Too Human (Xbox 360)

There are no healing items, only one of the five classes has regeneration and whilst there’s an expansive skill tree, having a lack of health restores and scaling monsters means that you never feel like the god you are later on and all you feel is particularly mortal. Talking of the five classes, you have the melee focussed: Berserker and the Defender, the balanced: Champion, the ranged Commando and the tech focussed Bio-Engineer. You can start a new game with any of these but there’s no real lure to play anything but the Champion unless you want the regenerative powers of the Bio-Engineer.

The skill system is decently done, you can put points in a variety of skill trees and give your character bonuses and extra buffs. Battle Cries buff you and the AI cannon fodder that’s sent with you, the spider is a useful tech device that can act as a gun turret or so on. If you don’t like a particular specification you can re-spec the current skill tree and give yourself a whole new set, this costs a fee in (Bounty) the game’s currency. (Ed. I can’t help think of chocolate bars now).

There is a plethora of weapons and armour to experiment with, you almost have too much and you just get used to using a weapon when suddenly there’s a new weapon available for you, even better and with even more enhancements. It’s the MMO style loot system that will appeal to fans of World of Warcraft the most. Yet it doesn’t allow you to build any kind of rapport with your character as he is constantly evolving. There are armour sets, but what’s the use because in ten minutes you’re going to be wearing a new one.

You can equip charms (bonus items) that require a quest (kill x of this, or find a secret area etc) to activate. There are runes (enhancement bonuses) to go into weapons and armour. There are even colour runes (MMO style again) to allow you to customise the look of the armour, but what’s the point (see above). Most of my time in Too Human has been spent in the menus, tweaking things, making sure I have equipped the latest of everything just to deal with the scaling enemies.

There’s even a crafting system when you can find blueprints of new weapons and armour, you can make them. Dyack has said time and time again that his game is innovative and anyone who doesn’t understand this just doesn’t get it. This isn’t me failing to understand anything; this is me looking at a feature I’ve seen in a dozen games before it. The workbench from Kotor 1 and 2 for instance, the craft system from World of Warcraft and so on. Perhaps I’m failing to see this on a wholly spiritual level that Dyack is obviously active on.

To sum up Too Human’s gameplay in one word, one would have to use: repetitive. To expand upon this, linear and it harkens back to the days when a bunch of keys were needed to open doors like in DOOM and so on. Except this time SK’s innovation seems to extend towards, keys = monsters, buttons and so forth. Killing monsters to open the way, sounds like Devil May Cry to me and buttons to open doors are a staple of many a game.

Just to innovate (Ok, I promise this is the last time I take a dig) a little further, you can open some doors by entering a virtual world and doing something there that affects the REAL WORLD! You just walk up to one of the many wells, press A and you’re transported into a lush paradise that the NORNs call their home, here you can find loot, solve simple puzzles to open doors and unlock the way. This has also been done before and it’s the staple of many cyberpunk flavoured worlds, from the works of William Gibson to the Matrix within the pen and paper game Shadowrun.