I had played the demo for Too Human. I had played the demo A LOT. I had discovered how to play as all the characters and played the demo 75 times at 45 minutes a time. And I loved it. This was the first game I have ever pre-ordered in my 25 years of gaming. It was THAT good. Even my friend was convinced to pre-order on the strength of the demo. And then I read the pre-release reviews and wondered if these chaps had played the same game as I had, because Too Human was SUPERB!

The game seemed like a great cross between an RPG and arcade brawler, with visceral combat featuring guns, swords and a juggling mechanic similar to Devil May Cry, as well as levelled loot, equipment customisation and exploration.  The control scheme took a little getting used to, with your melee skill mapped to directions on the Right Stick, making the game in essence a Twin Stick Brawler RPG, but still SUPERB.

Let’s focus on this for a while. Superbness. I liked the visual design, the graphics, the background, the character models… All superb. I didn’t have any sort of problem with that. Oh, other than despite being a God, your squad wouldn’t move out your way and on occasion would rudely go all invisible, but not allow you to move through them or push them out the way. But still, it all looked good. The fighting looked phenomenal with goblins a-flying and trolls getting a-stomped with quite the light show in the background.

The sound too was excellent, all clashy swords and shooty guns and explode-y goodness. Top voice acting as well it has to be said. Rather odd that all these NORSE gods spoke in faux OLDE ENGLISH in AMERICAN ACCENTS. Forsooth, methinks someone was at ye olde cracke pipe the day they wrote ye scripte, verily! It was a shame that they decided to copy Marvel’s Thor with the script and styling, but still, the voice actors really got the job done well, especially the hot Norn lady. Nice. (Just quickly though, for reference, telling a god not to stare at a being that is “three distinct personalities in separate bodies” is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard – “three distinct personalities in separate bodies – that would be, erm… three women then?” “Essentially, yes. Yes it would.”)

Gameplay felt fantastic with all but the bioengineer class, which would only really come into it’s own at higher levels I would imagine, but the other classes worked very well. The mechanics work wonderfully, if erratically. Sometimes Baldur will slide four postcodes to gently tap a goblin about the face and neck, while on occasion, he will wildly hack away at thin air with gay abandon as a bemused goblin stands barely out of reach with a look of sadness in its big glowing eye. Also pumping round after never-ending round into thin air with your off-hand pistol on occasion could get old, but the satisfaction of cleaving through more goblins than my dad in a nightclub was fantastic.

The loot promised many things. It made me covetous and desirous and a great many things frowned upon by religious groups. Armour with 10% Soothing!!! WOW!!!! What’s soothing? Is it in the manual…? No. In a journal entry? Not that I could find… 15% Aggression? I feel aggressive enough thank you… I can only assume that this is to do with the “Aggro” system, similar to the World of Warcraft. I guess that Soothing stops enemies hitting you, Aggression makes them, well, hit you. But then, when playing a role playing game with so many stats and bonuses you need to be able to weigh up the pros and cons of each piece of armour without having to guess. +15% to dexterity! Wonderful! How high is my dexterity anyway? I don’t know, I couldn’t find that stat anywhere, never mind what it actually did. But still, never mind the quality, feel the QUANTITY!  I STILL loved the game. Like a tiny electronic son made out of videogame.

And then I hit level 2. Sweet. Merciful. Heaven. A game has NEVER unravelled as quickly as Too Human does. The mostly smooth control system stops working when “mostly” becomes the difference between life and death. Having got through the first stage with no problems at all (not one death!), fighting against the slightly harder Dark Elves was A LOT harder. Especially the ones that fire unavoidable beams of icy badness at you, or green poisonous streams of frustrating inevitable death. There is no running away, there is no guaranteed hope of healing and a few deaths will occur. Fair enough. The Valkyrie swoops down to some sad CELTIC music (seriously, did they reckon, “WOW! Norse is European, and Europe is where Vikings came from, so well just jam in European style stuff and NO ONE WILL NOTICE or CARE! AWESOME!” Yes, actually, and they were probably right.) and in a poignant scene showing the finality and tragedy of Baldur’s passing, he… wait for it… Appears a bit further away from where he died. Genius.

