Too Human Review

Too Human

Too Human is an action game with rpg elements. The game sees you controlling the Norse god Baldur in an alternative working of the Norse myths. In the game's universe, the Vanir created machines to aid them in their war against the Aesir and the machines have continued the war, long after the destruction of their masters. The Aesir now defend Midgard against the machines in a war that has lasted centuries. The Vanir were not the only ones to utilise technology however and the Aesir are all fully functioning cyborgs, living in a big city and using guns, tanks and drop ships.

At the beginning of the game, Baldur is recovering from some injuries and the loss of his wife. This is a convenient way to explain his less than god-like powers if nothing else. You're thrown into combat almost immediately then a few flashbacks are used to explain why you're where you are.

The game is essentially seperated into three sections, the fighting bits, Asgard and Cyberspace. There are four levels of fighting bits as far as I can tell and the first three are all rather different in appearance although sharing an industrial and snowy theme. You first visit the Hall of Heroes to kill a monster, then the Ice Forest to kill more stuff and then on to the World Serpent which in this version of the mythology is a fuck off great big battle station or something. In between the killing, you can visit Asgard, home of the Aesir where there are some shops and the plot gets advanced between levels. Finally is cyberspace, the home of the Norns who rather than being simply prophetic women, are now computer programmes existing in a Matrix-esque virtual dimension, accessable through wells. Here you find out extra information, open new paths and pick up the best loot...

Basic Gameplay - Fighting

The main part of the game is the fighting. Too Human utilises a control system that a lot of people have struggled to get on with for some reason. Rather than the traditional use of button presses to activate attacks (See: Every other game ever pretty much) you attack using the right control stick with the buttons being saved for jumping, dodging and special attacks.

The basic combat manouver is the slide attack. You see a bad guy, you run up until a green circle appears under them and you push the right stick towards them, at which point Baldur screams forward and smacks them with his weapon. Continuing to hold the stick in that direction will result in him smacking seven shades of shit out of whatever you're facing until it dies. Alternatively, double tap the control stick and you'll launch your opponent into the air. Pushing both sticks towards them will perform a ranged attack or a powerful chain of hits, depending on the range you're at. This is all well and good when you're fighting a single, weak opponent but generally this game throws what at times seems like hundreds of enemies at you at once. This is where the intuitive combo system comes into play.

The slide attack is a combo-opener. While Baldur is sliding, you enter any other attack command and after his slide hits, he'll perform that move. This includes further slides so by rotating the stick, you can slide from enemy to enemy, allowing you to take out huge numbers of weak bad guys in one long hilarious succession of attacks. Alternatively, slide to an enemy then launch them in the air before jumping up and smacking the crap out of them with an air combo. The trick to the combos is not hammering buttons or anything (Which might be where a lot of people fail at the controls I guess), it's smooth movements and knowing vaguely the right move to use at the right time. In addition to the stick controls, Baldur can perform a wide area attack called a ruiner which basically blows all the monsters near you away from you. He can also use a small, robotic spider thing every now and then which has one of a range of attacks, dpending on your character class and skill choices. Oh yeah, you can also launch a sentient version of your weapon which flies around the screen attacking things. Baldur also has a ranged weapon in the form of pistols, a rifle or a massive cannon, which can also be incorporated into combos, meaning it's quite possible to keep every combo going until everything attacking you is dead.

Performing big combos builds up a combo bar which in turn, increases your attack power and the experience you gain from the fight. Using a ruiner eats up one bar of your combo meter so you have to balance the need for additional power and experience with the need to get everything the fuck off you right now.

The combat can get a little confusing when you're swamped by monsters but the particularly evil ones are much bigger than the rest making it easy enough to focus on what you're attacking. This leads us nicely on to the camera controls...

Camera Controls

A lot has been said about the camera controls in Too Human or rather, the complete lack of any. The right stick being used for combat and the shoulder buttons being needed for gun attacks mean there are no buttons for moving the camera around, other than a tap of LB centering it behind you or holding it down when not fighting to enter a free look mode. You can choose from a number of camera distances and a kind of overhead view too.

