Too Human
So, I picked up Too Human on Wednesday. At this point, I'm about 8-10 hours into the game, I've just finished the third mission, and I believe there are supposed to be 5 total missions. So after putting in this much time, I think that I know enough about the game to discuss it.
First off: I have read plenty of negative reviews of this game. So far, most of the negativity seems to be the reviewer's perception and preferences, and is little based on the game's actual flaws. So I figured the best way to start would be with a comprehensive review of what I consider to be Too Human's flaws. I have split the flaws up into two categories: Technical and Design flaws. Technical flaws are things like bugs, glitches, and optimization problems: things which are generally not done on purpose. Design flaws are places where I feel a poor decision was made, and the game suffers for it.
TECHNICAL FLAWS
-Sound glitches. Sometimes, when a character is delivering a voice line, the speech will cut out. It appears that it might be related to the camera, but it's not reliably reproducible.
-I have read several places about characters getting stuck/falling through the world. I haven't ever seen this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.
DESIGN FLAWS
-Lack of information on enemies. There are many different special types of enemies that can appear that have different special properties, or "polarities" as I think they're called. Some blow up when killed, dealing area damage, and so are optimally killed at range. Others are resistant to certain types of damage. Without experimenting, there is no way to tell what properties a given enemy has, and the game never tells you what the properties do, nor does the manual have a list.
-Lack of information on item properties. This is a pretty small problem, but there are a few item properties that are never explained. For instance, Aggression and Soothing. I had no idea what these two stats did until I started thinking in coop terms. I'm pretty sure Aggression is like threat: The more you have, the more likely it is that enemies will attack you. Soothing is the opposite. Of course, these stats are totally useless in Single Player.
-The death penalty in the game is somewhat pointless. When you die in Too Human, a Valkyrie picks you up, and then you respawn with full health at the entrance to the latest room you went into. There is a minor durability penalty on items when you die as well. The repair is pretty well-balanced: it's very difficult to actually break an item, and so effectively this is just a money penalty. As such, it might have been a better decision to simply associate a cost with death: a certain percentage of your current bounty (the game's currency). This wouldn't really be a problem, except the valkyrie picking you up takes about 20 seconds and it can't be skipped. Also, when you die, the game world doesn't change. Anything you have already killed stays dead; anything you have already damaged stays damaged. This technically makes it impossible to "lose" the game, as you could theoretically kill anything in the game by repeatedly dying, though you're likely to break your gear long before you'd be able to do this alot. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when I die, I want to get back into the game right away. I don't mind death penalties, but when it takes 20 seconds to get back fighting, it's a bit frustrating
-Loot is totally random. While I like random loot, because it adds a bit of excitement to gathering loot, I don't like getting blueprints to craft loot that I can't use. For instance, only berzerkers can dual wield, yet as a champion I will get blueprints for dual weapons. Ideally, I would say have blueprints that drop off of mobs be random, but blueprints that I get from obelisks (the treasure chest of Too Human) to be class-specific. Single-player it would just be for your class, and in Coop, they would always be for one of the two classes playing. It's still random, because class-specific just means that as a champion I won't end up getting something that's +dual wield damage, and will instead be guaranteed a small level of synergy with my skill points.
-No sprint button. While sliding moves you around quickly in melee combat, if you're out of combat and exploring, you have no way to move faster. In missions this usually isn't a problem because of how fairly linear they are, but when you are exploring cyberspace, sometimes you'll have to run all the way back through an area you've already explored when you get a new ability that would let you cross an obstacle from a previous unlocked area. A sprint ability that's only in effect in Cyberspace where there is no combat would have been great.
-Complete linearity of plot. Now, I'm down for the game and its course being linear. This doesn't bother me. However, after your first mission, you choose an alignment: Human vs. Cybernetic. While I've only played through as Cybernetic, this hasn't come into play plotwise. Supposedly, this choice is kind of the crux of the game: will you seek power by becoming more like the monsters you seek to destroy, or will you rely on the natural gifts of humanity? The alignments are pretty cool and have some awesome skills, but I wish that the story, if not the gameply, would take your chosen alignment into account a bit more.