After the eighth time of being frozen by an ice troll’s area of effect attack while a fire troll hits you with a lingering burning attack and a thing that looks like a Drider from D&D hits you with a green poison attack and you can only sit helplessly and watch as this GOD gets his buttocks handed to him on a silver platter, you begin to get angry. But then it gets worse. In level 4, you face hordes of the undead, some of whom explode when killed AND do lingering damage, and some of whom fire streams of bullets at you. The inaccuracy of the controls shows itself more starkly here. You can only watch helplessly as Baldur slides inexorably towards an exploding zombie when you were aiming for his friend slightly to his right. While nine of his other friends simply stand around shooting you. Watching your health bar constantly deplete is demoralising to say the least. In this level, I died 90+ times, compared to 12 in level 2 and 3 in level 3.

I usually hate boss fights, but I found them very easy in Too Human. Too easy, as a matter of fact, except the last one. At least it meant not coming up against an impassable wall, but the fight at the end of level 2 is so boring as to be coma inducing.

The story maintains momentum, but you end up feeling that Baldur is the second most stupid god ever. “Hmm… I can’t remember how got my hideous facial injury. Hod’s eyepiece shows him shooting Loki through the face, yet Loki still lives…” Colombo this fool isn’t. The human NPCs who follow you through the game, Wolf squad, is handled very well, bringing a human perspective to the battles, with quite a touching end for one of the characters at the end of the game, but there is some bizarre dialogue where they sound more than a little disrespectful of Baldur and the Aesir in general when Baldur is stood right beside them. Not exactly awe inspiring godliness, then. Not as bad as Thor, though, who comes across as incredibly thick because the developers couldn’t be bothered putting more dialogue into level 3, so frankly having Thor say “Come out and fight me Loki!” and then have Loki explain (quite patiently, I feel) that he is not physically there a total of NINE times in the course of the level isn’t just annoying and lazy, but also very stupid.

Also very lazy is the co-op. I don’t know why, but both players playing as Baldur is a bit, well… Rubbish. It would have been quite cool to see the other player as one of the other Aesir, even if they saw themselves as Baldur and you as someone else. If you know what I mean… It feels somewhat empty and sterile when playing with another player, ironically because you lose the humanity brought to the game by the Wolf squad, so the game becomes more mechanical and less emotional.

It is a great pity, because the game starts of very, very well and could so easily have been scored very highly. And one of the easiest ways to remedy this would be to have either health potions or stat antidotes that could be used when required, or have every enemy drop a health orb that returned a tiny bit of health. A very simple solution that would have rendered what becomes a completely unplayable mess of a game into a near classic. Which makes the game very hard to score. With a good patching, it would have been superb, but this never happened.

Despite having used the term “Unplayable mess”, I do have to point out that levels 1 and 3 are both very good as the game comes into its own by handing you a big sword and scores of weak enemies and telling you to beat the tar out of them. Tempering this, however is the frustrating direness of the other two levels and the shockingly infuriating last boss battle.

It must be said though, that having fairly recently sat down and played through again as both bioengineer and commando, it WAS terribly compulsive. I freely admit that I came online and checked out some guides as to what the stats do and took some advice. And the game was bearable. In fact, due to the loot and having a high level character, I’d even say it was compulsive playing.  Eventually, on top of my original 60 hours, I put in another 140. And bear in mind that the game only has 4 levels.

In summary, this game was the biggest disappointment I had faced in a long time, but with a little bit of research it can be good game. I can only hope that Silicon Knights take the criticism of detractors on board because the Too Human trilogy isn’t sunk yet, apparently, and it with so much potential it would be sad not to have a shot. “Too Human 2: Even More Human Than Previously Suggested” will either be superb, or destroy this fledgling series.