So I had a few days in our apartment last week. Of course I spent this on getting some of the latest demos and crap on the Xbox among other things. Among these were the Too Human demo, that got some heavy flaming for its camera controls (or lack thereoff) so I didn’t expect too much.

What I did find though was a lot more than I expected. Once I got past the original irritation of the horrible (lack of) camera control, I found a rather interesting and “new” control scheme for a 3rd person action game. I really, really enjoyed the geometry war take on the controls and while I never got too deep into the combo system (that I found out after I left the apartment is waaaaay deeper than I first though, so now I really want to get back to try it out again), I had a really good time hacking through the hordes of mindless robot drones. The loot system was nice, with automatic spring sales of low level gear and all and I really think I could enjoy this game. Especially since I found out that you can actually pull the camera way back to a semi-isometric view so the lack of control over it won’t matter as much… there’s some downsides though, that keeps it from becoming an instant purchase:

No same machine coop game. It’s designed for coop from the ground, so leaving this out is bad. Now I can’t play this with Lovisa unless we get a second Xbox :(

Only 2-player online coop. It’s cut for fun, not technology I’ve been said. Appearently it can become too hectic with more players (original design plan and playtests were done with 4), so they cut it down so the experience would be much better. I would still like ti play it with a few more if possible… if even any borkers pick it up in the future.

I’m also concerned about level variety. While I respect Silicon Knights as developers, they have mentioned that the whole world is covered in Ice since it’s an ice age… so I just hope there’s enough environmental variation to keep us going.

So what do you think? Anybody completely sold? If I knew I’d have borkers to play with, I would definitely get gold going again for a game like this. I love coop and a game designed to be fun for two players means a lot less haggle getting games going… but it also means a lot of frustration when there is more than two that wants to play…

Also, another reason I’m not rushing like crazy to get it right away is the storm of good (looking) games coming our way. Fable 2 will be the true coop game for me and Lovisa, so I’m not sure when/where there will be room for Too Human, even if it comes a month earlier.

I’m passing. I’ll rent on gamefly at most. I really don’t like the control scheme very much. I think it’s OK, but I don’t feel that the combat relationships seem deep or interesting enough to hold my attention for very long. The UI for upgrading is not responsive enough for the amount of time you need to spend fussing with it, either. I feel like it should be lightning fast to the point of invisibility for a game driven by loot management. I’m also not big on the story. Ancient norse mecha gods aside, the whole thing just stinks of typical bad video game storytelling: all complex backstory and mythology, no interesting characters.

Getting back home to play the demo a second time and it grew on me enormously. Finding the semi-isometric camera and learning how to juggle made the game 10 times as fun. Als finding out that there’s a talent tree on the default class that is all about tossing opponents in the air and hurting them there kind of sold me. I’m gona get this game, someday. Not sure it’ll be a day one purchase though… if I can find it cheap enough maybe. Depends on my economy and if I can beat a few of the older games I have first.

Wasn’t this game originally supposed to be on the Playstation? I remember reading about it in PSM like 10 years ago.  Have they just restarted development a bazillion times or am I thinking of another game entirely.  I feel like this is probably development hell at its worst, but it’s nice to see them finally get the product out the door.  When I get home from vacation I’ll download the demo and post my erotic thoughts.

It’s the very same game. Revealed at E3 in 1999 for playstation (planned to take 4 CDs as well), but then they signed a deal with Nintendo, moved development to the GameCube. Something came in the way though, and 2005 Silicon Knights made a new deal, this time with MS, to make the game for the 360. By then they were using the Unreal Engine 3, but had so much troubles with it that they apparently scrapped it and made their own engine.

So, Too Human hit the US streets today (Europe is getting it the 29th), and the reviews that are popping out are extremely mixed. Most end up in the average range, while some reach high and some give the game 50&#xis;h scores. What I’ve been able to see as the largest complains from the reviews so far is:

1) The Norse Mythology isn’t well explained, so if you have little background from it yourself, the story will lose a ton of neat undertones and appear bland.

2) Loot scale with level, and appearently this ruins the joy of getting new gear since better will always wait ahead. This complaint has showed up in like half of the reviews I’ve read so far, and I still don’t get it. What I do get is that the people voicing these complaints probably haven’t played much WoW or Diablo or any other loot based game, because until you reach the highest level, your gear will ALWAYS be outdated in a few levels.

