Too Human

[Arameus]

I am very surprised at myself; I rarely ever buy a game without really checking up on it first. Usually check magazines and the internet, but you can't beat having a few people give you their honest opinion. I'm something of a cautious buyer, my money being more valuable to me than to most teenagers.

I surprised myself, though, when I not only bought a game I had only passing familiarity with but actually preordered it, picking it up the day it came out. Shelled out full price. Didn't even notice I hadn't even been given my special preorder swag.

Let me make one thing very, very clear: I will not soon make this mistake again.

This game was a colossal disappointment. It's such that I hardly even know where to begin criticizing it. Being a fast-paced brawler with RPG elements, success and failure depend entirely on your ability to do exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. But the system is so imprecise that performing what you think are simple tasks is next to impossible. As you slide hectically from enemy to enemy at lightning pace, you eventually learn to either resign yourself to simply take out your foes in the order the game chooses or rebel and fail utterly when this brutal system's enforcer of sorts, the bizarre and broken camera, will make you feel your folly.

Even the best of players will die in this game a lot. A whole, whole, lot. There are hundreds of cheap, unavoidable deaths to endure in the course of a single play through, which is impressive when you consider how short the game is. The worst offender for me was the ranged enemies, who exhibit a surprising and almost unheard-of amount of intelligence for all the wrong reasons. Enemy AI in this game is awful, see, and melee enemies will often go completely unnoticed because they will stand right next to you and do nothing. It's like their forming a queue for buttkicking, patiently taking a number in consideration with how overwhelmed you probably are from the front at any given moment. But the ranged enemies, even the lowliest of whom have pinpoint accuracy at all but the greatest ranges (assuming your moving and rolling), have really got it all figured out. They just take their positions and fire, taking off little pinpricks of damage, but doing so in a large group and for however long it takes you to get to them once the game decides it's time for you to slide in their direction. But even at point-blank range, the won't stop shooting. they have no concern for life or limb and will continue to just pour round after round into you big, oval head. (Seriously, have you seen Baldur's head? It's a geometric wonder on par with Steve Harvey's hair.)

And this will lead to a slow, ever-present, embarrasing drain on your health that will never, ever fail to provide a premium of frustration. And this is what amazes me about them: despite having some of the worst AI in gaming, they of all the stooges and mooks and underlings and minions have figured out that it's just easiest to shoot the hero to death and have done with it. So you die, and...? You are reborn, of course. Seeing a robotic Valkyrie descend from the sky to raise your broken body to Asgard is actually very poetic the first few times, but this sequence is almost half a minute long, and is unskippable. And every single death will make you endure this. After that, though, you pick up pretty much where you left off; the penalty for death is almost completely unnoticeable. All that will happen is the loss of your combo, which you probably didn't have going anyway, and slight equipment degradation.

Oh, about equipment: Sell all your armor. It does nothing. I figured this out somewhere during the second boss, which was also the first (but not the last) time I seriously had to cool off to stop myself from breaking a wireless controller and an HDTV in a single glorious throw. I had died so many times during this fight that all my equipment had degraded to nothing, at which point it confers no benefit but is actually cooler then because it flashes red. But having no armor didn't affect gameplay, even a little bit. The fact that I was not even a little surprised by that should have warned me that I was already coming to loathe this game in subtle, acerbic ways, but I wanted to see things through to the finish and so I did. (I now loathe myself in subtle, acerbic ways.)

Oh, and that boss fight? Turns out it was a sign of things to come. The first boss is exactly as bad, but at that point in the game I was still chalking things up to my unfamiliarity with what was by all accounts supposed to be a very serviceable game. I actually concluded, after the first boss fight, that I must have simply never comprehended its weak point and had been fighting it incorrectly to its death. But the second boss was blatantly and maddeningly broken, as are all the games bosses, and I couldn't be fooled by it no matter what I told myself. But no matter; I paid for it, I may as well beat it.

So, the setting at least makes up for some of it. Well... I'll amend that. The concept of the setting is rather intriguing. After the Earth is put into nuclear winter sometime post-today, humanity finds itself struggling to merely remain extant while fighting the very warmachines that continue to mindlessly wage war ages after the fact. With mankind on its last legs, cybernetic 'gods,' the Aesir, have been created to stand as the final champions and defenders of our doomed species. With the war leaning further, as it always has, in favor of the machines, you enter as Baldur and commence the epic buttkicking and save the world.

That's the plot. In theory. But everything has a great deal of Norse myth plugged into it: Aesir, Valkyrie, ODIN, all the 'gods,' Asgard and Valhalla, monsters and Yggdrasil and the NORNS and on and on. But the integration is so haphazard and campy it just left me completely nonplussed. The characters are as shallow as they could possibly be made, and you will never, ever have to wonder at any character's role in the plot, as your first meeting with them will tell you absolutely everything you need to know, from 'this guy thinks with his fists' to 'Huh. Wonder what critical bit of plot this character, which I've seen for all of five seconds, is hiding from me?' Unfortunately, the characters are the plot; introducing who is who and who does what and goes where makes up one hundred percent of this game's story. This is a feat that actually amazes me, and not even in the sarcastic way; I stand in total awe of a completely expository game, a feat that I know that I as a writer could never have thought to try and likely will never equal. This has led to my speculation that the second game in what is planned to be a trilogy will actually contain the whole of the rising action and climax, with the final entry consisting completely of the denouement, breaking the overarching storyline neatly into a story worthy of a single game. Too Human is like playing that part in Mario where Bowser captures the princess, except for ten hours. Ten excruciating hours.

And speaking of the game's length, I honestly don't know what to make of it. If it where any shorter, I would cry foul and question whether the game was even complete. It's that short, really! But if the game where any longer, even by a few seconds, I think I would honestly blow a gasket for having to endure it. The length of the game sits in a strange and wonderful zone that I have not yet named, but it functions on this theory: If half of you were on fire, and the other half encased in ice, there must be a zone on your body where these two forces are at equilibrium. But the execution of this theory finally answers my question about that zone's nature. It is not, as I theorized, grotesquely pleasant. It actually attains a new and magnificent form of torture in its hybridization by taking away something potentially pleasant and giving you something unequivocally unpleasant, as though someone gave you a stick of delightful rock candy by jamming it as far as possible up your nose, only to leave you to find it's not rock candy at all, just the bloodied stick it should have come on.

