Actually, wrong. In an unexpected twist, despite me knowing virtually nothing about the game's progress, Too Human managed to betray virtually zero expectations of the game, STILL managing to disappoint me greatly. Which makes me hate to imagine how people would've reacted had they actually been looking forward to it.
In a nutshell, Too Human is an odd mix of Action/RPG that takes a decidely "ancient myth" storyline, modernizes it into hi-tech surroundings, tries a few new concepts and takes very questionable approaches towards establishing them. Oh, and it looks pretty. For what good THAT's worth.
The game starts out simple enough, giving you a choice between five different warrior types, each with their own specialties and skill trees - the dual-wielding, melee-crazy Bezerker, the Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none Champion, the Shield-wielding, defense-oriented... erm, Defender, the gunslinging Commando and the healing support Bio Engineer. Given I was most eager to try out the unusual close combat concepts, I went with the Bezerker.
Right from the moment you're thrown into your first fight, the melee comes off as incredibly basic, and not in a good way. To attack an enemy with your melee weapons, all you have to do is to tilt the right control stick in your target's general direction, and Baldur, the main guy, slides straight on over and slashes them in the face. From there, you either hold the stick down to attack continously, tap the stick to uppercut them into the air for a juggle combo, or tilt both sticks to initiate a heavily damaging Finisher combo. At the best of times, the latter two moves are very unresponsive, and often take at least 2-3 attempts to actually pull off. In the first place, you only even need pull these moves off if you're feeling fancy, as the vast majority of the game outside of boss fights can be accomplished simply by holding the stick down and letting the game do the rest.
The gunplay aspect of the game doesn't fare any better. Baldur never has his ranged weapon out by default - he summons it whenever you pull the trigger for the weapon, and automatically aims and shoots it at the nearest enemy in his line of sight. This targetting system is, without contest, the single worst aiming system I have ever had to put up with in a videogame. Actually changing between targets is a chore which requires you to release the trigger and perfectly align Baldur with your target of choice - without any form of manual camera control outside of preset zoom settings, this makes it impossible for you to attain a specific target in a crowd unless it's purely by accident. Dual wielded weapons, such as pistols, are even worse to use, in that it's possible to target individual enemies with each pistol, and there's virtually no manual control to distinguish the first pistol from the second, aside from a second trigger to fire your other pistol.
It's commonplace to find a game which appears incredibly basic at first though, and develops later on to accomodate advanced moves and tactics - and seeing as Too Human was a very RPG centric game, I had high hopes this would happen. However, this game does almost nothing to reward a player's progress through higher and higher levels of skill - the Skill Tree, which supposedly contains new powers to use in-game, often do little more than slightly altering stats and at the best of times, producing a slightly effective attack that you'll often have no reason to resort to. And even your standard stat enhancements never feel at all satisfying, as the game automatically scales difficulty depending on your skill level - so if you're hoping to royally kick the shit out of the first mission's enemies with stats you gained from finishing the game, forget it - they'll still be roughly as strong as they were right at the end.
Additionally, the game is a complete and utter loot whore - nearly every enemy you defeat will drop at least one equippable item, and sometimes in excess of five. Many of these come with small, subtle stat changes unrelated to its damage or defense rating, and some are even customizable in that regard with stat-enhancing runes that are also found dropped by the game's many peons. By the time you get to the second level though, you'll simply find all this information too overwhelming to care about, and only bother equipping items with the highest attack/defense rating without care of whatever else they do for you. Enemies also frequently drop health pickups too, which further decreases the game's difficulty and reduces most of it to more generic stick tapping.
The only sense of difficulty from Too Human ever comes from enemies that come bigger than you - and initially, with the first of these being the hammer wielding Troll, this proves to be a welcome change of pace. To defeat a Troll, you first have to cripple it by destroying its individually target-able armour pieces, then jump on top of its head, balance yourself to make sure you don't topple off, then deliver a fatal killing blow with a simple tilt of the right stick. This is by far the most satisfying element of Too Human's combat moments, and it's somewhat difficult to get tired of. Of course, you can still destroy Trolls by removing ALL their armour, but that just isn't as satisfying.
As far as giant enemies go though, that's where the fun ends. Come second level, the game starts throwing things at you with incredibly obscure solutions, and few come more frustrating than the bow wielding spider-like enemy that is introduced midway through. Said enemy has a shockwave move that, unlike the Troll's equivalent, cannot by avoided by jumping into the air, which is a puzzling limitation to say the least. It can, however, be dodged by a simple rolling manuever... now stop everything for a minute. Does that make even a BIT of sense to any of you? Didn't think so, because it certaintly didn't make any sense to me either.