-The targeting for the ranged weapons is pretty awful. Alot of reviews mention this, and I think it's an accurate assessment, but I feel that many reviewers missed the fact that you can actually aim at all. That doesn't excuse the clunky and inelegant targeting system though, especially when ranged combat is one class' whole milieu. A true lock-on button would have benefited this game alot. Instead of having left-trigger activate secondary fire, have left trigger lock onto an enemy. Then, while holding down your lock, you can discretely swap between enemies by tapping left and right on the right stick. While locked, change the functionality of the left bumper to alt fire. For pistols, whose alt fire is shooting the second pistol, just roll both pistols shooting into primary fire, and either come up with a new alt fire for pistols or just say they don't have one. In my honest opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the game, because being able to quickly target a specific enemy with ranged weapons is damn important when you're dealing with monsters that have polarity. Being unable to effectively target means that once the enemies have reached me, it's near impossible to actually single out a monster with polarity to kill it in the way I need to.
Now, most of the negative reviews I've read harp on a couple of issues that I don't think it is reasonable to complain about. First, repetitive gameplay. The Gametrailers review called the game a "stick masher," since you attack with the right stick instead of a button. Now, keep in mind that this is an RPG whose combat system takes after brawler/shooter games like Devil May Cry or God of War. These games often have this same situation, where you fight lots of enemies and just hit the same button to attack them over and over. Generally, these games break up this repetition by giving you a large set of moves, and rewarding you for using a diverse set of moves, as well as by having enemies that vary widely in the tactics they use and the optimal ways to defeat them. In Too Human, you have about 5 or 6 different types of moves. You can make normal melee attacks, you can do a melee finisher in close range, you can shoot a bolt of energy called a Fierce attack if you're at range, you can use Ruiners which are PBAoE nuke abilities, you have your spider bot and its different abilities, you can knock an enemy into the air and then juggle them with both ranged and melee attacks, you have standard ranged attacks, and alt fire ranged attacks. Now while it's certainly easier to simply spam one type of attack, doing so causes your combo level to grow more slowly, and you aren't fighting at full effectiveness. I get a feeling that people who think this is a button-masher style of game simply never grasped the full capability of the control system. They were able to get through the first level by just sliding between enemies, and so they never learned how to juggle, user fierce attacks/finishers, or use ruiners and spider abilities.
Now, it is true that the game does not possess a wide variety of base enemy types, and that most enemies of the same type use very very similar tactics that are generally pretty simple. Would it be nice to have more? Sure. But the additional properties added onto enemies means that you're not always going to approach the same enemy in the same way. Normally, I'll just slide from goblin to goblin beating them up. However, tack in a freeze polarity goblin, and I'll want to blow him up at range before engaging in melee. Another example is that some polarities give you bonus combo points for killing the mob in a specific way, and so you may want to kill them in that way to maintain high combos. Add into this the fact that instead of just getting more red orbs for killing something with a high combo score, your combo score can actually add concrete bonuses like a damage increase or higher crit rates, and I fail to see how Too Human is any different from God of War or Devil May Cry in its repetitiveness, save that you fight much larger numbers of enemies. But this just makes me feel more badass when I beat them all up and take their stuff.
Another thing that many reviewers have criticized is the camera. Too Human uses a "smart" camera; the camera adjusts itself to display what it determines to be the most important perspective. With only one exception, I have never had trouble with this. Generally the camera is very good about what it displays, but if you do need a specific field of view, you can manually recenter the camera behind your character with the left bumper. Once, however, when I was close to a wall, the camera glitched a little and got stuck. It fixed itself fairly quickly though, and did not occur in combat, nor has it happened again since. Honestly, I think we as gamers have become so used to being given direct control over the camera that when we don't have control, we tend to fight it. Learn to accept the way the camera works, and it actually works very well, but if you insist on constantly micro-managing your viewpoint with the left bumper, it can cause problems.