These are the high points of the low points, but really there isn't any part of the game you could not criticize. From the grinding, the brokenness of the classes, the inefficacy of the skill tree, the poor attempt at personalization, and all the many varieties of repetition the game offers you, from the stale environments, the few and uninspired enemy types, to the constant cycle of having you lower and lower expectations consistently defied, there isn't really anything I can say I enjoyed about this game, as even finishing it brought me no pleasure. And that is what hurts most of all: that the game has succeded in mocking me.

One of the few attempts the game makes at depth is the constant illustration of the pointlessness of revenge, of how spite will never offer any solace or completeness. And yet even as the game force-fed me these tired epigrams, I found myself playing more and more for the sake, not of enjoyment, on which I had long given up hope, but of finishing the game, of slogging through each and every last little biting and highly effective attempt the game makes both to stop you from succeeding and to rob you of joy, of bile, of spleen, ichor, of the blood boiling in my eyelids, of the constant chime in the back of my head that I had brought all this upon myself and could stop at any time. I walked into the game's unwittingly set trap of completely falling prey to the theme of the most hackneyed plot I have played in recent memory.

But what really gets to me the most is knowing that, for all the terrible things I've ascribed to the game, no folly on the part of Silicon Knights, the developer, can be held in lower esteem than my own, which was, of course, paying sixty damn dollars of my hard-earned money for a completely unknown quantity, this game, and then willfully enduring the pain it brought me, adding insult to injury in as faithful a manner to the original Aesop as anyone could consciously devise, and that I was making myself play in complete and conscious spite of Mass Effect's final level lying easily within reach, waiting for me to share its secrets and revel with it in its glory. And for that I feel a cold and special shame.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, caveat emptor.

[Icewalker]

...Harsh. Nice rant though, reminds me a lot of Yahtzee in a few places. Like the rock candy thing.

I've heard a little about the game, but not much with regards to how good it actually is. As you said, the plot seems intriguing, but I never looked into it really.

Sorry you wasted your time and money :smallfrown: that always sucks.

[Destro_Yersul]

Just spent the last several hours playing Too Human, and I have to say I disagree with you on some points. Yes, the camera could be better. Just the ability to rotate it would make it awesome. But I didn't find it that much of a detriment to the combat. Push the stick in the direction of the one you want to kill next, watch as it goes flying and probably dies. The melee ones even keep trying to hit me, and most of the shooting ones have switched to melee when I got close enough to them.

I never had a problem with not being able to slide at them either, mostly because I was jumping a lot and able to disengage, run closer, beat the crap out of them, go back, kick some more butt... and so on. Admittedly I'm not finished the second level yet, and I've died around eight times, but that's nowhere near the number of times I died for far cheaper reasons whilst playing Ninja Gaiden Two. On normal.

I've noticed an effect from my armour, mostly that it gives small bonuses to lots of things. I think I might take less damage from some stuff as well, because I've got a lot of it. It's nifty looking though, if nothing else, and I like collecting it.

Being only two levels in, I can't comment on the plot much. But the only character I've figured out is Thor, who just likes killing stuff. Maybe being a bad judge of people helps with this.

Anyways, that's my two cents. Certainly not a great game, from what I've seen, and it has a bug or two that I've noticed, but it shall go on my shelf under 'good'. Right under KotoR 2, which I also liked.

[Inhuman Bot]

That sucks....
Good writing though, if that means anything.

[Dragor]

It saddens me to hear that Silicon Knights are busy making this crap instead of a true sequel to Eternal Darkness on the GameCube (Penny Arcade commented on this along with one comic). I'm a big fan of ED:SR and I think I remember it mentioned that Too Human's going to be a trilogy. A trilogy. It annoys me to the core.

Well written, and I feel for you. It's always angry time when you find out you bought a pile of unfinished tripe.

I'm still going to give it a blast regardless, if I get the chance. I'd like to see if it's as bad as you make it out to be. :smallamused:

[Arameus]

Just spent the last several hours playing Too Human, and I have to say I disagree with you on some points. Yes, the camera could be better. Just the ability to rotate it would make it awesome. But I didn't find it that much of a detriment to the combat. Push the stick in the direction of the one you want to kill next, watch as it goes flying and probably dies. The melee ones even keep trying to hit me, and most of the shooting ones have switched to melee when I got close enough to them.

I never had a problem with not being able to slide at them either, mostly because I was jumping a lot and able to disengage, run closer, beat the crap out of them, go back, kick some more butt... and so on. Admittedly I'm not finished the second level yet, and I've died around eight times, but that's nowhere near the number of times I died for far cheaper reasons whilst playing Ninja Gaiden Two. On normal.

I've noticed an effect from my armour, mostly that it gives small bonuses to lots of things. I think I might take less damage from some stuff as well, because I've got a lot of it. It's nifty looking though, if nothing else, and I like collecting it.

Being only two levels in, I can't comment on the plot much. But the only character I've figured out is Thor, who just likes killing stuff. Maybe being a bad judge of people helps with this.

Anyways, that's my two cents. Certainly not a great game, from what I've seen, and it has a bug or two that I've noticed, but it shall go on my shelf under 'good'. Right under KotoR 2, which I also liked.

Yes, the camera actually isn't too bad of a problem if you just accept the order the game wants you to kill things in. But once polarity enemies start showing up it all falls apart. Polarity enemies are like normal enemies, but they flash certain colors and blow up when they die, leaving you with a status effect ranging from annoying to crippling. I went through as a berserker, the melee specialist, so not being able to attack things in melee pretty much stumps me. You have a special ranged melee attack, but it's difficult to execute with any precision; it always seems to either autotarget the wrong enemy, or perform that quick slide right into them, which is frustrating and embarrasing because your character is running directly into an explosion. You can use guns, but their range is terrible and, for a berserker at least, the damage isn't worth your time. Not that you'll even know polarity enemies are around most of the time; due to that camera again, you usually won't see them until Baldur is sliding directly into a group of them that were just offscreen. Queue the valkyrie.

