Paylord
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My Steam account is almost old enough to go to the bar.
My Steam account is almost old enough to go to the bar.
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This is a fun little romp through the late 90's early 00's aesthetic. There's plenty wrong with it, but it's pretty hard to tell what's intentional and what's not.
Fun music, fun graphic elements, and some pretty nicely done level design overall. If you're feeling nostalgic for that era, then this game's going to touch you in a special place, like a creepy Hot Topic manager.
Fun music, fun graphic elements, and some pretty nicely done level design overall. If you're feeling nostalgic for that era, then this game's going to touch you in a special place, like a creepy Hot Topic manager.
This review contains spoilers
This was a pretty fun uhhhh, what kind of game would this be?
You spend your time driving/piloting different kinds of vehicles used for demolition. As expected, there are plenty of different stages, with nicely done environmental effects. The music is pretty good.
The physics system is going crazy. I've never seen so much debris explode at once in a game, and my graphics card was definitely struggling to keep up.
Performance woes aside, one thing I did not expect to see was a storyline. There are threads that connect the different missions together, and things keep escalating to a faction war within the company, and even a Kraken. The Kraken?
Whatever you want to call it, in the last stage you get to pilot it, which is a very interesting twist.
I'll probably be returning to complete the bonus challenges after a few more updates (which will hopefully iron out some of the performance issues and bugs I ran across.)
You spend your time driving/piloting different kinds of vehicles used for demolition. As expected, there are plenty of different stages, with nicely done environmental effects. The music is pretty good.
The physics system is going crazy. I've never seen so much debris explode at once in a game, and my graphics card was definitely struggling to keep up.
Performance woes aside, one thing I did not expect to see was a storyline. There are threads that connect the different missions together, and things keep escalating to a faction war within the company, and even a Kraken. The Kraken?
Whatever you want to call it, in the last stage you get to pilot it, which is a very interesting twist.
I'll probably be returning to complete the bonus challenges after a few more updates (which will hopefully iron out some of the performance issues and bugs I ran across.)
This game has a reputation for being pretty bad. While not entirely undeserved, I think there's something to enjoy here nonetheless.
Let's start off with its many, many problems:
Sound Design: There's a distinct lack of music for most of the game. What music is there is pretty good, but most of the time spent is listening to a mish-mash of stock sound effects blended with a few original sounds. Sometimes the sound just stopped playing.
The Story: The story is pretty uninteresting as presented in the game, which is too bad! There's a lot of lore here that would have benefited from being presented in a better tale.
Tutorials: A lot of the game's mechanical elements aren't explained fully, and some of them aren't explained at all. I still don't know what requirements there are for triggering some of the special abilities.
The Puzzles: Often, progressing through an area requires Baldur to jump into cyberspace to "solve" puzzles by activating special abilities only available in cyberspace. That doesn't sound so bad. The problem is that they only ever amount to the player character walking to clearly marked spots, and pressing a button. Sometimes there's treasure, sometimes there's not.
The Camera: This is the big one for me, and likely lots of other people. Your only control over the camera is to press the center camera button to turn it toward where your character is facing, and even that doesn't work much of the time. You can also choose how far back the camera is, but the game so regularly wrestles the camera away from where you're facing that I ended up bumping into invisible walls way too many times for my own liking. The auto-camera doesn't work, and makes a lot of assumptions about what I want to be looking at.
The Level Design: Don't get me wrong, the areas are very pretty, and definitely represent some of the finer 3d work from the Xbox 360 era. That being said, progression through the stages is very predictable, laborious, and just kind of a slog.
There's probably a lot of other things I could criticize about the game, but that's not why I'm writing this. Now that my major grievances are out of the way, it's time to talk about the good.
Art Style: The art assets have a grimdark charm to them, reminding me a lot of the world of Warhammer 40,000 with grandiose halls, full of futuristic greeblies and science-fantasy doodads. Every weapon and piece of armor has its own appearance, and you can apparently change the color of your items with a consumable, something I never bothered with.
The cutscenes are pretty well done, and I especially like the sections of the game where the camera zooms out or up and the player gets a birdseye view of the surroundings.
The Combat: While I certainly spent a lot of time fighting against the auto-camera, most of the combat was thoroughly enjoyable for me. Controlling things with the right-stick provided a fresh take on third-person action combat.
Melee combat was blissful, with Baldur quickly jump dashing between separate enemies, air juggling them, triggering special abilities, and building up a combo meter that's used to power those abilities.
