Xbox Living

If you had told the developers who started work on Too Human that their game would be released for the Xbox 360, they may have said, “…the what?”

That’s because it was sometime in 1998 and the original Xbox hadn’t even been announced yet.  Too Human was originally planned for the Sony PlayStation.  Since then, the game has been on a roller coaster ride as its developer, Silicon Knights, tried to get it released.  In 2000, Nintendo partnered with Silicon Knights and the project was moved to the GameCube.  Silicon Knights’ attention shifted to other games, though, and it wasn’t until 2005 that Too Human resurfaced with hope of release.  The game was now being developed again.  In fact, Microsoft had comissioned Silicon Knights to create a trilogy of the games.

So with hype dating back to 1999’s E3 convention, expectations for Too Human were obviously high.  The promise of an action-adventure game with RPG elements, with a cyberpunk story based on Norse mythology?  Sounds very cool… in that geeky sort of way.

And indeed, Too Human is fun, but not quite as I was expecting.  It’s mindless, hack-and-slash fun.

The gameplay essentially consists of jumping or sliding from enemy to enemy, slashing them to bits.  You do so by rotating right analog stick around to move your character from enemy to enemy.  You may be fighting anywhere from 10 to 40 or more enemies at a time.  You have a few other moves at your disposal, allowing you deliver damage around you, release a machine to damage or disable enemies, power up your attacks or release some automated weapons to fly around and attack things.

The controls are clumsy, at best.  It’s difficult to precisely control where you want Baldur to go, which enemy to attack and, with larger enemies, where to attack them. The boss fights seem futile and senseless, as an enemy charges at you and delivers a flurry of attacks.  Ranged attacks are hopelessly weak and evading attacks is a challenge.

The cameras were equally frustrating.  As you progress through a level, the camera angle changes as you turn corners or cross bridges.  While this gives a cinematic feel to the game, it can be a bit frustrating when you’re trying to look in a specific direction.

Playing Too Human, I constantly got the feeling that I was missing something — that I didn’t understand how to play it.  Frequent deaths and no obvious strategy left me feeling like I was either really bad at the game, or the game was really bad for me.

Fortunately, dying has little consequence.  Aside from depreciating your armour, which can easily be replaced, all dying only costs you about 20-30 seconds.  The biggest motivation to stay alive is to avoid the death cutscene, in which a Valkyrie descends, picks up your body, and carries you off to Valhalla (which seems odd, since you don’t end up there.)  There’s an achievement for dying 100 times, which I did earn before completing my first playthrough.

The game is relatively brief.  It only consists of four levels, though each may take 2-3 hours to complete, and there is some running around involved in between levels.  You are encouraged to play multiple times, since there are various classes available to play, and achievements that can be earned by leveling each up and completing the game at least twice.

As for RPG elements, what Too Human brings to the table is the sort of classes and character customization elements that RPGs have.  You collect, buy, sell, craft and wear weapons and armour, you level up your character as you play, assigning skill points to abilities as you go.  But really, these are the more tedious aspects of RPGs.  I was expecting, given the subject matter and the game’s claimed RPG feel, a deeper, more immersive storyline.  (I suppose I was expecting something more like Bioshock.)

Instead, the game borrows names and general characters from those Germanic stories, but puts them in a simplified setting.  The game follows the story of Baldur, one of the Aesir, or gods.  These gods are essentially cybernetically-enhanced humans, walking along ordinary, mortal humans in their quest to protect them and restore the Earth to its original, natural beauty.  The game’s main antagonist is to be Loki, although his role as an actual enemy is limited.  Silicon Knights appears to be saving him for one of the game’s sequels.  The mythology is obviously changed, as the Scandinavian people did not envision their gods as cybernatically enhanced.  The game’s name refers to Baldur, whose enhancements are less involved than those of the other gods, making him “too human”.

Too Human uses the Unreal Engine 3, so it has graphics about on par with many familiar games.  The game is visually appealing, aside from the looks of some corpses and a few gloomy locales.  There’s not much to say about the graphics: they’re nice, but not exceptional.

I can’t help but to feel like Too Human could have been a lot better.  I’m a little hard on the game here, but since the game was envisioned 10 years ago, I feel like it should have been a little more polished.  (I also expected more from a Canadian studio.) But I did complete it, and I enjoyed it.  I will probably also play the next game in the planned trilogy — hopefully they’ll have improved the combat system and the story will get a little deeper.

Score: 71%