This is what I meant when I said about needing to do the right thing at the right time; if you run into a group of the exploding ones, you're almost guaranteed to die instantly when you set off a chain reaction with you in the middle of it, and if you run into one of the poisoning ones it's even worse because, despite how little damage the poison does, it lasts a ridiculously long time. If you get poisoned, it's over; you will die from it because, unless you are the only class of five that can heal themselves, because the poison takes off percentage-based damage and will deal about 150% of your health in damage before it actually wears off.

And that's another thing that got to me, the healing thing. Like I said, only one class of five can heal themselves, and if you aren't that class then you are stuck praying that the next enemy will randomly drop a health pickup, that you cannot store and is used on contact. This takes success and failure out of the hands of the player and makes it a matter of chance, making some hard battles total wipes for the enemy due to copious health drops or leaving you watching that eons-long death animation dozens of times in battles against the game's weakest enemies because you simply are never given a chance to recuperate from their thousands of pinprick attacks.

Ranged enemies really do present as big a problem as I stated; I'll provide an anecdote. In what is I believe level three, there is a huge rectangular room about the size of two football fields by two football fields. In about the middle or the latter 3/4 mark, a horde of enemies spawn. The melee ones will quickly close to range and you have to either deal with them or endure them hacking your back, since even your dodge roll can't really outrun any but the slowest enemies. As you're dealing with the melee enemies then, the ranged ones will stay right where the spawned, pouring slugs, lasers (which are entirely undodgable) and missile volleys from 150 yards in the background. Even if only one of every ten of these attacks connects, there are about 20 of these enemies in all waiting back there and the sheer volume of airborne doom is simply too much to dodge all of it, even if you're rolling and sliding every single second and never standing still; they win by simple attrition, taking strategy and tearing it to pieces, demanding you simply tough out the melee enemies as they come and endure your half-minute death animations until they're gone, at which point you can then run the entire length of the room to the ranged enemies, their attacks becoming more and more accurate as you close the gap, until you reach sliding range and begin taking them out. Now, once you're there you have a choice: you can take them out one by one or do your slide form one to the next, harrying them and disrupting their attacks. Sounds strategic, eh? Nope, you just determine whether you die due to your stupidity or theirs. If you plod merrily along, taking them out one by one, all the others, regardless of whether or not they are standing literally withing claws reach of you, will continue to pile on their ranged attacks, which are practically unavoidable at such a range. Guaranteed death. But if you attempt to disrupt their attacks by harrying the group, all you will do is disrupt the attack of the one you just hit, while all the rest will immediately continue firing at you, exactly where they were standing, regardless of whether you hit them or not. They cannot be compelled to fight any other way, and you cannot outlast their stupidity with your constitution. Guaranteed death.

And the spider and troll type enemies are so broken I won't even get into them in this post. Suffice it to say, those damned machines are going to win this war from sheer retardation.

The positive statuses granted by armors are appreciable, but since strategy is nonexistent, the only thing they can offer you of any value is either faster or stronger attacks. Better armor will not in any situation save you from dying, they will only delay your death until the gliding pig zombie unleashes its next no-warning area-of-effect superattack. The armor does look nifty, though, I really have to agree with you on that. I have this completed set of prety epic armor that would look so, so cool if I actually planned on playing this game long enough to gain another level so I could wear it. Unfortunately, Shepard's armor in Mass Effect is also 'pretty bitchin,' scientists, report, and it's in a game with redeeming qualities. Cool-looking armor isn't exactly something that will make a bad game into a good game. And it's pretty funny that you elevate the game's colossal cheapness by saying it's not as bad as Ninja Gaiden, a series whose principle flaw is considered to be its countless and extremely cheap deaths, often from offscreen. It can't be considered a compliment, but I don't really know what else to classify it as. It's like saying someone isn't as unattractive as Steve Buscemi.

Not that I'd ever compare Too Human to Steve Buscemi; he's great!

[Destro_Yersul]

The Ninja Gaiden thing was kind of a joke on that, about how I am extremely patient with games because of Ninja Gaiden. I have to die around twenty times in one place before it even starts to be frustrating. :smallbiggrin:

Thanks for the reply, and I think I now know why armour didn't do much for you. You played as a berserker, which has very bad armour. I'm playing as a defender, with masses of armour and health, so that's probably why I don't die as much. Also, I figured out a good way to kill the spiders. Shoot them a lot. If you roll backwards you can avoid their area of effect attack entirely, and once their shields are gone they have surprisingly low health. The trolls are similar. If you destroy their leg armour they become really slow, and if you destroy their combat arm completely they don't have any attacks that can still hit you, provided you keep running.

I'll get back to you on the ranged thing once I get to that part you mentioned. I'm pretty good at dodging things that move at a visible speed, also thanks to Ninja Gaiden. The other thing it teaches one is reflexes. Godly ridiculous reflexes.

I agree with you on the healing thing, which I've noticed. Sometimes the healing orbs drop from containers, so destroying them is always good.

Also, I haven't had as many problems with the sliding thing as you have. I do still slide into polarities if they're mixed in with the others, but usually I can see them coming and blow their skulls off before they get to me. Generally this means the rest of them go up in smoke as well, thanks to the chain reaction.

And I agree with you that Mass Effect is awesome. I've played through it two and a half times, all sidequests completed, because I am crazy and want all the achievements. Regarding that, which armour do you have? I'm wearing the Mantis kind, I believe, and it looks awesome.

[Twin1]

Its a mediocre game. Not great but not Daikatana bad. As others have mentioned the camera can be a pain at times which is really frustrating when your being mobbed by a large group of baddies. I played through as a gunner first and the ranged enemies while a pain didn't quite bother me as much as the guys who exploded and did status effects. And then there are the guys who seemed resistant to ranged attacks and take a huge amount of fire power to kill. These guys are the ranged dudes for the gunner class and until you get your skills up high enough to compensate for it they will kill you a lot.

My biggest problem is this. It seems to suffer from the biggest problem I had with Advent Rising. It focused on setting up an overarching story at the expense of the game at hand. While it is nice that developers seem to be putting a good deal of thought into stories these days they seem to forget that without a good product they will never make it to game #2 or 3. Give people a good game first and they'll come back for sequels. Plan out a bunch of sequels while giving a mediocre game and you may never get to do the sequels.

