Too Human

Travel back in time with me, dear readers, to the final day of the fourth month of the 2010th year of our Lord. It's a Friday night at the tail end of my final semester in college and I'm living it up in the event room of some hotel at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department's Spring Banquet. My senior design project group has just won the award for best senior design project, and it's nice to know that a hundred evenings of desperately trying to figure out coding and circuitry I was never taught have not gone to complete waste. I mean, look at this certificate! And listen to that mild applause! And... what's this? Microsoft has decided to sponsor our class by rewarding the top three project teams with Xbox 360 games? There'll be time to question this later. For now, I have to decide between Halo 3 (which I and every other 360-owning SDP winner already own) or some obscure game called Too Human. I've got no interest whatsoever, but a prize is a prize and I can't refuse a free video game. Wait - it's the final day of the month. That means this surprise acquisition will leave me without net progress on the month in the video games department! No! Logging progress foiled yet again by this fucking senior design project... Alright. Present day again. That was fun, right? Reliving my college days? Anyway, I've spent the last week or so actually playing through this random acquisition of a game, Too Human, and I've got a lot to say about it. Since we're already running long, I'll let Wikipedia give you the overview:

As part of a planned game trilogy, the story is a science-fictional futuristic retelling of Norse mythology that portrays the Æsir, the Norse Gods, as cybernetic-enhanced humans, tasked with protecting mankind from the onslaught of Loki's army of machines. The player takes the role of the Norse God Baldur, who is less cybernetic than the other Gods, thus being "too human". The game incorporates elements of hack and slash and action-adventure with heavy emphasis on role-playing gameplay elements such as gathering items, upgrading equipment and choosing character classes and alignments. The game is noted for remaining in development hell for almost ten years, originally planned as a four-disc release for the Sony PlayStation in 1999.

The nicest thing I can say about Too Human is that it featured a lot of interesting elements. Futuristic cyborgs stand in for Norse gods? I can dig that. RPG elements such as leveling up and upgrading weapons and armor? Cool; sounds like BioShock. Dungeon-crawling gameplay featuring endless hordes of enemies? Eh, a bit of a trope, but it's cool that I can deal with them in either a hack-and-slash or shoot-em-up manner. Sadly, the game was far worse as a whole than the sum of its interesting parts. From the get-go, you're asked to choose a character class. There's an attack-heavy guy, a defensive-oriented one - you know the drill. I went for the "bio-engineer," who has the ability to heal himself. I'm glad I chose this guy arbitrarily, because there's no way in hell I'd have beaten the game without absolutely spamming those healing abilities. The thing is, once you've chosen your class, you're locked in. Yet, you'll still find weapons and armor throughout the game that are meant for other classes, and you can't use them. Why include them at all? The game begins with a confusing and lengthy multiple-part cinematic that doesn't so much serve as an introduction to the game as it does as an introduction to the first of four missions that constitute the story. These videos looked absolutely terrible, which is likely a result of the game spending ten years in development hell. After all, how can an Xbox 630 game take advantage of the Xbox 360 engine when it was originally intended to come out for a console two generations old? Anyway, from the start, you're locked into a character class that you picked more or less blindly (unless you've played the game before) in a world that hasn't been explained to you in the least. Are you ready to go hunt down a robot monster codenamed "Grendel?" (I'm pretty sure Beowulf was an Anglo-Saxon poem which had nothing to do with Norse mythology and the likes of Odin, Thor, and Baldur, but whatever.) So here comes the first of only four missions in a game that took ten years to make. And boy, does this combat system suck. You swing your axe or sword or staff or hammer around by pointing the right analog stick in the direction you wish to swing it. This works fairly well when you're surrounded on all sides by enemies (and you spend half of the game in that exact situation) but at no point in time does it buy you any kind of advantage over, say, just mashing an attack button. In fact, with the left stick reserved for movement and the right stick taken up by attacks, you're left with no control over the free-wheeling third person camera, which obnoxiously swings around and disorients you in the middle of combat. This makes maneuvering and fleeing from enemies nearly impossible. (Did I mention that every enemy is much faster than you? Every enemy is much faster than you.) And if you had planned on sitting back and shooting at the enemies instead of charging them for close combat, plan again; by the second mission, gunfire can't chip away one enemy's health before eighteen of them are swarming you. The game's difficulty curve also swerves all over the place like a roller coaster. While playing through the middle of the second mission, I was dying every thirty seconds or so. This wouldn't have been the most frustrating video game I've played in years were it not for an unskippable cinematic that occurs every single time you die, in which a valkyrie nonchalantly flies down to retrieve your corpse and bring it to Valhalla. This takes twenty-seven seconds, and as I said, there were stretches during the game where I was dying multiple times a minute. Fortunately, the game got a whole lot easier in the third mission (how? why?) and although it took me eight hours to finish the first two missions, it took a scant four or five to do the final two. Perhaps this is because halfway through the game I lost the will to do optional exploration of some sort of parallel cyberspace world full of weapons and armor. The game doesn't even end with much closure, since it was meant to be the first part of a trilogy which now seems unlikely to ever come out with a second installment. Hey, fine by me - no way was I interested in a continuation of this experience anyway. That said, a hypothetical Too Human 2 could actually be a very fun game. After all, most of the flaws in Too Human - and there are many severe ones - could be fixed just by revamping the gameplay. Hell, just two easy changes - allowing me to skip the valkyrie sequence and re-mapping the right stick to do camera work - would have made this a fairly enjoyable gaming experience. And that's the real shame here, I guess; for a game that took ten years to make, Too Human feels an awful lot like a title that was rushed out for release before it could be properly tested. Its biggest flaws are so easily amendable and it probably should have been a simple and enjoyable game, if memorable for nothing more than a creative retelling of Norse mythology. Instead, it's an early nominee for "worst game I played in 2012." Great concepts for games don't amount to much when the metaphorical glue that binds them all together happens to be metaphorical wet shit.