The game also scales encounters based on your level. IGN, in particular, felt the scaling was too harsh, and as such they never felt like a badass. I have to admit, when I played through the second mission, I had a real hard time. The enemies were all kicking my ass, and I couldn't effectively fight them. I died so many times in that mission... Today, when I started into the third mission, I chose to respec my character into one of the other trees available, and it made the world of difference. You see, each class has three paths it can take for skills. Each is themed slightly differently. For instance, the champion has one path that focuses on boosting ranged combat, one on boosting melee combat, and a third that's focused on aerial combat (that is, juggling enemies). I had been specced into the melee tree, and was getting slaughtered. My melee attacks were super strong, sure, but I could still only really kill one guy at a time, and each dark elf basically took a finisher to kill. But when I specced into the aerial tree, I learned a Battle Cry that makes all of my melee hits launch the enemy into the air. This made a HUGE difference in evening the odds: when an enemy is in the air, they are effectively stunned, and can't attack, so this ability meant I was no longer getting swarmed by armies of dark elves and goblins that I couldn't kill quickly while being shot to death by the ranged enemies. It's important to note that Too Human was created to be a coop game, so it makes perfect sense in hindsight that one of the paths for a given class might be the "solo" spec, with the others more optimized for coop.
Ultimately, I think the best arbiter of this game's quality is indicated by what happened to me tonight. I had just finished paring down my gear, selling what I didn't want and buying/crafting upgrades, and I was ready to head off to the 4th mission, and I had to pull myself away, and force myself to remember that it was 1am, and if I started the 4th mission, I probably wouldn't sleep. So I highly recommend Too Human, but with a caveat: there's a free demo on XBox Live. Download and try that out before you buy it. Games like Too Human aren't everybody's cup of tea, and while it's great at what it does, the sort of game it is just might not suit you.
First off: I have read plenty of negative reviews of this game. So far, most of the negativity seems to be the reviewer's perception and preferences, and is little based on the game's actual flaws. So I figured the best way to start would be with a comprehensive review of what I consider to be Too Human's flaws. I have split the flaws up into two categories: Technical and Design flaws. Technical flaws are things like bugs, glitches, and optimization problems: things which are generally not done on purpose. Design flaws are places where I feel a poor decision was made, and the game suffers for it.
TECHNICAL FLAWS
-Sound glitches. Sometimes, when a character is delivering a voice line, the speech will cut out. It appears that it might be related to the camera, but it's not reliably reproducible.
-I have read several places about characters getting stuck/falling through the world. I haven't ever seen this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.
DESIGN FLAWS
-Lack of information on enemies. There are many different special types of enemies that can appear that have different special properties, or "polarities" as I think they're called. Some blow up when killed, dealing area damage, and so are optimally killed at range. Others are resistant to certain types of damage. Without experimenting, there is no way to tell what properties a given enemy has, and the game never tells you what the properties do, nor does the manual have a list.
-Lack of information on item properties. This is a pretty small problem, but there are a few item properties that are never explained. For instance, Aggression and Soothing. I had no idea what these two stats did until I started thinking in coop terms. I'm pretty sure Aggression is like threat: The more you have, the more likely it is that enemies will attack you. Soothing is the opposite. Of course, these stats are totally useless in Single Player.