[Arameus]

The Ninja Gaiden thing was kind of a joke on that, about how I am extremely patient with games because of Ninja Gaiden. I have to die around twenty times in one place before it even starts to be frustrating. :smallbiggrin:

Thanks for the reply, and I think I now know why armour didn't do much for you. You played as a berserker, which has very bad armour. I'm playing as a defender, with masses of armour and health, so that's probably why I don't die as much. Also, I figured out a good way to kill the spiders. Shoot them a lot. If you roll backwards you can avoid their area of effect attack entirely, and once their shields are gone they have surprisingly low health. The trolls are similar. If you destroy their leg armour they become really slow, and if you destroy their combat arm completely they don't have any attacks that can still hit you, provided you keep running.

I'll get back to you on the ranged thing once I get to that part you mentioned. I'm pretty good at dodging things that move at a visible speed, also thanks to Ninja Gaiden. The other thing it teaches one is reflexes. Godly ridiculous reflexes.

I agree with you on the healing thing, which I've noticed. Sometimes the healing orbs drop from containers, so destroying them is always good.

Also, I haven't had as many problems with the sliding thing as you have. I do still slide into polarities if they're mixed in with the others, but usually I can see them coming and blow their skulls off before they get to me. Generally this means the rest of them go up in smoke as well, thanks to the chain reaction.

And I agree with you that Mass Effect is awesome. I've played through it two and a half times, all sidequests completed, because I am crazy and want all the achievements. Regarding that, which armour do you have? I'm wearing the Mantis kind, I believe, and it looks awesome.

Mantis was GREAT, but I found this epic red and black suit that grants me nigh-invincibility. With that and my elite spectre weapons, I can just walk up to endgame Geth Primes and essentially have ****-measuring contests with them. It allowed me to essentially bull-rush my way through the endgame; that and shock trooper spec make me a walking Mako. I gave the Mantis to my girlfriend; it looks like Spartan armor, you know? Weird.

Berserker spec probably did bring me a lot more problems, but with the way I tend to play brawlers it's really the most natural choice. You can essentially use Diablo II as a measure: you either set up your nice little Paladin all nice and neatly with the perfect rune combinations and optimized skillset, or you can give Stew_Pot the barbarian the biggest, toughest armor in the game and an inhumanly powerful weapon in each hand, let loose your battlecry, and wade into the pile. Guess which one I am.

And in DII, it works really, really well. Soloing the endgame is challenging but really fun, and almost always doable without dying. Berserking in TH just doesn't work as well, though; for a game that cribs so heavily off of Diablo, it has none of that supreme balance or depth. The boss fights, save for the last one, are extremely biased against melee; Berserkers have essentially no chance to utilize their skillsets. Try as I might, I could never deal significant damage, or even any damage whatsoever, to bosses with melee. I don't know how far in you are, so be warned I'm about to run down the bosses, but they don't really reveal anything because it says right in the manual who the bad guys are.

The Grendel is almost completely to melee, mainly because one he only has one target remaining it becomes almost impossible to strike in melee. I actually did most of my damage when he was running around on all fours, at whch point I actually thought the way to beat him was to do something to force him on all fours and melee rush him, but he only went for it once and then got back up 'til I killed him. So I, a berserker, ended up mainly just kiting the SOB and using my guns, which are pathetically weak for Berserkers and feel like cheating. On the second boss, he jumps into these little pods, which ostensibly protect him, even though his head is sticking out and you have LASER WEAPONRY that can strike dimes at a kilometer and a half. So you have to use your guns to blow up all five of the pods to flush him out. This takes forever with the berserker's pea-shooters, and Hod's attacks are very cheap, following this pattern: two slugs, two slugs, two grenades, reload. Now, the slugs are quick but pretty dodgeable, but the grenades are so spaced out and have such radius that if you dodge the first, even just by an inch, the second hits you, or vice-versa. I could occasionally dodge both, but it felt more like dumb luck or hit detection issues, which the game does indeed have in spades. You can use your ranged melee on the pods, but it's very innacurate because it won't autotarget the pods and you have no way to actually tell if you dealt damage or how much. That's actually innacurate; you can use the damage list on the right, but I didn't know you could do that at that point, because it generally has no purpose; either the enemy dies in one or two swipes, or it has a health bar at the bottom of the screen. So, after suffering three or four cheap deaths in this little game of whackamole, he falls down to the lower level. Now, Larry Alexander, author of Band of Brothers, wrote about one of the soldiers that he would often narrate the events of his life to himself as they happened, and identified such as the mark of a great author. As I killed the last pod and watched Hod fall, I actually narrated the hypothetical sentence "And what could be more fun than that? Doing it two more times!!!" Well, I hoped I was wrong, but sure enough, they make you do that crap two or three more times until he gets to the ground. By that time I had died so many times my armor was all broken, which is the point I was talking about in the initial post. It really didn't make any difference at that point, both because it doesn't matter at any point in the game but also that once he's on the ground you essentially just have a ****-measuring contest with Hod as you run up to him and make him eat your swords and he impotently runs away, making you finally know how good it feels to be a group of Dark Elf Elite Regulars. Huh.

Then you fight the Giant Troll. It's essentially a normal troll on meth in giant armor, so oyu fight it the exact same way you fight normal trolls. Now, about trolls: they're easy. REALLY easy. When they're alone. If you catch them alone, all you do is run up and break their legs, smash their face in, climb on their back and open their skulls. None of that is figurative language. If you don't want to do the special instant-kill finisher, you can always just bash them apart, but sadly, this fails hard. Hit detection is sloppy at best, and is even worse in the air, so once you smash the shoulders, legs, and faceplate, he'll still have health left, and the only remaining targets will be the arms and hands. But you can't hit those parts in melee. Even when I could plainly see my blades slicing through these parts, they didn't take damage, and even when I did my Finisher, which has a huge radius, they still didn't take damage. So what do you end up doing? Running around shooting him, which takes absolutely no skill due to the perfect autotarget. (Note that when I say perfect, I don't mean it's without faults; it's terrible. What I mean is that you cannot miss. It is %100 accurate, making ranged combat a total snoozefest and requiring no skill other than hoping you target the thing you want to kill. Which in hindsight is rather difficult since that never happens.) So you always do the insta-kill troll move. It's fast and easy and simplifies everything. (That's if trolls are alone. It's.... complicated if there are other enemies present.) So back to the Boss Giant Troll. Once you knock its armor off, you just do the insta-kill, right? Nope. No such luck on a boss. So you end up using your pea-shooters on the boss rather than running right up into this melee-god's horrible meth-rape drill-fist radius. Granted, I took off its armor and legs and plating just like any other troll in melee, but, again, just like any other troll once that's done you can see yourself hitting the remaining parts yet not doing the slightest bit of damage, not to mention the fact that when you actually get around to the side to hit him, he's just turned to face you and you're attacking nothing by the time you're in the air. So the battle becomes a matter of running around for a while trying to run away to a sufficient distance form this extremely fast for its size boss, fighting the camera as you do so (it was particularly bad in this fight), until you gain enough distance to take off a tiny bit of damage and repeat the process, hoping you don't accidentally run through him and get drill-raped. I actually had a lot fewer deaths on this boss, but it was so tedious because this thing, like all bosses, is so overhealthed that they seem like the game is making fun of typical overhealthed bosses.

