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Too Human Review

by Dick Ward August 19th 2008 10:55 AM CDT5 Comments

Playing Too Human is like taking a trip with your girlfriend and your best friend. Sure it looks good on paper, and everything is working out beautifully until it actually happens. Your friend makes a pass at your girlfriend, you end up fighting, and your girlfriend dumps you for it. Everyone just ends up bitter and resentful and never really has the fun that everyone planned on.

On paper, the plan for Too Human is amazing. It’s a dungeon-crawling action RPG with simple to learn but hard to master combat, and an epic storyline set in a future where Norse gods are the protectors of humanity. Oh, and there’s robots. The potential is there, but before the experience really kicks off, it starts to go bad.

From a purely technical standpoint, this game is a letdown. Cutscenes are poorly animated and run poorly, music cues cover up dialogue, and bugs litter the game design. Seemingly extinct problems like invisible barriers, players getting stuck on enemies, and events not triggering properly all make appearances at different points in Too Human. There’s an obvious lack of polish, evidence that the game really could have used a few more months of work before being pushed out the door.

Silicon Knights have designed a strange method in giving players choices and then completely ignoring them. The in game camera is the pinnacle of this strange design decision, as players are given the option of choosing between a few camera angles and distances only to discover that nearly every passageway in the game has some sort of cinematic camera angle that overrides their choice.


The story is muddled and unfocused. There seems to be a lot going on but without any real attachment to the main character, Baldur, there’s not a lot of reason to care. Even if Baldur was a deep character that players could get into, the story is presented in quick snippets without a whole lot of explanation.

NPCs are generally frustrating, and are either incredibly dense or really love shouting a few phrases over and over again. As example – early in the game , players are asked to make a choice between accepting cybernetic implants or not. After choosing to remain fully humanoid, NPCs still said things like “How are those implants working out?” and “Aren’t you glad I talked you into them?”

Perhaps more annoying than those is the character of Thor. A blatantly one dimensional character; Thor loves fighting, drinking, women and all the things that an Asgardian god should love, apparently. He’s annoying enough in cutscenes, but later in the game he joins Baldur in battle and players are forced to listen to him utter one of his three or four speech options every minute or so. This gets old very very quickly.

When it comes to the actual combat, the game holds up pretty well. The right analog stick may not be the most comfortable or accurate control method for a game like this, but after the first level, it becomes second nature. Different moves can be performed by moving the stick differently, such as double tapping in a direction to launch enemies, and there really is a surprising amount of depth to the standard combat.

Special moves are a bit more limited, as players get one battle cry and one ‘spider’ ability, the latter of which sends out a spider like robot from Baldur’s back to engage the enemy, as a turret, as a mine, a shield or a variety of other ways. Without being able to select and use multiple abilities though, players may find themselves a bit underwhelmed.

Of course, Silicon Knights doesn’t appear to be banking on deep combat systems or thrilling stories to keep players interested, they know what fans of dungeon crawls really love – loot, and this game has plenty of it. There is an overabundance of weaponry and armor dropped from monsters or obtained through obelisk like nodes placed throughout levels. In lesser supply, but still pretty common, are blueprints for new weapons and armor that can be created on the fly. Blueprints almost always provide the best option; the weapons and armor are more powerful, but much more expensive.

There was definitely a lot of development time put into armor design. From the starter set of armor to the set Baldur has equipped at the end of the game it all looks good. Mixing and matching pieces is no problem at all, they were designed to work together, and for parts that clash, purchasing a bit of dye can take care of the problem and give your character a great look.


The only thing unfortunate about the armor and weaponry is that they become outdated so quickly. Never does the player have the chance to get attached to a certain weapon or armor set up because it’s changing so rapidly. New equipment upgrades come far too rapidly, to the point that it can become more a chore than an exciting event.

The whole game seems to suffer from a lack of restraint. Baldur is always angry, levels are always huge, and weapons are always cool and powerful. There aren’t really any ups and downs, everything is 100% all the time, which just makes it seem bland. When everything’s epic, nothing’s epic.

I really wanted to like this game, to have it be new standard for action RPGs on a console. I tried to love it, and accept its flaws as quirks, but there are just too many to overlook. Rent this one, and have a friend rent it too, get some co-op going, but don’t get your hopes up too high, Too Human is averageat best.