-The death penalty in the game is somewhat pointless. When you die in Too Human, a Valkyrie picks you up, and then you respawn with full health at the entrance to the latest room you went into. There is a minor durability penalty on items when you die as well. The repair is pretty well-balanced: it's very difficult to actually break an item, and so effectively this is just a money penalty. As such, it might have been a better decision to simply associate a cost with death: a certain percentage of your current bounty (the game's currency). This wouldn't really be a problem, except the valkyrie picking you up takes about 20 seconds and it can't be skipped. Also, when you die, the game world doesn't change. Anything you have already killed stays dead; anything you have already damaged stays damaged. This technically makes it impossible to "lose" the game, as you could theoretically kill anything in the game by repeatedly dying, though you're likely to break your gear long before you'd be able to do this alot. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when I die, I want to get back into the game right away. I don't mind death penalties, but when it takes 20 seconds to get back fighting, it's a bit frustrating
-Loot is totally random. While I like random loot, because it adds a bit of excitement to gathering loot, I don't like getting blueprints to craft loot that I can't use. For instance, only berzerkers can dual wield, yet as a champion I will get blueprints for dual weapons. Ideally, I would say have blueprints that drop off of mobs be random, but blueprints that I get from obelisks (the treasure chest of Too Human) to be class-specific. Single-player it would just be for your class, and in Coop, they would always be for one of the two classes playing. It's still random, because class-specific just means that as a champion I won't end up getting something that's +dual wield damage, and will instead be guaranteed a small level of synergy with my skill points.
-No sprint button. While sliding moves you around quickly in melee combat, if you're out of combat and exploring, you have no way to move faster. In missions this usually isn't a problem because of how fairly linear they are, but when you are exploring cyberspace, sometimes you'll have to run all the way back through an area you've already explored when you get a new ability that would let you cross an obstacle from a previous unlocked area. A sprint ability that's only in effect in Cyberspace where there is no combat would have been great.
-Complete linearity of plot. Now, I'm down for the game and its course being linear. This doesn't bother me. However, after your first mission, you choose an alignment: Human vs. Cybernetic. While I've only played through as Cybernetic, this hasn't come into play plotwise. Supposedly, this choice is kind of the crux of the game: will you seek power by becoming more like the monsters you seek to destroy, or will you rely on the natural gifts of humanity? The alignments are pretty cool and have some awesome skills, but I wish that the story, if not the gameply, would take your chosen alignment into account a bit more.
-The targeting for the ranged weapons is pretty awful. Alot of reviews mention this, and I think it's an accurate assessment, but I feel that many reviewers missed the fact that you can actually aim at all. That doesn't excuse the clunky and inelegant targeting system though, especially when ranged combat is one class' whole milieu. A true lock-on button would have benefited this game alot. Instead of having left-trigger activate secondary fire, have left trigger lock onto an enemy. Then, while holding down your lock, you can discretely swap between enemies by tapping left and right on the right stick. While locked, change the functionality of the left bumper to alt fire. For pistols, whose alt fire is shooting the second pistol, just roll both pistols shooting into primary fire, and either come up with a new alt fire for pistols or just say they don't have one. In my honest opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the game, because being able to quickly target a specific enemy with ranged weapons is damn important when you're dealing with monsters that have polarity. Being unable to effectively target means that once the enemies have reached me, it's near impossible to actually single out a monster with polarity to kill it in the way I need to.
Now, most of the negative reviews I've read harp on a couple of issues that I don't think it is reasonable to complain about. First, repetitive gameplay. The Gametrailers review called the game a "stick masher," since you attack with the right stick instead of a button. Now, keep in mind that this is an RPG whose combat system takes after brawler/shooter games like Devil May Cry or God of War. These games often have this same situation, where you fight lots of enemies and just hit the same button to attack them over and over. Generally, these games break up this repetition by giving you a large set of moves, and rewarding you for using a diverse set of moves, as well as by having enemies that vary widely in the tactics they use and the optimal ways to defeat them. In Too Human, you have about 5 or 6 different types of moves. You can make normal melee attacks, you can do a melee finisher in close range, you can shoot a bolt of energy called a Fierce attack if you're at range, you can use Ruiners which are PBAoE nuke abilities, you have your spider bot and its different abilities, you can knock an enemy into the air and then juggle them with both ranged and melee attacks, you have standard ranged attacks, and alt fire ranged attacks. Now while it's certainly easier to simply spam one type of attack, doing so causes your combo level to grow more slowly, and you aren't fighting at full effectiveness. I get a feeling that people who think this is a button-masher style of game simply never grasped the full capability of the control system. They were able to get through the first level by just sliding between enemies, and so they never learned how to juggle, user fierce attacks/finishers, or use ruiners and spider abilities.
