StompingFreak
20-08-2008, 05:59 AM
Check this review posted to day on oxm.. intresting stuff.. will it put players off?
Hating Too Human is all too easy. When it's bad, its failings all hit you at once: the questionable controls; its bizarre respawning system; the enemies' tendencies to annihilate everything near them - and you're screaming like Loki with serpent-venom drip-drip-dripping in his eyes.
But take a deep breath and persist. Silicon Knights' tardy role-playing slasher will reward you with more than just a clever sci-fi re-interpretation of the Norse myths.
It's this visionary quality of the game that's going to carry you through its low moments. It feels epic like few other games - even Gears of War doesn't do sheer scale like Too Human does. You play as Baldur, one of the God-like beings who protects humans.
Honestly, trying to describe it undersells it. The best we can come up with is that it's an immediate bizarre fantasy, with every part of the Viking legend re-imagined in a sort of cyberpunk style. Thor as a 95 per cent cybernetic blunderhead. Blind Hod with crude cybernetic eyes hanging off his face. Goblins and Elves are robotic monsters, arrows as energy beams. Valkyries as combat medics, descending from teleport gates in the sky to take away the fallen... while the writing itself only occasionally rises above average, the world-building and sense of place is absolutely astounding. It's an amazing place to be.
What you get up to, however, is more familiar - though the details will surprise. In order of how common the activity is: Firstly, you fight monsters in a full-on action style. Secondly, you upgrade your characters' abilities in a role-playing game manner. Thirdly, you watch cutscenes. Fourthly, you wander around a bizarre cyberspace-as-fantasy realm. Fifthly, you drum your fingers as you watch an indeterminedly long animation of a Valkyrie dragging you off to heaven when you pop your clogs. Actually, that may be fourthly. Or thirdly. Or sometimes firstly.
Valhalla
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. While shooting is on the triggers, the combat, rather than being driven by button-presses, is primarily driven by the right thumbstick. A quick prod slashes. A sweep attacks multiple people in that direction.
There's a large degree of AI assistance to the process, so if the enemy in that direction is at a range, you'll do a sliding attack to reach them. This carries over to the shooting where you'll target whatever is roughly ahead of you, with you being able to manually adjust your aim with the right thumbstick.
Generally speaking, it's an efficient system that keeps the majority of your combat on the thumbs. What that means is that the normal buttons can be kept solely for moves such as rolls, dodges or your Godly powers - which you can only perform when your combo meter has been charged up by defeating opponents.
Cue mass melees in which vast numbers of enemies throw themselves at you. When you pick up an Achievement for killing 25 enemies with a single battle-cry, you'll realise how frenetic the game gets.
Gods are only human
Elegant though it is, there are holes in the system. Take the slide attack. You tap in the direction, and you just do a normal attack - either because the enemy is out of range for the slide or your Xbox 360 didn't realise you were going for that particular plasma-spewing Elf-Robot thing. The result is you standing, slicing in thin air as enemies take pieces out of you.
The gunfire is even worse. While great for dealing with mobs, trying to manually change your aim - say to select the one enemy in a crowd who explodes when they reach you - usually ends with your guns pointing in any direction other than toward the incoming swarm.
All of this, of course, leads to the one enemy who explodes all too often, sending you flying. Or freezing you. Or setting you on fire.
It's the sort of game that, when things are going badly, leaves you spending a lot of time not being able to do anything about it. You've made a mistake, and now you have to sit back and twiddle your thumbs. The absolute ultimate example of this is the aforementioned Valkyrie animation when you die.
The only in-game penalty for death is your equipment degrades a little, meaning it has to be replaced or repaired sooner... but you basically respawn and go straight back in to pick up breaking people where you left off. Presumably the length of the sequence is meant to be punishment enough to prevent a player from just abusing the system to gain an inevitable victory.
On the bright side, it works. You really don't want to die. On the bad side, when you hit a difficulty spike (and you will), you're staring at a glowing winged lady and trying to remember why you're playing this bullying game in the first place.
But then you inch past the problem and the reasons come flooding back. The character customisation of the five classes is just deep enough - selecting equipment, spending skill-points, inserting runes into weapons - to add colour to your character, with enough streamlining (like automatic selling of the cheapest items in your inventory when it's full) to keep the action ticking along.
Cyberspace hacking is sleight, but an interesting insert of atmospheric non-violent action-adventuring. The co-op is an enormous godly giggle. And we can't stress enough how stunning the sheer vision of the thing is.
Perversely, the game really blossoms after you've completed it. Replaying it with a tooled up character really freshens up the experience. It rebalances the opponents' power accordingly, and with your knowledge of how best to deal with certain tricky opponents, the game opens up. It helps that you can further freshen it up by selecting an individual level directly, leading to a slightly different set of encounters.
Either way, the big fights start to flow, leading to fewer interruptions, while your acquired skills make the difficulty humps less offensive.
And you start thinking it's more of an eight out of ten. But then there's the 12 hours it took to get to the point where the game clicked and you realise, for all its charm, that it's a game that you shouldn't hate. But it's not one that deserves your love either.
