23/09/2008
What The Fuck
Action RPG that dresses Norse gods up as space marines.
Who The Fuck
Very, very patient people.
Why The Fuck
Originally planned as a 4-disc epic for the original PlayStation, Too Human has been in development for more than a decade.
Review
Ten years in the making and the target of endless hype, big things were expected from Too Human. What a shame then, that the finished product is overdeveloped and utterly underwhelming.
You play Baldur, the Norse god of light and beauty, here reimagined, like all Xbox 360 characters, as a gruff, burly bloke in a space marine outfit. God of mischief, Loki, has sided with a lot of mechanical beasties to bring about destruction upon the other gods. You're charged with stopping him.
The game itself is a simple action roleplayer. You cavort around huge, dull dungeons, slaying an endless stream of identical baddies. Hacking and slashing between goblins is fast, furious and it's great fun. For a few minutes.
The chief problem is that Silicon Knights, for reasons known only to them, have decided to force the player to use the right analogue stick to attack. You flick it in different directions and Baldur skips across the screen whacking the mundane foes. It lacks any kind of depth and becomes, after the first couple of dungeons, quite boring.
The faults in the combat don't end there. There's no ability to block and no health regeneration (unless you choose the Bioengineer character class). Baldur's only means of defence is a rolling dodge move, that invariably ends with him scrambling into the path of one of a trillion bullets on screen at any one time.
Many enemies explode when defeated in melee combat, showering you with status effects that sap your health and seemingly last forever. Attempts to mix up the close combat with ranged assaults are futile. Enemies are stronger and faster than you and practically impervious to bullets. This means that you wind up just circle-strafing around most bosses, peppering them with bullets until, nine hours later, they drop dead.
Just as well then, that you can't actually die. Clearly aware that they had made the enemies unfathomably tougher than you, Silicon Knights have created a system where you’re respawned without punishment each time you die. However, there’s one huge drawback to this system: the Valkyrie cutscene.
This is the worst piece of videogame design I have come across since Final Fantast VII's interminable summon spells. Each time you die, which is often, you are forced to watch an unskippable, 30-second-long cutscene, in which a Valkyrie carries Baldur off and plonks him down a few feet away from the battle that caused his death. It's the same animation each time, the same music, the same teeth-pulling length. It’s totally unbearable and will force all but the most patient gamers to hurl the game disc from the nearest window.
The almost unending pattern of battles followed by Valkyrie cutscenes, is broken up by several trips to Cyberspace. These are strange, pointless sections where Baldur visits a virtual reality world and pushes over trees and opens doors to make changes to the 'real' world. Presumably they were added as a puzzle section, but there’s nothing the least bit puzzling about them.
The camera, too, is a debacle. It can be situated at varying distances behind Baldur but, with the right-stick given over to fighting, it remains static. Silicon Knights appear to have forgotten that it's 2008 not 1994 and they were making an action RPG not Ridge Racer. By holding down RB, the camera can pan left and right, but it clicks back into its awkward, automatic place, the minute you let go of the bumper. In 3D adventure games of this type, the right-stick was made for the camera. What possessed Silicon Knights to attempt to make it the fighting control is beyond me. It's a shocking oversight that leaves you spastically flicking the right stick in the hope of fending off unseen enemies when all you want to do is locate the nearest door.
So, Too Human fails as an action game. And, sadly, it's little better as an RPG. The differences between the five character classes are negligible, and while there's plenty of loot to collect and upgrade, it never really feels like it matters.
The storyline is no better. Gods of War is proof enough that the brutality of Greek and Norse mythology and videogames can work together in brilliant synergy. But here the Norse mythology is shoehorned in so awkwardly, it becomes laughable and distracting. Robots are referred to as goblins and Odin is represented as some sort of artificial intelligence. The dialogue, while well acted, is pretentious dross.
The unskippable cutscenes, unresponsive controls and wonky camera are not there by accident. Silicon Knights made arrogant, obtuse decisions out of sheer bloody-mindedness when creating this game. At eight-hours, it's unbelievably short for an action RPG, but if you're somehow able to sit through the entire thing, you'll be delighted that it's not longer. Words: James Bassett |
