One God Enters…

I recieved some-what of a wake-up call from my OMS co-author the other night.  He reminded me that it has been quite some time since I have posted on our little patch of cyber-space.  In my defence, I have been somewhat preoccupied with University-type-stuff of late but aside from that, he was, for all intents and purposes, correct.  As such, much in the same way as a masters student who, after a year of vegetation, suddenly realises that his thesis is due in six weeks, I decided to commit to some form of writing as soon as possible.  That only left me with the tricky decision of what I could write about; a decision which, it turns out, wasn’t that tricky at all.

Given Ian’s reviews of The Dark Knight and The Mummy compared to my brief treatise on Ninja Gaiden II, it would appear, at least in the interim, that I am something akin to a games correspondant for OMS… A correspondant, that is, who has reviewed one game… So pretty much the worst games correspondant known to man.  Nevertheless, I was determined to sell games reviews as my OMS ‘go-to’ move.  That left me with the choice of which game to talk about in this post.  That really wasn’t much of a choice.  In the last three week’s I’ve only been playing one game.  More than this, I’ve played that game for 100 hours in the last three weeks.  That means that I’ve devoted almost 20% of the last three weeks of my life to one single game; quite a statistic any way you look at it.  Which game?  That would be Canadian developers Silicon Knights reimagination of norse mythology through a medium of science fiction; Too “it’s been in deveolpment for seven years” Human.

I should mention that at times this post seems to stray from being a Too Human review and instead flirts with being pure libel against Ben Croshaw.  I don’t like his reviews in general but, specifically related to this post, the same mans review of Too Human is severly misleading and, at times, just wrong.  Croshaw had this to say;

‘Too Human is my favourite kind of game to review because its bad.  None of that wishy washy mediocrity or “I have to admit that the soundtrack was nice” or that “the gameplay was slightly more entertaining than lacerating my gums with the edge of a rusty tin.” This is just all bad, all the time…’

I have to say, Ben Croshaw is my favourite kind of reviewer because he’s bad.  None of that non-committal, middling quality of “I have to admit, his video animations were alright” or that “his dialogue was just about as fun as waking up next to a horse’s head.”  He’s just all bad, all the time… In terms of my newest canonical vocabulary, he’s quite the chump.  I have a real dislike for him as a reviewer and, if I’m honest, that may or may not come through a little in this post.  In fact, I may have been a little over-zealous at times.  Truth be told, Croshaw is not the only reviewer who annoys me.  My problem with him, and in particular, his Too Human review, is that it is indicative of the worst kind of games journalism.  It disregards objectivity in persuit of purile humour.  I appreciate that Croshaw is probably, first and foremost, a comedian, and that his entertainment value may well propell his type of reviews into cult stardom on the forums of the net.  The problem is, however, that he has a responsibility, in his (all be it more limited) capacity as a games reviewer, to present his audience with objective facts, not humour derived from misinformation which, when translated into the real world, results in good games suffering in the shops.  That’s why this review tries to remain objective regarding Too Human and while yes, I admit from the outset that I am a fan of the game, I like to think I’ve considered the game as a whole; warts and all.

I was actually in Game this afternoon and discovered that the same game which I’d bought for £40 three weeks ago has been dropped to £20, a huge drop in three weeks by any standard.  It is still the second best selling game on the xbox 360 at the minute, just behind Madden ‘09.  That said, however, there are still Wii games outselling it.  This is a problem.  Too Human currently holds the infamous record of highest development budget of any game.  While Silicon Knights don’t really like to talk about it there is speculation that it was somehwere in and around $70 million.  For a game which is expected to be the first in a trilogy, it really needs to be exceeding all sales expectations in order to justify a sequel and there is some doubt regarding Too Human 2 : Rise of the Giant’s future.  One of the main reasons why Too Human has suffered on the shelves is the negative press which the game has recieved.  While across the board it has recied a fairly mediocre average score of in and around 6.5/10, I’ve seen it getting scores as low 4.  I can empathise with these reviews to a certain extent.  A friend of mine asked me last week if I could reccomment Too Human.  I told him I’d find it very hard to reccomend it to anyone.  Allow me to elaborate somewhat.

