LATEST GAMES: Too Human

Price:
$99.95
Reviewed on:
Xbox360
Summary:
Any game that opens with a quote from Nietzsche had better have the content to back it up. To err is human and forgiveness may be divine - but we're not in the business of forgiving. We're here to spell it out for you; Too Human is what happens when big ideas get in the way of good ideas.
TOO Human is a game with a serious identity crisis.
It wants so badly to be everything to everyone – a slick, frantic brawler in the tradition of Devil May Cry; an epic tale of Norse gods, power and corruption; a hardcore dungeon-crawling RPG like Diablo with swarms of enemies and loads of loot; a thoughtful meditation on technology and religion; a cinematic masterpiece – and all of it wrapped around a curious double-planed techno-organic landscape that shares more than a passing resemblance to The Matrix Revolutions.
Too Human tries its hand at all of these elements and succeeds only in proving the old adage that "more" doesn't necessarily equate to 'better'. There are more outside influences in Too Human's final design than original thoughts; the culmination of more than a decade of on-off development is the clear culprit here.

Silicon Knights' repeatedly delayed, reworked and arguably overhyped release is, in a word, harmless. It won't move you with its writing; it won't impress you with the latest, greatest graphics; it might not even compel you to finish the adventure if you're not immediately taken with the gameplay. It doesn't push the envelope as much as it pretends to on the surface.
What Too Human will do is serve to remind you that, even in a market flooded with dystopian adventures, moralistic epics, mini-game compilations, formalist Japanese turn-based RPGs, World War X shooters and hardcore sports simulations, sometimes the genius is in choosing the right niche, sticking with it to the end and getting it right the first time.
The story is a strange journey – and being the first instalment of a planned trilogy of games, it's also noticeably incomplete. The hero, Baldur, is a member of the Aesir gods, who have sided with humanity in the long-running battle against sentient machines. Superficially, your quest is to wage war and hunt down GRNDL-1, a rogue machine, but this eventually gives way to a more conspiratorial story of gods-against-gods and the implications of overreliance on technology.
At all times, you get the feeling Silicon Knights is holding back. You're tossed into a conflict that your grunt-fodder allies are quick to point out that they don't understand – and neither do we, really. There's a fair amount of exposition between missions that starts to stitch together Baldur's strange memories and weaves them into the rest of the story.