Now, it is true that the game does not possess a wide variety of base enemy types, and that most enemies of the same type use very very similar tactics that are generally pretty simple. Would it be nice to have more? Sure. But the additional properties added onto enemies means that you're not always going to approach the same enemy in the same way. Normally, I'll just slide from goblin to goblin beating them up. However, tack in a freeze polarity goblin, and I'll want to blow him up at range before engaging in melee. Another example is that some polarities give you bonus combo points for killing the mob in a specific way, and so you may want to kill them in that way to maintain high combos. Add into this the fact that instead of just getting more red orbs for killing something with a high combo score, your combo score can actually add concrete bonuses like a damage increase or higher crit rates, and I fail to see how Too Human is any different from God of War or Devil May Cry in its repetitiveness, save that you fight much larger numbers of enemies. But this just makes me feel more badass when I beat them all up and take their stuff.
Another thing that many reviewers have criticized is the camera. Too Human uses a "smart" camera; the camera adjusts itself to display what it determines to be the most important perspective. With only one exception, I have never had trouble with this. Generally the camera is very good about what it displays, but if you do need a specific field of view, you can manually recenter the camera behind your character with the left bumper. Once, however, when I was close to a wall, the camera glitched a little and got stuck. It fixed itself fairly quickly though, and did not occur in combat, nor has it happened again since. Honestly, I think we as gamers have become so used to being given direct control over the camera that when we don't have control, we tend to fight it. Learn to accept the way the camera works, and it actually works very well, but if you insist on constantly micro-managing your viewpoint with the left bumper, it can cause problems.
The game also scales encounters based on your level. IGN, in particular, felt the scaling was too harsh, and as such they never felt like a badass. I have to admit, when I played through the second mission, I had a real hard time. The enemies were all kicking my ass, and I couldn't effectively fight them. I died so many times in that mission... Today, when I started into the third mission, I chose to respec my character into one of the other trees available, and it made the world of difference. You see, each class has three paths it can take for skills. Each is themed slightly differently. For instance, the champion has one path that focuses on boosting ranged combat, one on boosting melee combat, and a third that's focused on aerial combat (that is, juggling enemies). I had been specced into the melee tree, and was getting slaughtered. My melee attacks were super strong, sure, but I could still only really kill one guy at a time, and each dark elf basically took a finisher to kill. But when I specced into the aerial tree, I learned a Battle Cry that makes all of my melee hits launch the enemy into the air. This made a HUGE difference in evening the odds: when an enemy is in the air, they are effectively stunned, and can't attack, so this ability meant I was no longer getting swarmed by armies of dark elves and goblins that I couldn't kill quickly while being shot to death by the ranged enemies. It's important to note that Too Human was created to be a coop game, so it makes perfect sense in hindsight that one of the paths for a given class might be the "solo" spec, with the others more optimized for coop.
Ultimately, I think the best arbiter of this game's quality is indicated by what happened to me tonight. I had just finished paring down my gear, selling what I didn't want and buying/crafting upgrades, and I was ready to head off to the 4th mission, and I had to pull myself away, and force myself to remember that it was 1am, and if I started the 4th mission, I probably wouldn't sleep. So I highly recommend Too Human, but with a caveat: there's a free demo on XBox Live. Download and try that out before you buy it. Games like Too Human aren't everybody's cup of tea, and while it's great at what it does, the sort of game it is just might not suit you.