I couldn’t tell you my favourite game of all time.  There’s no way I could definatively place any game in a numebr one spot.  I have, however, specualted as to what might appear in a hypothetical ‘Top 10 list.’  Games therein would include the likes of Reisdent Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 2, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid 3, Battlefield Vietnam and Guild War’s Prophecies.  I’d say that when I look back at this in a few months time, Too Human will be strongly contesting a place within it.  For me, its just THAT good.  It seems odd, therefore, that I couldn’t even reccomend it to a friend.  You see my problem is that I know if I reccommeded it to people, for every one person who loved it, there’d be another who’d ask me why I convinced them to waste their money on Too Human.  I don’t blame people who think this.  I have a good fried who bought the game, played through the 12-ish hours of the campaign and then traded it in.  His reasons?  He was bored of the ‘hack and slash combat,’ ‘he was bored with the repeditive levels’ and he was ’utterly fed up with dying.’  Much as I would hate to say this to my good friend, comments like this demonstrate a distinct lack of understanding regarding the game.  This is why 50% of my friends and probably 50% of the gamers in the world will not enjoy Too Human.  They simply won’t understand the game.  That lack of understanding, however, is not his fault.  It is the game’s.  It tell’s you nothing.  It explains nothing.  The games producer, Denis Dyack, says thats there is simply too much information to put in a manual and there’s no other reasonable place to put it.  Denis, much as I have the utmost respect for his games, clearly missed the two-hour seminar on ‘tutorial levels’ when he was at ‘game development school.’  It’s like being five and getting a bike for Christmas, then asking your Dad to teach you how to ride the bike because you’re so excited about it only to find that your Dad takes you to the top of a hill and reads the afternoon paper while you continually fall off the bike into devestatingly painful bramble at the side of the road.  In this analogy, you, play yourself, the bike is Too Human, your Dad is the game development team and the bramble is ‘that’ death animation.  The thing about that analogy is that is holds perfectly true for Too Human.  Yes, you could throw the bike from you, tell your Dad that he sucks and then storm off, much in the same way that Yahtzee Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation fame, seems to have done.  If, however, you persevere, perhaps buy a guide or look up a wikipedia article on it, consult youtube videos or check online forums, you’ll eventually find yourself perfectly able to ‘ride your bike.’  When that moment arrives, you’ll suddenly realise that you’re in possession of a game which is one of the most rewarding I’ve certainly ever played.  I know, however, that there will be people out there who, unless they are captivated by a game within the first five minutes, will simply give up on it. So put it this way, if I could get my friends or indeed you, the OMS readers, to commit to investing time in Too Human, it comes with my highest reccomendation.  Be warned, however, that reccomendation comes with a sub-clause: you will have to power through those frustrating hours where you know… well, nothing.

The 12-ish hour campaign which so many people complain about is really only your entry into the game.  After its completed and your character, the Norse God Baldur, has ascended to somewhere in and around lvl. 30 out of 50, each section of the four levels can be played over and over again with different enemy spawns each and every time.  More than this, the game induces a sense of drug-like adiction and you will find yourself playing it at 4am “just waiting for that next armour drop.”  This is one of the games best qualities.  Enemies drop ‘loot’ in a pseudo dungeons and dragons fashion and there is nothing more fun than getting loot.  It’s more noticeable when you get to the higher levels and begin to crave the best loot in the game – those shiney red ‘elite drops’ which, when you pick them up, are accompanied by a triumphant norse riff, almost as if the halls of Valhalla are a-praise, congratulating you for your acomplishment.  Likewise, however, you’ll find yourself utterly infuriated by those enemies who refuse to drop you anything except comparatively low value purple items. 

Of course, your only way to access these items is by fighting your way through four of the most detailed levels I’ve ever seen.  I was playing co-op with a good friend of mine the other night and several times during the games final level, Helheim, he must have been infuriated with my asking him to stop on the middle of bridges and half way along walk ways, just so we could check out the detail of the scenery.  It’s truely stunning. 