So then you invade the underworld and fight Garm, a giant cybernetic zombie dog. He's close to the ground and you're intended to use the other soldiers as bait to flank him. Finally! I thought, A chance to use melee on a boss! Time to shine! But nope, still no dice. Flanking him is easy, but sure enough you can't actually hit any of Garm's numerous targets in melee. Not only do the hits simply not register, you will be beaten down the very instant you close to melee range. Even the fierce attack, which autotargets the weak points, does no damage. I was using the damage chart by this time so I know it just wasn't registering. So what do you do? Pea shooters. Run around to the side and wait for his barrier shielding to go down, then wait for his armor to go down, then wait for the weak point itself to take enough damage to knock him to his knees, at which point you can actually deal melee damage to him. While he's motionless and not attacking. Real gratifying, Silicon Knights! You rinse and repeat this process about four or five times. His attacks are predictable and easily dodged if as long as you're not in his melee range, so the entire battle consists of holding down the triggers and watching his health meters fall. The battle is literally just like waiting for a file to upload, except instead of a file, it's laserdeath, which is actually much, much slower than your average file upload. And then once you've actually beaten it? You get the gratification of seeing some other douchebag run up and give his life to deliver the killing blow with his suicide. That's right, the game even makes every effort to cheat you in the cutscenes, too!

Then the last boss, Hel, consists entirely of killing her bizarrely-weak minions, sliding up to her and hacking at her in melee, where she's pathetic, until she teleports away and blasts you with a %100 accurate laser continuously until you close to slide range and do it all again until a third of her health is taken off and she runs to the next room. Repeat two more times. It requires absolutely zero skill to kill her and her only real attack is undodgable, so it's really just your health against hers. That's right: the final boss consists entirely of a ****-measuring contest. With a woman. The end of the game then comes so abruptly and with so little conclusion you feel like the real final boss is contending with what the game tries to pass off as a cliffhanger, a match in which you can of course put up no struggle.

I observed early on that guns were so integral to the most important parts of the game (all the tougher enemy types, bosses, polarities) that I really considered around level three starting over as a ranged specialist rather than the pathetic cannon-fodder class I blundered into. But that would mean I had to replay the first two and a half levels, and I almost threw up, so I just slid on and bore it. Then again, even people that really try and defend the game will admit that the classes are all so similar that it would really make very little difference.


It saddens me to hear that Silicon Knights are busy making this crap instead of a true sequel to Eternal Darkness on the GameCube (Penny Arcade commented on this along with one comic). I'm a big fan of ED:SR and I think I remember it mentioned that Too Human's going to be a trilogy. A trilogy. It annoys me to the core.

Well written, and I feel for you. It's always angry time when you find out you bought a pile of unfinished tripe.

I'm still going to give it a blast regardless, if I get the chance. I'd like to see if it's as bad as you make it out to be. :smallamused:

Let me just say this: I exaggerate a lot. I can get really heated essentially for
kicks over something that is actually mildly off-putting. But of there were only two things in the world that were actually as bad as I make them out to be, they would be the crash of the Hindenburg and Too Human. Oh, the too humanity!

Did Silicon Knights really make Eternal Darkness? That game was brilliant! What in the world happened? And another thing I just read is that the Too Human concept has existed in some form or another since 1994. Huh. I wonder if Baldur will guest-star in Duke Nukem Forever?

You know, it's refreshing to actually discuss something like this, rather than just be insulted for dissent. Even on this board it happens a lot, but I read some of the threads on GameFAQ's about this game... Man, if you have not attempted to reproduce with this game you are flamed right out of town.

Edit: By the way, this has nagged at me for a while... How is this like Yahtzee? Is that a sexual euphemism? Did I miss something? :smallconfused:

[Crow]

The story of the game is more interesting when you realize that it is basically telling the story of the events leading up to Ragnarok in Poetic Edda. Too Human isn't taking place in the future, but in the past.

It's unfortunate that the story isn't made more clear. Already having knowledge of "what's going on" really helps. It is unfortunate that the game requires this foreknowledge to really have a good story. You shouldn't need to be a scholar of Norse mythology to fill in the blanks left by the developers in the plot.

[Dallas-Dakota]

I am very surprised at myself; I rarely ever buy a game without really checking up on it first. Usually check magazines and the internet, but you can't beat having a few people give you their honest opinion. I'm something of a cautious buyer, my money being more valuable to me than to most teenagers.

I surprised myself, though, when I not only bought a game I had only passing familiarity with but actually preordered it, picking it up the day it came out. Shelled out full price. Didn't even notice I hadn't even been given my special preorder swag.

Let me make one thing very, very clear: I will not soon make this mistake again.

This game was a colossal disappointment. It's such that I hardly even know where to begin criticizing it. Being a fast-paced brawler with RPG elements, success and failure depend entirely on your ability to do exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. But the system is so imprecise that performing what you think are simple tasks is next to impossible. As you slide hectically from enemy to enemy at lightning pace, you eventually learn to either resign yourself to simply take out your foes in the order the game chooses or rebel and fail utterly when this brutal system's enforcer of sorts, the bizarre and broken camera, will make you feel your folly.