The camera instead attempts to move itself intelligently. What this means is that it focuses on what it thinks you're trying to attack in combat or points rather unsubtley at secret doors and the like. Generally this means you're looking at the big mean troll in any given fight but run past it and the camera very quickly realises that you're after the rocket-launching fucks behind it and swings around. There are also times when the camera moves to give a view of the wider scenery for cinematic effect.

Personally, I have no problem with the camera at all. During the fights you're inevitably surrounded by a load of enemies and zipping around using slide attacks so manual control would be rather wasted, there's just no time or in fact need to be moving the camera around. Most games of this type have a lock-on button and Too Human simply dispenses with this and automates the process for you, locking the camera on whatever you've chosen to shoot at or attack. Outside of combat, there are occasions where you'll want to move the camera to spot some treasure or something but the levels are pretty linear and the treasure isn't very well hidden, certainly not to the extent that you'd need to move the camera to find it. If you played God of War and coped with a completely static camera in that then you'll have no problems with Too Human. If you're put off by not being able to move the camera aroudn in fights or to find treasure then you're probably not going to be able to get through the game without dying a shit load anyway as you ought to be concentrating on killing things, not looking up their skirts. I can honestly think of only two occasions where I've gone to move the camera manually and performed an attack by mistake, for me it simply isn't an issue.

Roleplaying Elements

Too Human isn't an rpg, no matter how hard you try to shoehorn it into being one. It's an action game with a choice of skills and equipment. Actually I take that back. The choice of equipment and skills you make has a fairly great effect on how you play the game so this probably has more claim to being an rpg than pretty much anything Squaresoft ever made.

Anyway, customisation in Too Human comes in the form of skill trees and equipment choices. You have an initial choice of five character classes; The Champion who's got average stats and excells at air-combos and uses mainly swords, The Defender who has high defence but shoots slowly and can't really do aerial fighting but can use a hammer and shield combo, The Berzerker who can use twin swords and has a high attack but low defence, Some kind of sniper type guy with good ranged weapon skills but fuck all else and a BioEngineer who heals himself. I went with Defender, you've got to use a big hammer in a Norse game...

Once you start levelling your character up, you can access the skill tree for that class. You get a number of points per level which you can put into skills from one of three paths, each of which has a different spider weapon and battle cry ability. You can backtrack and re-assign your skill points for a cost later if you change your mind. For the Defender at least, one path leads to added status effects, one to greater defence and the last to offensive bonuses.

After finishing the first world, you get a choice between becoming more cybernetic or more human, a one time choice with no going back. Cybernetics hit harder and focus on damage dealing, being able to use the big cannons and having different ruiner attacks based on their equipment whereas humans focus on longer and better combos. Once your choice is made, you can access the alignment skill trees. These have two branches with the Defender/Cybernetic one giving you either improved gun skills or improved hammer skills of various types.

Baldur's powers are also hugely affected by his equipment. You find weapons and armour either as loot drops from monsters or in chests (Well, kind of pillar things actually). Weapons are either swords, staves or hammers and come in one and two handed versions of each. Guns are either pistols, rifles or cannons. Armour is split into helms, shoulders, torso, gauntlets, legs and feet.

Equipment is graded in colour on the menu screen by it's rarity, going from grey for incredibly common stuff through green, blue, purple and orange up to red for the rarest gear. Each rarity grade adds a rune slot. Runes add effects like adding atack power or defensive power or reducing spider cool-down time and themselves come in varying degrees or rarity. Most equpiment comes with built in runes but some comes with empty slots, allowing you to choose the effect to add, from the runes you've colleted. Once a rune is on, there's no removing it so you need to think carefully what you want to put on (Although you'll probably find a better weapon soon enough after anyway). Bonus's from different equipment stack together up to a pre-determined maximum so wearing boots, leggings and a helm of bashing will all add to your hammer bonus for example, meaning you can really specialise if you set your mind to it. You can also change the colour although the armour especially is predominantly black and the colours can only really be seen in cut scenes.

The more powerful gear comes in the form of blueprints which must be turned into useable equipment by using the money that most enemies drop. You can buy equipment using the same money and repair your gear (It gets damaged when you die) too. Money is never really short as I don't see the need to carry any spare gear you aren't using and unwanted stuff can be converted to money at the press of a button.