3) Camera control is still a bitch. It hasn’t changed since the demo, and either you can learn to live with it (like me) or it will annoy the hell out of you.

All in all, none of the complaints I’ve read affect me, since I 1) Know Norse Mythology to a decent degree, 2) Have played WoW for ages and know not to grow too attached to my gear and 3) like the camera in the ISO view.

So despite a 68,4% score at GameRankings right now, I’m not turned away from this game. Yet the lack of on screen coop is the one big gripe I have with it… and there’s no way around that which would have made this game so completely solid. Now if I would like to play it with Lovisa I would npot only need a second Xbox, but dual Live gold subscriptions.

Whaleman - 19 August 2008 01:06 PM

2) Loot scale with level, and appearently this ruins the joy of getting new gear since better will always wait ahead. This complaint has showed up in like half of the reviews I’ve read so far, and I still don’t get it. What I do get is that the people voicing these complaints probably haven’t played much WoW or Diablo or any other loot based game, because until you reach the highest level, your gear will ALWAYS be outdated in a few levels.

The complaint I saw wasn’t that loot is outdated quickly, it was that collection-based loot is outdated before you can even assemble it. So you get blueprints, and need to gather materials, which takes a while, but when you do you find you were wasting your time. In WoW or Diablo, you are rarely building your items in that way, and if you do it always results in a reward. It sounds like Too Human missed the point, and they short circuited their own reward loop by overdoing the frequency.

Actually, the same does go for WoW. There’s long chains of quests for some class specific rewards, and I haven’t had a single one of them on me for more than max one level Same goes with crafted gear for everything but level 70 epics, which takes forever to get. Given that you can reach the maximum level cap in Too Human in like 1/100th of the time you reach it in WoW, I don’t see too mcuh too complain at with “too much loot”. It’s no more per level than in WoW

I just don’t think that the criticisms were that there is to much. Its that it dangles the carrot, compels you to get it, then removes it from being relevant before you ever got the satisfaction of reaching it. At least that’s the impression I got form the 1up review.

It appears all the Dennis Dyack controversy has not only soured the vision of the game in most critics minds, but has made him personally a figure of questionable benefit to his company. I hear more about Dennis in the news blogs and podcasts lately than I hear about the actual game. Honestly I don’t really know much about Too Human and probably won’t really play it anyway, but just thought I’d throw that out there if anyone else had also gotten this impression from the internet media.

So I got the game in the end. I actually preordered it even, but the Royal Mail service managed to delay it a couple of weeks before I got it. Anyhow, I’ve played the game through… and then some… so here comes:

Too Human Review - Nordic Cyberpunk Mythology without Bork

Too Human tells the story of little Baldur, youngest son of Odin and one of the Gods. Only in Too Human’s reality, ODIN is somewhat of a neutral network, and the gods are technologically advanced humans. Despite this, the story actually manages to keep within the borders of the nordic mythology, even if they fail to mention that in the beginning, Bork created Odin, and then he went on lunch. They do mix in some Beowulf in the story as well actually… but that’s fine with me.

Silicon Knights seem to assume that everybody knows at least some about our mythology though… because while there’s several characters involved in the story, only a few select of them ever actually get properly introduced… and the same goes for some key story events as well… so the story might seem hard to follow for somebody less interested in Bork’s offspring than us cold loving Scandinavians. Some moments even had me lost… but a few more playthroughs and I’m getting the grip of it now.

As for cold loving, it’s kind of a must. The game only features 4 levels, a lush “cyberspace” plus a hub world you visit in between… and out of these four levels, 2 are more or less covered in snow and ice. Despite this, the levels are fun, decently varied and huge above all. Count with at least a couple of hours per each. Only boring parts is the visits to the NORNs in cyberspace… since they’re mostly about running and pushing at a rock or opening a door.

What drives Too Human in the end is not the Story (albeit good), puzzle solving in cyberspace or even exploration in a vast world (those two does not really exist)... no, it all comes down to hack and slash. The game feature a combo combat system that is a lot deeper than a first look (and judging from several reviews, a longer look as well) reveals. Several reviews have discarded the game as simple pushing the sticks every here and there to kill everything… and while basically true, that would be akin to playing Diablo constantly holding the left mouse button down and doing nothing else. In the end, either you learn to juggle, or you won’t enjoy the game.