Even the best of players will die in this game a lot. A whole, whole, lot. There are hundreds of cheap, unavoidable deaths to endure in the course of a single play through, which is impressive when you consider how short the game is. The worst offender for me was the ranged enemies, who exhibit a surprising and almost unheard-of amount of intelligence for all the wrong reasons. Enemy AI in this game is awful, see, and melee enemies will often go completely unnoticed because they will stand right next to you and do nothing. It's like their forming a queue for buttkicking, patiently taking a number in consideration with how overwhelmed you probably are from the front at any given moment. But the ranged enemies, even the lowliest of whom have pinpoint accuracy at all but the greatest ranges (assuming your moving and rolling), have really got it all figured out. They just take their positions and fire, taking off little pinpricks of damage, but doing so in a large group and for however long it takes you to get to them once the game decides it's time for you to slide in their direction. But even at point-blank range, the won't stop shooting. they have no concern for life or limb and will continue to just pour round after round into you big, oval head. (Seriously, have you seen Baldur's head? It's a geometric wonder on par with Steve Harvey's hair.)

And this will lead to a slow, ever-present, embarrasing drain on your health that will never, ever fail to provide a premium of frustration. And this is what amazes me about them: despite having some of the worst AI in gaming, they of all the stooges and mooks and underlings and minions have figured out that it's just easiest to shoot the hero to death and have done with it. So you die, and...? You are reborn, of course. Seeing a robotic Valkyrie descend from the sky to raise your broken body to Asgard is actually very poetic the first few times, but this sequence is almost half a minute long, and is unskippable. And every single death will make you endure this. After that, though, you pick up pretty much where you left off; the penalty for death is almost completely unnoticeable. All that will happen is the loss of your combo, which you probably didn't have going anyway, and slight equipment degradation.

Oh, about equipment: Sell all your armor. It does nothing. I figured this out somewhere during the second boss, which was also the first (but not the last) time I seriously had to cool off to stop myself from breaking a wireless controller and an HDTV in a single glorious throw. I had died so many times during this fight that all my equipment had degraded to nothing, at which point it confers no benefit but is actually cooler then because it flashes red. But having no armor didn't affect gameplay, even a little bit. The fact that I was not even a little surprised by that should have warned me that I was already coming to loathe this game in subtle, acerbic ways, but I wanted to see things through to the finish and so I did. (I now loathe myself in subtle, acerbic ways.)

Oh, and that boss fight? Turns out it was a sign of things to come. The first boss is exactly as bad, but at that point in the game I was still chalking things up to my unfamiliarity with what was by all accounts supposed to be a very serviceable game. I actually concluded, after the first boss fight, that I must have simply never comprehended its weak point and had been fighting it incorrectly to its death. But the second boss was blatantly and maddeningly broken, as are all the games bosses, and I couldn't be fooled by it no matter what I told myself. But no matter; I paid for it, I may as well beat it.

So, the setting at least makes up for some of it. Well... I'll amend that. The concept of the setting is rather intriguing. After the Earth is put into nuclear winter sometime post-today, humanity finds itself struggling to merely remain extant while fighting the very warmachines that continue to mindlessly wage war ages after the fact. With mankind on its last legs, cybernetic 'gods,' the Aesir, have been created to stand as the final champions and defenders of our doomed species. With the war leaning further, as it always has, in favor of the machines, you enter as Baldur and commence the epic buttkicking and save the world.

That's the plot. In theory. But everything has a great deal of Norse myth plugged into it: Aesir, Valkyrie, ODIN, all the 'gods,' Asgard and Valhalla, monsters and Yggdrasil and the NORNS and on and on. But the integration is so haphazard and campy it just left me completely nonplussed. The characters are as shallow as they could possibly be made, and you will never, ever have to wonder at any character's role in the plot, as your first meeting with them will tell you absolutely everything you need to know, from 'this guy thinks with his fists' to 'Huh. Wonder what critical bit of plot this character, which I've seen for all of five seconds, is hiding from me?' Unfortunately, the characters are the plot; introducing who is who and who does what and goes where makes up one hundred percent of this game's story. This is a feat that actually amazes me, and not even in the sarcastic way; I stand in total awe of a completely expository game, a feat that I know that I as a writer could never have thought to try and likely will never equal. This has led to my speculation that the second game in what is planned to be a trilogy will actually contain the whole of the rising action and climax, with the final entry consisting completely of the denouement, breaking the overarching storyline neatly into a story worthy of a single game. Too Human is like playing that part in Mario where Bowser captures the princess, except for ten hours. Ten excruciating hours.

And speaking of the game's length, I honestly don't know what to make of it. If it where any shorter, I would cry foul and question whether the game was even complete. It's that short, really! But if the game where any longer, even by a few seconds, I think I would honestly blow a gasket for having to endure it. The length of the game sits in a strange and wonderful zone that I have not yet named, but it functions on this theory: If half of you were on fire, and the other half encased in ice, there must be a zone on your body where these two forces are at equilibrium. But the execution of this theory finally answers my question about that zone's nature. It is not, as I theorized, grotesquely pleasant. It actually attains a new and magnificent form of torture in its hybridization by taking away something potentially pleasant and giving you something unequivocally unpleasant, as though someone gave you a stick of delightful rock candy by jamming it as far as possible up your nose, only to leave you to find it's not rock candy at all, just the bloodied stick it should have come on.

These are the high points of the low points, but really there isn't any part of the game you could not criticize. From the grinding, the brokenness of the classes, the inefficacy of the skill tree, the poor attempt at personalization, and all the many varieties of repetition the game offers you, from the stale environments, the few and uninspired enemy types, to the constant cycle of having you lower and lower expectations consistently defied, there isn't really anything I can say I enjoyed about this game, as even finishing it brought me no pleasure. And that is what hurts most of all: that the game has succeded in mocking me.

One of the few attempts the game makes at depth is the constant illustration of the pointlessness of revenge, of how spite will never offer any solace or completeness. And yet even as the game force-fed me these tired epigrams, I found myself playing more and more for the sake, not of enjoyment, on which I had long given up hope, but of finishing the game, of slogging through each and every last little biting and highly effective attempt the game makes both to stop you from succeeding and to rob you of joy, of bile, of spleen, ichor, of the blood boiling in my eyelids, of the constant chime in the back of my head that I had brought all this upon myself and could stop at any time. I walked into the game's unwittingly set trap of completely falling prey to the theme of the most hackneyed plot I have played in recent memory.