Ranged combat is another story, but I did find the variety of available ranged weapons to be fun. The problem for me was that the lock-on system often had trouble finding enemies, even if I was facing them directly.
The Equipment: There's a lot of gear! It's not all useful but I kept finding improved gear throughout my playthrough, so I never felt too held back by having inferior equipment, because I knew I'd soon find something better.
Weapons, multi-piece armor kits, charms, and runes allow for a lot of customization and optimization. I could see myself spending a lot of time here, in any other game.
There are also crafting blueprints for various items, but since they only cost money to build, I would have preferred just finding the item I wanted rather than a blueprint that essentially functions as a buy-in ticket.
The Setting: Is there anything more 2008 than a science-fantasy romp through a grimdark Nordfuturist Helscape, with marines? That's a rhetorical question.
I think it's a lot of fun, but your mileage may vary.
The Bottom Line:
All in all, this game is deserving of its reputation, but for some players there is still something to love about Too Human.
Just don't tell me it's your favorite game; I won't believe you.
Let's start off with its many, many problems:
Sound Design: There's a distinct lack of music for most of the game. What music is there is pretty good, but most of the time spent is listening to a mish-mash of stock sound effects blended with a few original sounds. Sometimes the sound just stopped playing.
The Story: The story is pretty uninteresting as presented in the game, which is too bad! There's a lot of lore here that would have benefited from being presented in a better tale.
Tutorials: A lot of the game's mechanical elements aren't explained fully, and some of them aren't explained at all. I still don't know what requirements there are for triggering some of the special abilities.
The Puzzles: Often, progressing through an area requires Baldur to jump into cyberspace to "solve" puzzles by activating special abilities only available in cyberspace. That doesn't sound so bad. The problem is that they only ever amount to the player character walking to clearly marked spots, and pressing a button. Sometimes there's treasure, sometimes there's not.
The Camera: This is the big one for me, and likely lots of other people. Your only control over the camera is to press the center camera button to turn it toward where your character is facing, and even that doesn't work much of the time. You can also choose how far back the camera is, but the game so regularly wrestles the camera away from where you're facing that I ended up bumping into invisible walls way too many times for my own liking. The auto-camera doesn't work, and makes a lot of assumptions about what I want to be looking at.
The Level Design: Don't get me wrong, the areas are very pretty, and definitely represent some of the finer 3d work from the Xbox 360 era. That being said, progression through the stages is very predictable, laborious, and just kind of a slog.
There's probably a lot of other things I could criticize about the game, but that's not why I'm writing this. Now that my major grievances are out of the way, it's time to talk about the good.
Art Style: The art assets have a grimdark charm to them, reminding me a lot of the world of Warhammer 40,000 with grandiose halls, full of futuristic greeblies and science-fantasy doodads. Every weapon and piece of armor has its own appearance, and you can apparently change the color of your items with a consumable, something I never bothered with.
The cutscenes are pretty well done, and I especially like the sections of the game where the camera zooms out or up and the player gets a birdseye view of the surroundings.
The Combat: While I certainly spent a lot of time fighting against the auto-camera, most of the combat was thoroughly enjoyable for me. Controlling things with the right-stick provided a fresh take on third-person action combat.
Melee combat was blissful, with Baldur quickly jump dashing between separate enemies, air juggling them, triggering special abilities, and building up a combo meter that's used to power those abilities.
Ranged combat is another story, but I did find the variety of available ranged weapons to be fun. The problem for me was that the lock-on system often had trouble finding enemies, even if I was facing them directly.
The Equipment: There's a lot of gear! It's not all useful but I kept finding improved gear throughout my playthrough, so I never felt too held back by having inferior equipment, because I knew I'd soon find something better.
Weapons, multi-piece armor kits, charms, and runes allow for a lot of customization and optimization. I could see myself spending a lot of time here, in any other game.
There are also crafting blueprints for various items, but since they only cost money to build, I would have preferred just finding the item I wanted rather than a blueprint that essentially functions as a buy-in ticket.
The Setting: Is there anything more 2008 than a science-fantasy romp through a grimdark Nordfuturist Helscape, with marines? That's a rhetorical question.
I think it's a lot of fun, but your mileage may vary.
The Bottom Line:
All in all, this game is deserving of its reputation, but for some players there is still something to love about Too Human.
Just don't tell me it's your favorite game; I won't believe you.