Source (http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=5783)
Hating Too Human is all too easy. When it's bad, its failings all hit you at once: the questionable controls; its bizarre respawning system; the enemies' tendencies to annihilate everything near them - and you're screaming like Loki with serpent-venom drip-drip-dripping in his eyes.
But take a deep breath and persist. Silicon Knights' tardy role-playing slasher will reward you with more than just a clever sci-fi re-interpretation of the Norse myths.
It's this visionary quality of the game that's going to carry you through its low moments. It feels epic like few other games - even Gears of War doesn't do sheer scale like Too Human does. You play as Baldur, one of the God-like beings who protects humans.
Honestly, trying to describe it undersells it. The best we can come up with is that it's an immediate bizarre fantasy, with every part of the Viking legend re-imagined in a sort of cyberpunk style. Thor as a 95 per cent cybernetic blunderhead. Blind Hod with crude cybernetic eyes hanging off his face. Goblins and Elves are robotic monsters, arrows as energy beams. Valkyries as combat medics, descending from teleport gates in the sky to take away the fallen... while the writing itself only occasionally rises above average, the world-building and sense of place is absolutely astounding. It's an amazing place to be.
What you get up to, however, is more familiar - though the details will surprise. In order of how common the activity is: Firstly, you fight monsters in a full-on action style. Secondly, you upgrade your characters' abilities in a role-playing game manner. Thirdly, you watch cutscenes. Fourthly, you wander around a bizarre cyberspace-as-fantasy realm. Fifthly, you drum your fingers as you watch an indeterminedly long animation of a Valkyrie dragging you off to heaven when you pop your clogs. Actually, that may be fourthly. Or thirdly. Or sometimes firstly.
Valhalla
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. While shooting is on the triggers, the combat, rather than being driven by button-presses, is primarily driven by the right thumbstick. A quick prod slashes. A sweep attacks multiple people in that direction.
There's a large degree of AI assistance to the process, so if the enemy in that direction is at a range, you'll do a sliding attack to reach them. This carries over to the shooting where you'll target whatever is roughly ahead of you, with you being able to manually adjust your aim with the right thumbstick.
Generally speaking, it's an efficient system that keeps the majority of your combat on the thumbs. What that means is that the normal buttons can be kept solely for moves such as rolls, dodges or your Godly powers - which you can only perform when your combo meter has been charged up by defeating opponents.
Cue mass melees in which vast numbers of enemies throw themselves at you. When you pick up an Achievement for killing 25 enemies with a single battle-cry, you'll realise how frenetic the game gets.
Gods are only human
Elegant though it is, there are holes in the system. Take the slide attack. You tap in the direction, and you just do a normal attack - either because the enemy is out of range for the slide or your Xbox 360 didn't realise you were going for that particular plasma-spewing Elf-Robot thing. The result is you standing, slicing in thin air as enemies take pieces out of you.
The gunfire is even worse. While great for dealing with mobs, trying to manually change your aim - say to select the one enemy in a crowd who explodes when they reach you - usually ends with your guns pointing in any direction other than toward the incoming swarm.
All of this, of course, leads to the one enemy who explodes all too often, sending you flying. Or freezing you. Or setting you on fire.
It's the sort of game that, when things are going badly, leaves you spending a lot of time not being able to do anything about it. You've made a mistake, and now you have to sit back and twiddle your thumbs. The absolute ultimate example of this is the aforementioned Valkyrie animation when you die.
The only in-game penalty for death is your equipment degrades a little, meaning it has to be replaced or repaired sooner... but you basically respawn and go straight back in to pick up breaking people where you left off. Presumably the length of the sequence is meant to be punishment enough to prevent a player from just abusing the system to gain an inevitable victory.
On the bright side, it works. You really don't want to die. On the bad side, when you hit a difficulty spike (and you will), you're staring at a glowing winged lady and trying to remember why you're playing this bullying game in the first place.
But then you inch past the problem and the reasons come flooding back. The character customisation of the five classes is just deep enough - selecting equipment, spending skill-points, inserting runes into weapons - to add colour to your character, with enough streamlining (like automatic selling of the cheapest items in your inventory when it's full) to keep the action ticking along.
Cyberspace hacking is sleight, but an interesting insert of atmospheric non-violent action-adventuring. The co-op is an enormous godly giggle. And we can't stress enough how stunning the sheer vision of the thing is.
Perversely, the game really blossoms after you've completed it. Replaying it with a tooled up character really freshens up the experience. It rebalances the opponents' power accordingly, and with your knowledge of how best to deal with certain tricky opponents, the game opens up. It helps that you can further freshen it up by selecting an individual level directly, leading to a slightly different set of encounters.
Either way, the big fights start to flow, leading to fewer interruptions, while your acquired skills make the difficulty humps less offensive.
And you start thinking it's more of an eight out of ten. But then there's the 12 hours it took to get to the point where the game clicked and you realise, for all its charm, that it's a game that you shouldn't hate. But it's not one that deserves your love either.
Source (http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=5783)