But what really gets to me the most is knowing that, for all the terrible things I've ascribed to the game, no folly on the part of Silicon Knights, the developer, can be held in lower esteem than my own, which was, of course, paying sixty damn dollars of my hard-earned money for a completely unknown quantity, this game, and then willfully enduring the pain it brought me, adding insult to injury in as faithful a manner to the original Aesop as anyone could consciously devise, and that I was making myself play in complete and conscious spite of Mass Effect's final level lying easily within reach, waiting for me to share its secrets and revel with it in its glory. And for that I feel a cold and special shame.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, caveat emptor.
And that kids, is why I never ever pre-order anything.

[hanzo66]

Well, Too Human (or as Sony fanboys call it, Too Humorous) already had a bad rep beginning with the first time it was presented to the public. At first I thought the idea of Dual-Wielding guns in different directions mixed with Melee sounded cool, but as time went on, I naturally stopped caring for the game, though I did develop an annoyance to the constant "Too Humorous Lol" from the board I frequent in IGN (Devil May Cry board, which has a large amount of Sony Fanboys who are still very sore at DMC4 being multi-platform).


Today I played it on a booth and I would comment that the game is very dark. Not dark as in Frank Miller, Tim Burton and Wes Craven collaboration dark, but dark as in "Where's the friggin' Light Switch?!" type of dark. The in-door settings are incredibly hard to see with poor lighting, but luckily the robo-mooks are very shiny. I only played until I died once, then I had to go but I also agree that the Death Animation is way too long.


Your frustration reminded me of the time I, in a moment of folly and wanting to do it for the Lulz, bought Sonic the Hedgehog for the PS3. I may be able to rant about it somewhere else, but this is your thread, so that would take somewhere else (besides, the game has already had it's ass torn apart by bunches of guys in Youtube).

[Destro_Yersul]

Yahtzee is a video game reviewer famous for having a sweet hat and a British accent. He uses expletives a lot and is characteristically brutal to every game except Portal. You can find his stuff over on The Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation). It's hilarious.

I have had a problem doing melee damage to bosses, but fortunately the defender is equally good (read: bad) at doing damage with guns. Which is why I went with a cybernetic alignment, cause now I get gigantic cannon things and all kinds of extra nifty equipment. Can't comment on individual bosses because I've only gotten to level 2, which I am almost done. I'll comment on the grendel though: Those little buzzer things he sends at you are evil incarnate. Too Human needs autotarget for guns. Badly.

I haven't actually played Mass Effect recently. I should have a look again, because I might have changed the armour... I went with an infiltrator for the sniper rifle training, because I loves me some snipers, and I have to say the spectre master sniper is godly. I can.. 3 shot the geth prime, I think. And I can do it from really far away. I killed a colossus with my sniper rifle once just for fun.

[Arameus]

The story of the game is more interesting when you realize that it is basically telling the story of the events leading up to Ragnarok in Poetic Edda. Too Human isn't taking place in the future, but in the past.

It's unfortunate that the story isn't made more clear. Already having knowledge of "what's going on" really helps. It is unfortunate that the game requires this foreknowledge to really have a good story. You shouldn't need to be a scholar of Norse mythology to fill in the blanks left by the developers in the plot.

I know it happened way long ago; the nuclear wars before the game triggered what we now call the Ice Age, right? I think that's the story, anyway. And no, knowing that really doesn't do anything to improve it. It just takes a terrible sci-fi/myth abortion into the exact same thing that's also ridiculously improbable due to an arbitrary setting restraint. They may as well have the third game take place fighting the Atlantean Psychic Fleet. I said it happened 'post-today,' but what I meant by that is that the plot is an obvious shill about how our violent ways will end our civilization, probably within our lifetime, in a game the sole appeal of which is theoretically derived from mass slaughter.

They've been taking some pointers from Namco Bandai's Project Aces team, haven't they? Or from most other 'serious' war-centered games, but whatever. For me, though, the Ace Combat games, which I am in love with, are especially egregious about this disparity. It's like the team decided early on that if people are going to play violent games, they should at least be made to feel like a terrible person for having done so. This is alleviated by Ace Combat's terrible, D-movie writing making it unintentionally funny, such that you can usually tell who will die or turn evil by the second or third mission. Ace Combat 0 doesn't even give you that long; you can tell Pix is the traitor before the first mission even properly begins if you're clever, or at least not a Hellen Keller.

What game were we talking about? Oh, that's right. I actually knew little to nothing about the game beforehand, which is essentially the point of this thread, and therefore I don't really have any pre-existing bias toward or against it. I knew its genre, a barely remembered some bits about the setting and classes, just enough to almost qualify as 'scant.' But I knew there was this picture of a troll in GI that, due to the lighting and angle, looked like a hybrid of Master Chief and Metal Gear REX. And I knew that instant that I must have this game. That, of course, was a bust, as trolls don't actually look like the picture makes them look, and fighting them is... Well, I've spoken my piece on them. In fact, I think I've railed against every single part of this game that I'm going to, with the very, very few things I haven't covered in depth being variants of complaints I've already mentioned, in slightly different situations. I still cannot think of any compliment to give this game, although I almost considered a part near the end.

Since you can finally bring your melee to bear, the last boss actually presents a place to bring your best skills to bear. However, this doesn't make it good, it just makes it boring and repetitive rather than aggravating and insulting. All the boss battles are artificially lengthened, and finally using your melee against this overhealthed final boss only serves to hammer home how shallow and dull the fighting actually is if something takes more than two hits to kill and doesn't have an obvious superattack to spam. That's not the part I almost thought of as being nearly good, though. The part I meant was the death scene of said final boss, Hel, whom you push into what can only be described as a doom cage. Saws and lasers and drills and spikes all come toward her, and just as you are about to have the effigy of everything about this terrible game that has irrevocably raised your blood pressure haewn to bloody chunks before your eyes in what would the been the most cathartic moment in all gaming, the camera cuts away and her execution last all of a second and a half, bloodless, silent, and surgical.

WHERE'S THE VIOLENCE??!!! WHERE'S THE BLOOD-SPRAY??!?!?

