Game Review: Too Human for the Xbox 360

Too Human (Xbox 360)

Released: August 19, 2008
Developer: Silicon Knights
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
# of Players: 1 (offline), 1-2 (online)
ESRB Rating: T for Teen
Price: $29.99 (new), $12.99 (used)
Available: Now

This week I’m reviewing another game in the RPG genre, (Thank God), so it is back to the normal grind for me. Too Human is this week’s review, and while the game does have its faults, I genuinely enjoyed playing it. But, objectivity will always be my primary concern here.

This game plays like a 3D version of Diablo. In other words, it’s an exercise in gathering loot and constantly upgrading your armor and weapons to bigger and better things. As far as that goes, it succeeds with flying colors. But, this is also where the game has one of its biggest problems. A game like this is almost dependent on the camera and with Too Human, you have absolutely no control over the camera. Part of the reason for this is because you don’t attack enemies by just hammering the X or the A button or something to that extent. No, instead, you use the right analog stick to attack. Whatever direction you move the stick is the direction you’ll attack in. Now, it’s a very nice idea and it works very well, I, myself, enjoy the innovative feel of that function. But, as a result of that, the company left the camera controls to “hit the Left Bumper to center the camera behind you.” That would be fine as well, except there are instances where you can’t, because the game is trying to take a dynamic look at the environment. On top of that, the environments themselves are very bland,usually spanning no more than a range of 2 or 3 colors, and 2 or 3 different rooms that are just repeated over and over. The environments do not look very pretty or polished either. To be perfectly honest this game felt rushed.

The graphics for the game are certainly not impressive at all, and don’t even look halfway decent, especially for a next-gen game. They are bearable at best. The cutscenes are really terrible, the voice acting is very hit or miss (usually miss) and the game lends itself to too many other ideas. Norse mythology is a very in depth and interesting social structure for the gods and it feels like they just tossed it into this game as a side note. None of it is really ever explored and the ending fails to incite any emotion at all out of you. I understand they left the ending open for the other supposed two games in the trilogy, but I’d bet my life savings those games will never even see the light of day. Also, as a result of this, the game feels way too short with only 4 levels that might take a couple hours each to plow through. Another serious flaw in this game’s proverbial armor is the fact that you die far too often. You’ll usually get overburdened trying to take out a group of enemies, with missiles being fired at you from afar, and you can’t even reach the missile enemies to kill them, because there are just too many enemies in your way. This is before they start adding trolls and the tougher enemies into the mix as well. That, in itself, would be something, except there isn’t much of a penalty for dying. Whatever damage you’ve inflicted to said enemies stays and the only real consequence of death is that your armor and weapons will start to degrade. Other than that, there is no point to it. And, when you die, Dear Lord, you have to watch a cutscene of a Valkyrie dropping down from the sky, which will carry your body to Valhalla, Norse mythology’s idea of Heaven. This cutscene lasts from about 30 seconds to a minute, every single time you die, which, as I said, will be quite often. The list of achievements for this game isn’t too bad though. They are fun and genuine accomplishments, and will take some time to complete. But, most of them are also rather simple to finish. The exception to this comes with an RPGs idea of the "kill 10,000 people" achievements that have been showing up in games lately.

In shooters thats a hard thing to accomplish as you have to be either really good at the game or just play it constantly. Too Human has a similar achievement which is easy to reach simply by playing the game a lot, which you would most likely do anyways to gather bigger and better loot. The comparable achievement here is one called "Relics of a Forgotten Past." This achievement entails completing a 7 piece Elite armor suit. Now the armor and weapons in the game get classified into colors which represents their rarity. They are made by finding blueprints that have that rarity color. The elite armor suit this achievement is talking about is made from Red blueprints that are the rarest. Not only are they the rarest (meaning somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 dropping every 100 times you kill a boss), but they cost an astronomical amount of money to forge. This is beyond ridiculous and takes wayyyy too much time. It goes well beyond the shelf life of this game for any gamer.

They took on an ambitious role with this game, attempted to live up to a lot, and they fell on their faces. This game has been in development since before the Gamecube was released. The Gamecube! That’s quite a long time. And it really shows, because this game does not live up to any of the standards that a next gen game should.

Too Human for the Xbox 360 scores a 62 out of 100.