Too Human or Not Too Human?

Finally, after 10 years, the highly anticipated title from Silicon Knights, Too Human, is about to hit the shelves. Actually, I could care less about the long, arduous journey this game has had. I wasn’t even aware of its existence until I saw the game’s stellar E3 trailer a few months ago. I decided to download the demo and give the game a try, and I must say, it is a true spectacle to behold. The game’s environments are beautifully designed and the storyline is a rather fascinating blend of Norse mythology mixed with problems facing our modern day society. This includes giant snarling robots that visit public events and devour the patrons. Or at least that’s what I gathered after 15 minutes of playing.

In the game, you play the character of Baldur, a badass cybernetic god with blue LEDs under his skin.I believe he also owned a Gate in a previous series of computer games. Anyhow, he wields a primary and secondary ranged weapon as well as a sword with glowing letters on it… and that’s where the good stuff ends.

So what could really go wrong with a game that’s had ten years of tweaking by one of the most prestigious video game developers? Well a hell of a lot, obviously, as the game has terrible controls, pointless, time consuming processes, and possibly the worst camera angles I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing in a game (especially a game promising to be “the next generation third-person epic action game”).

Let me elaborate:

1. Controls – The controls make about as much sense as eating rice with chopsticks. I can’t even explain the exact control process to you now, but here’s an idea. You’re supposed to be able to aim with one thumbstick while shooting with the right and left triggers and use the sword with the other thumbstick. What ultimately happens is that during the initial swarm of enemies, which are about as dumb as Paris Hilton, it doesn’t matter if you have bad aim because no matter where you shoot or swing your sword there will be a bad guy there. But after you’ve killed most of them and there’s one or two remaining, you will find yourself flailing your sword or shooting bullets aimlessly while the bad guy stands 1 foot behind you staring on…and after about 20 minutes you might get turned around and finally be given a camera angle good enough to actually kill them with. In short, it just doesn’t work.

2. Pointless Time Consuming Processes – Actually, I have only one example of this because it irritated me so much that I turned the game off and never played it again. Aside from bitching about things and doing armpit farts, I don’t consider myself a person of many talents, but I can open just about any door in my house with a simple flick of the wrist and a push. Apparently the same rules don’t apply to cybernetic gods. Instead you have to teleport into some ethereal plain and move floating rocks around with your mind-over-matter power to open a stupid door. It’s a completely mindless and pointless step that only exists to make basic, mundane tasks take an extraordinarily long time.

3. Camera angles – Camera angles really shouldn’t be a major issue with today’s fully immersive 3D games, but this game isn’t a fully immersive 3D game. Instead, you have absolutely no ability to look around your surroundings while you’re moving. Instead, you will go for the thumbstick that is normally used for looking around the environment in every other 3D game in existence only to find that it activates the sword. You will do this time and time again, I promise, because that’s the way it should have been set up. However, what happens is that the game tries to look around for you, zooming in on every detail on the wall while your enemies disappear completely out of your field of vision. There is a look around feature in the game that does enable you to look everywhere except for the ceiling or the sky or the ground, or sharply to your sides, or behind you.

Ok, I’ve said enough about this subpar, overhyped, slimey turd of a game. I wouldn’t reccommend downloading the demo, nonetheless spending hard-earned cash on Too Human.