Alright, now this is something I can't stand about some games, though it extends to all media. They try so hard to dark, edgy, gritty, and grim, and then they make shallow, obvious cuts into the gameplay, story, or presentation to keep their T rating. Nothing about this game says 'T.' It's epically violent. It contains nothing but pointless, glorified violence, grotesquely visible body-part integration, and some sexuality thrown in for good measure. But apparently showing someone having their skin melted off to reveal all their horrifying cybernetics is A-frickin-OK as long as there's no bleeding, showing an electronic nymphomaniac cutting off her clothes and disemboweling herself is fine as long as you only show bloodstains hitting the ground, not actually on her body, and both in her case and the case of Hel, you can show pretty much 99% of their flesh, but no nipples? That's the line. What absurdly-powerful media advocacy group convened one dark night and handed down the law that the only potentially-offensive part of the breast is the nipple itself? It's a fascinating concept I have never, ever understood. And you get to see two characters get an enormous bullet hole right between their eyes, which apparently is perfectly kosher as long as any kind of exit trajectory is ignored and the wound doesn't bleed. I had the same problem with The Dark Knight; the concept of pretty much every single scene in the movie more than warrants an R-rating, but the movie people always make sure that the specifics of the scene are just barely within the lines, which just cheapens everything and is not even passingly difficult to recognize.

I will now make a vow that if I am taunted with sex/gore that I am then explicitly denied, in the interest of making murder/sex more family-friendly, I will rape/kill the person(s) responsible. You've been warned, faceless media giants!

So I checked out some of the Yahtzee stuff. Pretty stonking hilarious. But he stole that hat from me! It's mine! It's in my closet! I've been wearing it since 2003! Well... I wore it in 2003.... Once or twice..... But it's the principle of it.

[Crow]

Which alignment is better power-wise? Cybernetic or Human?

[Destro_Yersul]

I have to agree with you on the arbitrary rating thing. Media people are very inconsistent about that sort of thing, I've noticed. For example, Assassin's Creed got an M. Perfectly logical. You're an assassin, and your whole job is to run around and murder people for fun and profit. You can also beat them up, steal their knives, and generally terrify them. However, Too Human, as you've said, got T. You still kill people for fun and profit, beat them up, steal their goodies and do all sorts of nasty things to them involving defiance of physics and absurdly large weaponry. Only they're machines, so it's ok. No blood, still ok. Well lookit that. Only difference is that they don't show it directly. It's there, but they let your imagination make it even more gruesome than it probably was. Doesn't make a lot of sense.

On alignments, I'd say go with Cybernetic. The Human alignment doesn't seem to give quite as large a benefit as the ability to use whacking great cannons and some truly nifty equipment. Most of the good stuff I've found has been cybernetic.

On another note, I find myself wondering how the game would stack up with more than one player. Perhaps less frequent death would occur, because bosses and such would be unable to focus entirely on one person. I like it as it is, but you know what they say. "The more the merrier", right? :smallsmile:

[MeklorIlavator]

Quick Question: is the combat similar to that of Jade Empire(Melee at least)?

[Thanatos 51-50]

Please, for the love of whatever dieties you may or may not worship:
Don't. Buy. This. Game.

Just don't.
I'm not even through the second level, and I already find it annoying and arbritrary (tm).

I'm playing as a Commando (Cyborg), specializing in Plasma Rifles. I run around wielding a Plasma Rifle.
I find myself facing a huge horde of enemies which kill me thrice before I start making anything resembling a signifiant impact on their HP.

The moment I loose my cool and bash 'im with my Zweihander is usually when I start the carnage.
Now, all of a sudden, these jerks have the gall to BLOW UP and leave persistant damage effects.
For enough time to take me out if that was the only damage I've taken the entire fight.

Which it isn't.
Cause I got close enough to bash their mechanical skulls in, already.

Where my feeling of badasserey?
I thought Baldur was, in the context of this game, supposed to be a super-warrior.
In the context of Norse Myth, he was invulnerable to everything except Holly.
I think, with my rudimentary knowledge of Norse Myth, I've already figured out the story.

So - what is going on with you playing as Baldur? Hes dead by the time of Ragnarok. And Fenrir is his weapon?
Does this mean I get to kill ODIN?
Wow - tangent.

[chiasaur11]

Please, for the love of whatever dieties you may or may not worship:
Don't. Buy. This. Game.

Just don't.
I'm not even through the second level, and I already find it annoying and arbritrary (tm).

I'm playing as a Commando (Cyborg), specializing in Plasma Rifles. I run around wielding a Plasma Rifle.
I find myself facing a huge horde of enemies which kill me thrice before I start making anything resembling a signifiant impact on their HP.

The moment I loose my cool and bash 'im with my Zweihander is usually when I start the carnage.
Now, all of a sudden, these jerks have the gall to BLOW UP and leave persistant damage effects.
For enough time to take me out if that was the only damage I've taken the entire fight.

Which it isn't.
Cause I got close enough to bash their mechanical skulls in, already.

Where my feeling of badasserey?
I thought Baldur was, in the context of this game, supposed to be a super-warrior.
In the context of Norse Myth, he was invulnerable to everything except Holly.
I think, with my rudimentary knowledge of Norse Myth, I've already figured out the story.

So - what is going on with you playing as Baldur? Hes dead by the time of Ragnarok. And Fenrir is his weapon?
Does this mean I get to kill ODIN?
Wow - tangent.

On the other hand, Balder in the original myths and the Walt Simonson run on Thor, while a good fighter, not a warrior but a poet at heart. The reason he was invincible was all the possible weapons liked him too much to hurt him if they're asked.

Thor is a MUCH more logical deific star of a beat-em-up.

[Stormthorn]

Damn.

Waiting all that time for a game that gave norse myth its day in the spotlight and its a flop.

Now i will have to go back to playing my ancient Age of Mythology and dreaming big dreams about nordic sci-fi.

[Philistine]

Damn.

Waiting all that time for a game that gave norse myth its day in the spotlight and its a flop.

Now i will have to go back to playing my ancient Age of Mythology and dreaming big dreams about nordic sci-fi.

Nordic sci-fi, eh? Have you read David Drake's Northworld trilogy, by chance?

[chiasaur11]

Nordic sci-fi, eh? Have you read David Drake's Northworld trilogy, by chance?

Simonson's run on Thor might be good too.

It has Alien Cyborg Horseface Thor, demons vs. spaceships with superintellegent AI, and dwarves with welding goggles.