Within these levels are, essentially, four types of enemies.  That’s right, four.  Goblins, Dark Elves, Undead and Trolls.  I’m still truely amazed at just how much gameplay Silicon Knights have got out of four enemies.  The way in which they have achieved this is through introducing two scales into each enemy type.  The first is a ’status effect’ scale which will determine whether the enemy is a fire enemy, a poison enemy or an ice enemy to name but a few.  These enemies convey their status effects upon you, unless, of course, you kill them in the correct way.  If you take the time to master this status effect scale, the game becomes so much more diverse and every battle will be different depending on the kind of status effects enemies posess.  The second scale has three increments which, again, influence how you have to go about attacking the given enemies.  Enemies could be ‘light’ meaning that they are vulnerable to ranged attacks like your rifle or pistols, they could be ‘dark’ meaning that they are resistant to your ranged weapons but vulnerable to melee damage like your hammer or your swords or alternatively they could be ‘unaligned’ in this scale meaning that they arent particularly resistant to anything.  Understanding these scales, what the game calls ‘polarisation,’ is the key to understanding the depth of the combat within Too Human. This really mixes it up and forces you, as the player to pause and think about combat and strategy before launching in.  Only a really underinformed reviewer would launch into combat blindly.  Mastering this combat and strategy leads to you dying an inherently less number of times meaning that anyone who complains incessantly about the death animation has no real justification for it in that theres a simple way to avoid it; don’t die.  This is why many reviewers lose hope in the game.  They don’t put any effort into figuring this out.  Theoretically speaking, you could play this game like any other generic hack ‘n’ slash game.  More than this, you probably coould play the majority of the campaign by just pushing forward on the right stick, but of course this seems rediculous and you would die… alot!  Too Human is not a generic hack ‘n’ slash game.  You have to employ a little bit of thought and effort into learning how to play it correctly and the game will reward you for it.  Once you’ve decided the best strategy for combat, you then have press on with exactly that; the combat. 

In Too Human melee combat is handled on the right analogue stick; something traditionally associated with the camera angle in-game.  One particular reviewer (guess who) was keen to point out that in third peron games, the right stick is confortable with camera angle control and should be left alone.  I can see his point.  I mean, it’s not like technology changes or tries to better itself and improve on the norm.  Everyone was quite happy with VHS and refused to buy into that silly DVD thing…  Alright, so that example’s a little convoluted, but still, you see my point.  I don’t think it’s fair to criticise a game for changing things up a bit and while the camera in Too Human is awkward at times, for the most part its very simple to centre behind you’re character model.  For the rest of the time the cinematic camera does a great job in capturing some of the most wonderful shots of the well designed levels – angles which just wouldn’t be achieveable with a right stick camera. 

With cinematic camera in operation you, the player, are left with an interface which is built around rotating, not tapping, the right stick in order to fight your enemies.  While this seems tricky and unwieldy at first, after investing a few extra hours in the game it becomes virtually second nature.  The ranged combat is a little more temperamental.  The ranged targeting system seems a little ‘off’ at times, with frustrating scenarios unfolding where your character will be left targeting a dead enemy while the rest of the horde continues to advance upon you.  The dual-wielded pistols, in particular, are difficult to pin down with your off-hand at times straying off into the back of beyond and targeting something completely random.  Rifle and canon combat, however, is a little easier to get to grip with; again, rotation on the right stick cycling through targets and a quick double tap on the same stick prioritising missiles and other things whcih may come at you through the air.  What really blows me away about the game is, once again, the diversity which the game manages to build around, in essence, two combat styles; ranged and melee.  How it achieves this is not only through the multitude of weapon and armour types which the game boasts but, perhaps moreso, in the way that your character design inherently affects the way in which you have to play the game.

Too Human offers five classes (at the minute) to choose your character from, ranging from the heavily armoured defender to the quick and devestating berserker to the ballistic speciaist commando.  Within each of these classes is a three pronged skill tree, each branch of which lends itself to a completely different way to use your characters assets.  On top of that, somewhere in and around level 13, you will have to allign your character as either human; that is to say a fast combo specialist or as cybernetic; more concerned with hit points, armour and big damage.  This means that even though there are only 5 classes and, fundamentally, two forms of combat, the differences in the way each character will use those types of combat are virtually infinite, giving the player scope to play with limitless character builds.

