Too Human

For anyone that knows the Norris legends about Odin and Thor then 'Too Human' has an interesting swing on things for you. You play the game as Baldur, a technologically advanced super human known as the Aesir to normal humans. The gaming world is parallel to the old legends, you and your brethren are the gods under Odin and you live the great halls of Asgard. You are the last outpost of humanity as after ancient countries have destroyed the world and left deadly machines behind that understand nothing more than their original commands to fight. The world is frozen in a eternal winter, what is known as Thimblewinter in the game. Baldur has suffered some kind of horrible tragedy but you have to slowly unravel what happened throughout the game as the injuries he received caused some kind of memory loss. You are helped by the NORD, three strange women that exists in cyberspace which I assume is references to the three fates. Slowly Baldur learns about what has happened to him as you progress throughout many different enemy strongholds.

I suppose my description made the world of 'Too Human' sound very grand. Where that might be true the game play aspect of that world is something of a frustration. The game is meant to be a kind of RPG where your character gains levels and abilities similar to perhaps 'Diablo'. You can pick up weapons and armor for fallen enemies as well as blueprints to create special equipment. You can even hit a button to view yourself during the game at a rotating angle, which sent up a warning flare to me that whomever designed this game was far to interested in graphics and flashy techno armor than actually game play.

The real problems with the the game starts with the fighting controls. Since this is for the Xbox 360 you have handy triggers for you gun which is what I used as often as I could because the melee portion is very confusing. You use the right direction pad to activate you hand held weapon and press it towards whatever enemy you want to attack on the screen. Where it seems very simply that is about as far as it goes to perform combos you have to manipulate the direction pads in many ways to pull off certain attacks. While I managed to do a few of these combos they were achieved completely by accident by flailing the buttons around like I was a inexperienced 'Tekken' player. The instructions explain how to perform the combos but even on paper they are confusing. So you are left stand there swing your sword like an idiot while hordes of robots charge at you. I gave up and just concentrated on Baldur dash attack from one enemy to another because if you're fighting one enemy at a time the others seem to enjoy stabbing you in the back or shooting you.

The enemies in this game come at you in clusters with the exception of the really large ones like Trolls whom are a whole other kind of frustration on their own. Trolls as like a group of enemies all built into one heavy armored unit. Their range of abilities were designed to make you use the ridiculous fighting style to defeat them with multiple points to destroy (and you have to destroy them all to kill it). I refused to be a slave to a game designers desire to have me jump in the air several times bashing at the thing with my sword only to discover I had hit the wrong point and then get batted away only to have to repeat the process eighty times until that one part of the creature was destroyed. Instead I just stood at a safe distance and destroyed each point one at a time, which is boring but far more efficient than doing it their way. You would think that with enemies coming at you from all directions with lasers and fire that they would have made the fighting a little easier to perform but as I already explained they didn't. What they did do instead is make it impossible for you too die. When you die (and you will a lot) a Valkyrie descends from nowhere and carries you to Valhalla as the NPC's in the game claim. Then she dumps you at the last save point while the action continues without you. After about my tenth death the game lost all incentive to try for me. What was the point of try hard when I can just throw myself at the enemy over and over until they're all gone? It certainly isn't challenging in the least.

For a game with such an interesting world to exist within the game play completely ruins whatever premise they were trying for by driving the player to boredom. This game will be one of those ones you see in bids at the local supermarket on discount because the hype caused a retail store to overbuy stock and then no one wanted to play it. Which is exactly what is wrong with the gaming industry. No one takes time to work on anything and just pump out title after title. In the case of 'Too Human' I was generally excited about the concept, now what the company needs to do is fired the game platform staff and maybe they will have a better shot at their next title.