berserker class. You end up pushing the analog stick towards the enemy you want to attack, and then you keep changing the sticks direction to attack a new enemy (no buttons required). Eventually you end up getting guns, but they do less damage than melee weapons (and the range on them is terrible). Anyway, it’s definitely unlike any control scheme I’ve encountered again. More points for originality.
There’s also loot. Lots of loot. You’re constantly upgrading various pieces of armor, your weapons, runes (I never understood these) and crafting new items as well. There’s various levels of armor (gray, green, purple, etc) which give you an indication of how awesome something will be (ala World of Warcraft), although those colors can be misleading at times (a level 1o green item might be a lot better than a level eight purple for example).
Everything seems good on paper, but after the initial set of levels, Too Human started annoying me exponentially.
Once you get into the city which I’m guessing is part of a hub design (I didn’t finish Too Human so I assume you come back here multiple times), you’ll find you have to walk all over the place. The problem is that it’s huge, open and empty. There’s no “transit” system (Mass Effect) so you’re forced to walk (slowly) everywhere. Common, this isn’t an MMO. The city environment is also used to drive the story along, but the story and characters are not that great. I think you’d have to do a lot to connect the average gamer with something as far out as “Future Norse,” and unfortunately the connection is almost entirely missing. For example, there’s a squad of “Wolfs” (army dudes) that go into battle with you. Now, besides the AI being terrible on so many levels (they rarely kill anything, they run into walls, they have terrible VO) you’re off killing everything and running ahead, and they’re just dying all the time. There’s no interaction or connection between the player AI on any level, they just seem to co-exist. For example, In a later level, there’s a really annoying story line (just VO that plays on active AI) about the squad giving the leader guff, and the leader talking smack back. It goes on and on and has no relevance to what’s happening around you (it’s poorly acted as well). They never seem to refer to Baldur either, or you to them. Are you leading the squad? Who is this squad leader they keep talking about? I thought I was in charge?
What would have made this better? I dunno, go with the Marvel Ultimate Alliance model and give the player a few characters to tag-team with and customize. The game seems to have lots of customization anyway. Save those cycles on something useful and fun. Maybe Silicon Knights just had to have one “god” running around.
The combat gets worse beyond the first few levels as it gets more complex. You have to mix up gun use, melee, aiming at certain parts of enemies to kill them, knocking guys into the air and juggling them and so on. However, beyond the very simple push-the-stick-in-the-direction-of-the-enemy gameplay, the controls are frustrating. Even the stick-pushing controls are iffy, since it’s hard to tell when you can actually “slide” into an enemy or not. Besides the controls, tons of enemies get thrown at you and they’re all pretty much the same, both in look and behavior. This makes Too Human feel repetitive awfully fast. And if the engagement isn’t repetitive, it’s extremely difficult to the point of frustration. The experience is compounded by the fact that when you die, a Valkyrie (angel) comes down and brings you to heaven in a long, drawn out sequence. You also die a lot so you end up seeing the same sequence over and over again. Too Human’s death sequence is another perfect case study for what not to do when killing the player.
The combat can also become boring due to the level design. So far out of the first 1/4 of the game, the levels have all been long, wide, flat hallways. There’s almost no vertical combat, which I guess wouldn’t support the control scheme anyway. Well, I take that back, why not? Just have the player “fly” up to where the enemy is if they’re within range? In any case, there just isn’t enough interesting stuff happening in the levels besides slugging it out with enemies which are all similar. The best sections involve traveling to “Cyberspace” which allows Baldur to influence the “real” world by taking actions in Cyberspace. For example, you use the equivalence of a “force power” in certain spots to throw a boulder through a wall, which opens up a door in Baldur’s world. It’s not really that imaginatively done though. It’s almost always “opening an actual door in Cyberspace opens the actual door in your world” type scenarios. I wouldn’t call these puzzles by any stretch.
I think Too Human over does the loot. You’re stopping after every few encounters or chests to check and see if it’s time to upgrade something. There’s a lot to upgrade, so I ended up going through all of my equipment to see if there was something I could improve. Maybe it’s just me being an OCD gamer, but after every few pieces of loot, I’m going to check and see if any of it’s worth using, especially with names I can’t relate to like “Ceremonial Quickdraw Mounting” (leg armor), “Honed Seax of Ensnaring” (sword) or “Chaotic Passive Field Array” (shoulder armor). Look, I’m into fantasy stuff and D&D to some degree, but I couldn’t understand what a good portion of the equipment was when I picked it up.
I’m not sure if I want to finish playing Too Human, but I really want those gamer points. Part of me thinks the game will get better as it goes along, but most of me thinks I’m crazy for having that thought. It isn’t helping that I’ve been playing Dead Space as well, which I’m enjoying way more. With the holiday game season coming up, I don’t want to play Too Human when I could be catching up on Brothers in Arms, Bad Company, Dead Space, Rock Band 2, and soon Gears 2 and Fallout 3.
I don’t want to blast Too Human all day. I’m sure some people will love it and the people at Silicon Knights worked really hard on it. There were just a lot of questionable choices made in the execution of Too Human and I expected a lot more from a game that’s been in development since the Original Playstation was out.