In this way, it almost inflects MMO properties within a single player context; the multiple charater builds, the volume of ’loot,’ the depth of combat and subtle differences between each and every fight all adding to an experience which makes you, the player, feel like your involved in one perpetual PvE experience.  This is, perhaps, the best way to look at Too Human.  In the same way that a one page blog entry on World of Warcraft couldn’t possibly convey every tiny aspect of the game, this brief review only gives you an idea of the depth within Too Human. There are, however, things which I haven’t even mentioned; things like charms, items in game which require quests to complete but which reward you with various weapon and armour effects.  There is just so much game in there for your money.  I mean I am 100 hours in and I’ve only played with one cybernetically aligned character class.  Within this character, I’ve already played with my build twice, discovering, each time, a new way to use my characters assets.  I could play the same class again, but human align him and find a whole different way again to play the character.  Alternatively I could play with one of the four other classes and again have to choose which assests to focus on and which alignment my character will persue.  All in all, I’ve played the game one way for 120 hours and, even at the games most fundamental level, theres another 9 ways for me to play it.  That’s remarkable.  This is why Too Human suffers in games reviews.  The run-of-the-mill reviewer will be given a bundle of games to review in a certain amount of time, play through the campaign mode and then give them a score.  That may work fine with Bioshock or with Ninja Gaiden II but it doesn’t for Too Human.  I honestly believe that no one is fit to review that game unless they’ve invested the kind of time in it that genuine fans have.  This isn’t to say, as some people have already misconstrued, that a reviewer must be a fan of the game.  If that were the case, there would be far less objectivity in the world of games journalism than there is at present.  No, what I am suggesting is that with some games, Too Human amongst them, you have to be prepared to put into a game what you expect to get out of it.  Too Human requires that resolve and anything else will doubtlessly result in negativity.  If, however, reviewers invested that little more time, then they’d see why genuine fans are genuine fans, but instead, we see the net smeared with pointlessly critical reviews.

I refuse to put a score on Too Human.  I have much more to do in the game and many more hours play before I can consider myself acceptable to do so.  Even then, in fact, I may never be adequately qualifeied to score it simply because it’s a game I never see myself ‘completing.’  Why?  There is, realistically speaking, more playability in Too Human than any other xbox 360 game which I own, and thats including Oblivion.  Perhaps, in the interest of objectivity, I could explain this comparrison further.  This is not a simple Too Human Vs. Oblivion comparison.  That would be almost impossible to do given the differences between the two games.  What I’m simply trying to get across is that Too Human, in my opinion, manages to acomplish in the space of its four levels, more game play than even the vast game that is Oblivion.  Let none say that I haven’t played my fair share of Oblivion.  My current play time in Oblivion is in and around 82 hours.  Much like Too Human you would have to spend a decent amount of time with Oblivion to appreciate its depth; the versatility of its equipment system, the sheer expanse of the landscape, the awesome roleplaying system and the engine which allows you to pick up literally everything in the game.  I suppose, however, in the context of this review, my main issue is that of replayablilty.  With a game like Oblivion, now that I’ve finished the main storyline and every side quest that the game has to offer I find myself looking at the game as finished.  Yes, there are more classes and races to play with but when I flick past it’s disc in my CD holder, it’s like I’ve already stamped it as complete.  Thats not the case with Too Human.  The way in which the game has been developed makes you genuinely excited to play that next class or to experiment with a different allignment or excited about a new armour drop because it forces you to re-think your skill tree.  At the crux of this comparrison lies simple issues with balance in Oblivion.  I could play two different races in oblivion, but if I specialised both characters in archery, they play exactly the same.  In the same way, magic users in Oblivion get to a stage that no matter what their equipment is or what their race is, they are equally broken and imbalanced.  Too Human doesn’t suffer from this.  It is superbly balanced both within and between classes and even the slightest changes to equipment and skills completely change how characters should be played.  This is where the true depth of Too Huam lies and where it far surpasses games like Oblivion. 

I am, and continue to be, utterly blown away by it.

Yours,

Jim