Juggling is the art of tossing enemies high in the air, and then either jump after them and do airbased melee combos, or stand on the ground and shoot at them with your gun to keep them up in the air longer… or combine the two. Add to this spider (a small mechanical spider you have with you) special attacks that can toss the enemies into the air, just cause explosions, freeze them or mount turrets to rain destruction over everybody, battle cries that can increase damage, make all attacks toss people into the air (instead of having to doubletap the right stick to perform the special juggle attack), heal, freeze and a lot of other things depending on class and spec. Then there’s the ruiners, that are area of effect attacks that usually clear the area closest to you from enemies… and if you spec for it cause major destruction while doing so. Lastly there’s the sentient weapons, on a horrible long cooldown. The Sentient weapon is a clone of your own melee weapon that charges around doing wild damage on your enemies and fills up your combo meter like crazy. This is very good, since the combo meter is what powers most of your other special attacks.

Exactly how you fight depends on which of the 5 classes you chose, but only 2 of them are truly different, in that they focus on either melee or ranged combat and excels in their fields… offering armor, health and the opposite combat method to dish out tons of damage with their preferred weapon. This means that the Berserker, the melee specialist, basically runs around with peashooters and enemies that can’t be hit with melee (like some bosses) takes forever to kill. The berserker makes up for this in combat with lots of small enemies though, where he’s not fighting them as much as running through them like a hurricane, weapons moving so fast you only see a blur. Despite this he’s probably the hardest class to play with, just because of the reliance of ranged damage on some enemies and bosses. Not that there’s enemies that are hard to impossible to take down with ranged damage… it’s just more obvious of a limitation the other way around.

How about the last three classes? Well, there’s one “middle of the road” class. He’s good at everything, and with the right spec the absolutely best at air-based combat. The last two are weaker in damage, but balanced between melee and ranged, and one relies on heavy armor and a big healthpool to get through the ordeal, and is also perfect as a Tank if you play online. The last is the healer, that has a big healthpool and slowly regenerates health between combat.

...and there I ran out of time….

(talk about cliffhanger ending of a review… but I need to rush)

So… more about classes. When starting out, you won’t notice that much difference between the three classes that balance melee and ballistic damage. This change a bit when you level them up and start spending talent points. The talents slightly change the way you play with each class, even at level 10 which is the lowest I have either class, but it’s not like they change the core gameplay… you still rely on melee juggling and gunfire in alternating patterns… what does change is how you deal with large crowds. In the end it doesn’t matter that much what class you play, they’re all fun and you are able to take most situations with either of them. Some situations are harder with the two specialized classes than the three balanced ones though, but they make up for it with tons of fun damage-dealing in between the troublesome passages.

As you murder your way through heaps of goblins (robots), trolls (big robots), dark elves (mean robots) and other mythical creatures (robots), you will collect a shitload of loot. The loot system is similar to World of Warcraft’s, they even use the same color scheme where grey < green < blue < purple < orange

< red items. Unlike WoW though, levelling is fast and the loot drop rate matches it. This makes any use of the game's currency, called bounty, before you reach the higher levels completely useless… just like in WoW actually You will get better gear than that orange sword in a few levels, so it's not worth so much money, trust me. This is rather important, because purple and better quality items never drop as is, buut as blueprints that you have to use bounty to create. I've done this from time to time with purple items that are rather inexpensive when my current blue item in that gear slot is way outdated, but I wouldn't dream of spending 5 or more times that money on an orange blueprint… no matter how nice some of them look. This will change when I get my characters to 50 though… but I have 20 levels to go on the two that are closest right now.

Once you've played through the game, you can replay the levels in a freeplay kind of mode, that removes the story cutscenes and changes the levels slightly and the encounters greatly. I managed to lose track of where I was in the first level, that I've played so many times I've lost count. This is a good thing and it's really fun to play through them again like this. If nothing else then to do Charm quests. Charms are little object that give you status efects when they've been activated. To do this you need to fullfil some criteria (kill 300 enemies, activate 5 wells, kill 30 enemies with a combo rating of 20 or higher and such) and fill the rune (bonus gems that usually fit into armor and weapons) slots with appropriate runes. Then there's higher tiers or Charms that you need to fill with low level charms instead of runes.