The last bit of gear is your charms. Mainly found in the Cyberspace sections, charms add additional bonuses and powers. Before you can use a charm you must activate it by slotting in certain runes and fulfilling a mini-quest, generally in the form of kill x enemies using melee attacks or find x secret areas. The more powerful charms need lesser, activated charms to activate them so for the really good bonuses, you'll be looking at a second playthrough I'd have thought.

Graphics and Sound

Too Human is a very good looking game. The areas are richly detailed (Although they do reuse artifacts a lot) and the whole game has a very epic feel to the design. All the cutscenes use the in-game engine as is usual these days. I've not noticed any pop-up or slowdown in the fights although the menus do access pretty slowly for some reason. The different armour pices make Baldur look different and as I said you can change the colour but might not notice the difference. The text is readable on an SD display and if I had an HDTV, I might be able to tell you how it looks on that, but I haven't.

The music does what VGM should do, sits unobtrusively in the background and adds to the emotion of the set pieces. I can't say I've really noticed the musci which for me is a good thing, meaning it's not jarring. There is a slightly silly rock theme when you're fighting certain battles which is a shame but that's counter-balanced by a really nice mournful strings piece when you fight one of the bosses. The accents are largely American which often lets down rpgs but the people in charge are all English by the sounds of things and at least there aren't any laughably bad American pronounciations of Norse words which could almost have been a game-killer for me. Baldur makes a slightly gay sounding grunt every time you jump which grates and one of the soldiers in your back-up squad makes some really odd noises but generally the in-game speech and sounds are ok and the squad are actually pretty funny, although they do seem to keep speaking after they're all dead.

General Thoughts

So yeah, I really like this game. The obvious game to compare it to is God of War, being as how both are based mainly around big, third person perspective fights and are based on mythology. God of War has more puzzles and less customisation, Too Human has very little in the way of puzzles and much, much bigger fights, although lacks the unique ways to kill big monsters that God of War has.

The mythology is very loosly based on Norse myths. The familiar characters are all there, Odin (Now a sort of computer programme overlord), Thor (With his hammer), Freya, Loki (The bad guy of course) and so on. Their relationships are all twisted around though. In the actual mythology, Baldur is killed by Hod (The Gods are throwing things at Baldur and watching them bounce off as he's immune to everything except mistletoe. Loki gives Hod a spear made from mistletoe without Hod realising and Hod kills Baldur by mistake, resulting ultimately in his wife dying of grief, Loki getting chained up with a snake dripping poison on him and a dwarf getting kicked into the funeral pyre. I fucking love Norse mythology), to return at the time of Ragnarok. I guess the developers have kind of placed the game just before Ragnarok and Baldur has just come back to life at the beginning. If he dies at the end I'm wrong. It's all a nice re-working of the stories though and you'd probably have to have read around the subject as much as I have to really notice the inconsistancies and at the end of the day, it's a game, not a historical treatise.

What this game does give you is plenty of action. The fights are more tactical than might initially be apparent and the combo system really comes into it's own as the game progresses. Obviously I've only played as a single character class so far but I can already see how one might approach the fights differently as a ranged specialist or damage specialist and so forth.

The myriad equipment combinations are an OCD's nightmare. As far as I know there is no best weapon or armour, the choices of rune you make being what makes each bit of kit suitable to your playing style. You can easily spend as long in the menus playing with stuff aas you can fighting, or just pick something you like and then check to see if anything you picked up is better periodically. There's a helpful sound when you pick up decent gear so you know when might be a good time to check.

Longevity-wise, I'm 11 hours in and just started the third world of four. The game rewards multiple replays in order to try out different character classes and keep levelling up your guys and there's an online co-op mode which I imagine is great fun, with the right person.

If you liked the God of War games and want a game that requires little thought and is about smashing up huge hordes of bad guys as a Norse god, then this is the game for you. If you tried it and were put off by either the camera or controls then I'd urge you to give it another go but try to approach it as a new experience, rather than trying to play it like all the other games you own. If you're after a deep, puzzle-ridden role playing experience then give this a swerve, simple as that really.

Jam it back in, in the dark.