Which brings me to the subject of the Boss fights. Like Trolls, most of them expect you to individually damage each individual section of armour - however, unlike Trolls, you cannot jump on top of them for the usual instant kill, and you are expected to destroy ALL of their armour to actually kill it. Most of the time, this is literally impossible to do with melee weapons, on account that not only will you not be able to reach certain parts of the boss (due either to sheer height, or its constant turning to meet facefirst with you), but also that you can actually target armour pieces you have already destroyed - given the game's indescriminate targetting system, this makes aiming for the one armour section you haven't destroyed yet incredibly frustrating, even if you're doing it with a gun. Speaking of guns, nearly every boss has a complete immunity to Laser weapons, as do a great many other large enemies - given that they're technically the most damage-dealing weapons otherwise, some may find themselves in impossible situations when they had the otherwise good practice of selling items weaker than than their best.
So inevitably, despite the overall dumb difficulty of the overall game, vauge sections of the game like this will meet with frustration, and ultimately, the worst part of the game - death. Every time you die in Too Human, you are greeted with an unskippable cutscene in which a Valkyrie appears and supposedly carries you to heaven... then abruptly respawning you just outside the action with full health, exactly as it was when you died, enemy health ratings and all. In addition to being incredibly annoying to have to sit through every time you die, it is incredibly unsatisfying and unrewarding to defeat anything in the game when it simply brings you back to life whenever you die without punishing you in any way - it's almost as if you're playing a deathmatch game, just that you're the only one who can respawn. It comes off as incredibly cheap in practice, and ultimately, makes you hate dying even more than you normally would.
Finally, outside of the actual missions, Too Human is incredibly boring and slow-paced. One of the main reasons is actually incredibly simple - the worlds are big, whilst Baldur is very slow, which makes exploration and, hell, just getting places an utter chore. Worsening things is the fact that there's little to no activity going on, almost no interaction aside from shops, tutorial screens and the obligatory story-advancing cutscene, and the fact that the game barely rewards you for exploring in the first place, outside of... you guessed it, more fucking generic loot. And while the story and settings themselves are inspired by actual mythos, you're unlikely to find much about the game particularly memorable - and right when it looks like things are about to get interesting, the game ends on one of the worst cliffhanger finishes imaginable.
For those looking for an action/RPG with a few new ideas, are patient enough to overcome the game's obscure completion methods and and can appreciate high quality graphics regardless of context, I can still recommend Too Human regardless of my personal despisal for this game. Everybody else? Unless the rest of the trilogy is a completely different game, I'd advice merely renting any entry in the series if you feel like playing at all.
Defining Points:
- The graphics. While Too Human evidently suffers from grey/brown syndrome, the visuals are otherwise crisp and hi-def, and are nothing short of masterful quality in a technical sense. A little more colour would be nice, but otherwise no improvement is needed here.
- Fighting Trolls. These buggers react according to each individual strip of armour you destroy on them, from scrapping alternate weapons on their backs to ruining their movement capabilities by removing their leg plating. Furthermore, they are practically the only armoured enemy who can accurately be targeted by each individual armour piece, and leaping on top of them for the lethal finishing blow is by far the most satisfying aspect in the game. Trolls should have been used as the standard for all the other giant enemies in the game, even the bosses, as they are clearly the only enemy in the game that's any fun to fight.
What could have been done better
- The targeting system for ranged weapons is an absolute mess. Too Human could have gone much better off simply with a manual aim ala typical First Person Shooters, but if the auto-lockon system is to remain, switching targets is something that should be made just as easy as targeting with melee weapons - I should simply be able to point my right stick and an enemy, and expect Baldur to shoot in that direction. Maybe a loose auto-aim system to keep my fire focused on specific enemies, but otherwise, no other bullshit.
- The melee combat needs to be more responsive - granted, the majority of the game can be finished with the only action that Too Human can pick up fluently (ie: the standard sliding strike), but there would have been more incentive to use at least the juggling combos, had it been possible to execute them on the first time every time I ask for it. A few extra moves, some unlockable through the Skill Tree, certaintly wouldn't have killed them - anything to help break the sheer repetitive pace of the standard game.
- Give us a reason to actually CARE about weapons and armour that we get every ten seconds. I mean, +3% sliding distance? +6% jump height? Who actually gives a damn about these pissy mods anyway? If it's not a 25% increase or better in something, I have no reason to care about which item enhances what.
- Why should I have to destroy every individual piece of armour just to kill a boss? Surely I could just cut the whole damn thing in half right after I've exposed its back joints? It's kinda neat that enemies can be weakened according to which pieces of them I've already damaged, but there's no feasible reason why its unarmoured components are somehow invincible whilst it's the ARMOUR that has to take a beating.
- If you're going to make big, massive worlds to explore, do NOT make your main character slower than a lead weight. BIG WORLD + SLOW SPEED = BOREDOM. IT'S NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE.
- Finally, enough with the obscurity. I don't mind if I have to use my head to get around a tricky situation, but at the very least it should make some sort of sense that doesn't require trial and motherfucking error to overcome. Bringing down the ceiling with a bunch of conveniently placed explosives to take down an abnormally massive crowd? Sure, that's cool, as long as I have some way of knowing those things are actually explosive.
Overall...
6/10. Too Human takes a daring new direction for a game of its type, but ultimately falls short due to questionable execution and repetitive, bland and oftimes unresponsive combat mechanics