If you can't tell, I really like this game and can easily recommend it. But I would advice people to play the demo first and try to get into the juggling… because if you can't find the joy in the combat system, this game could be full of fail. Most negative reviews of the game has obviously not gotten the grasp of the combat, so I can't blame them for trashing the game. The Unreal Tournament games wouldn't be much fun if forgot to connect a mouse to the computer either.

There is however several minor complaints I have about the game, it's by no meas a perfect 10.

The classes are fun, but not enough different in my opinion. It's more like different specs in one class in WoW than 5 different classes. This is minor though, since you level them up fast enough you can soon pick a favourite and stick to that if you want. The game experience is not very dependant of you class.

The difficulty of the game is strange… while you can be completely unstoppable at times, you can also be 3-shot by standard enemies if you're caught in a bad spot. Does not make you feel very much like a god. I've also been poisoned at full health to die from the poison alone because there's no way to dispel it unless you play as a bio-engineer (healer). It's very hard to say if the game is hard or not, because death only punishes you with a 30 second cutscene and some gear damage. After that you're dropped back into the world where you left it, all damage you caused before death valid and going. Trying to beat the game without dying is close to impossible though… so far I've only managed to beat the first level like that, and after that the difficulty ramps up a bit. Nothing of this gets in the way of the sheer fun I get out of the combat though.

Cyberspace is meh. More than meh. It looks nice, but there's no challenge and not action. It's a good place to get nice drops, but it's really not that fun.

Needs more voices. The in game voice acting isn't particular bad or anything, but they've reused their actors to an insane level. This makes the main character share voice with the annoying little NPCs that run along you, and thus makes it

really hard to understand who’s bickering with who during combat. Most actors voices at least 4 characters, mixed between gods and humans alike. On top of that they don’t have that much to ay either… so be prepared to hear the same oneliners over and over again.

Human combat troops are extremely useless. Not only do they die if anybody sneezes near them, but their pea-shooters do even less damage than a Berserker wielding a level 1 gray gun with his teeth.

No offline coop. You need two live accounts and consoles to play the game cooperatively… which means Lovisa and me are fucked on this point. Which is a shame. The game is probably awesome online… but I can’t find out since I never see anybody I know play it (*hint*). The coop is also limited to two persons… while I can understand this, it’s sad still.

In the end this is a fun game. A lot of people have wrongly tried to compare it to Mass Effect due to the extremely similar graphics, but a much better comparison would be Castle Crashers. This is a hack and slash game, and it builds on the same fun pointless violence that makes Castle Crashers extremely fun. Too Human has a much deeper combat and if I had to pick one, I’d go with Silikon Knight’s offering. Castle Crashers end up close for letting me and Lovisa play together though.

Whaleman - 21 September 2008 05:46 PM

The game is probably awesome online… but I can’t find out since I never see anybody I know play it (*hint*). The coop is also limited to two persons… while I can understand this, it’s sad still.

You know I’d play with you, but for obvious reasons I can’t. As I said above, from all the media coverage I was hearing about it, some reviews were coming down hard on it and the controversy over Dyack’s behavior didn’t help much. I wouldn’t mind trying it out though, but I don’t believe Too Human was impressive enough for my Xbox-owning comrades to buy it for themselves. Which means I probably won’t ever see it. Maybe someday when it hits the bargain bin, but by then it won’t matter.

I can’t tell you how many games my buddies have purchased (shooters in particular) thinking we could play it 4-player split-screen, but over Live as “Guests” on the same Live account then later disappointed to find out we can’t. Obviously I understand the economic reasons why they don’t do that. Sometimes it’s not always clear on the box if the cooperative or 4-player is meant for same console (no Internet), just over Internet, or both. In the case of shooters, I’ve only seen that feature available for Halos 2 & 3, maybe on GRAW 1 & 2 if I recall correctly.

Jim - 22 September 2008 08:04 AM

Obviously I understand the economic reasons why they don’t do that.

I’d be willing to bet that most often the reason for not having split screen is purely technical. Rendering 2 views can be very expensive, particularly if the game in question relies on view based occlusion or distance as an optimization. The other main issue I imagine would be UI. Making a 2nd UI that fits within what is potentially 1/4 a standard def. TV is a pretty daunting task, considering the complexity of many game HUDs.