Too Human, may not have been human enough
editor@playthismag.com Too Human had us split down the middle on all counts and as much as we originally thought it was be brilliant, it left us with a fowl aftertaste. While the graphics at times looked amazing, others it would become pixilted and have missing sections of the game (there would be random white spaces where walls would intersect). The futuristic yet ancient look (large amount of technology in an Egyptian theme/Greek/romanesc world) look amazing with towering statues and huge levels and certain points, but while watching cut scenes a vehicle’s tires are cut in half by the ground rather than riding on top of it. It also featured the same graphics in the cut scenes as regular game play… meaning no extra effort just some different camera angels.
Play This break down for Too Human
Graphics: While certain aspects of the game did look amazing, the voice overs with characters speaking and the mouth motions of the characters were terribly aligned. The idea of the futuristic past is awesome, but sadly they seemed to of half assed it creating a bland and unfriendly viewing experience. 4/5
Game play: This is where the game hits a major low. In most action games, the targeting system, fighting type and enemies are key to making a successful game. This had terrible targeting systems, horrible fight action and the enemies were a joke.
- Targeting system: While fighting an onslaught of enemies, which a majority of the time you will be, you can target two different enemies at the same time depending on your character. Well this would be super but you tend to lock on an enemy that you do not want to be shooting at; for example.. something rushing at your face and you decide to start shooting at everything else near you, even inanimate objects… The melee attacks are just as important as the gun related ones in this game, which brings us to the fighting.
- Fighting: The “fun” level in playing Too Human is pretty dull to say the least. Simply move your control stick towards an enemy and you either shoot it, or with melee, you magically float instantly in front of it and smash it’s face in. Where is the challenge in this? granted as you level up so do the enemy and they resist attacks more, but why would I want to just appear in front of each enemy by pointing at them? The action in the game is pretty lame, flinging your self at an enemy is not always the best of ideas either, which of course brings us to the terrible enemies.
- Enemies:A majority of the enemies in this game just require a quick smash to the face with a hammer/sword/melee attack weapon of sorts… there are of course larger ones like those that either randomly smash a large hammer down every 10 seconds, causing you to be pretty much screwed if any where near it. Until you get through a good bit of the game, chances are you will not even be able to get a gun that has the distance to shoot the guy without him smashing his hammer down and the shockwave constantly knocking you down. The enemies just tend to be bland and boring as well.
Game play continued: The most annoying part of the game is that when you get killed you must sit through an annoying cut scene of this angel like girl dropping down and reviving you. This happens every single time you die! While fighting bosses you tend to die often at the start of the game and this gets old quick. Maybe for the creators sake they simply did this as an effort to encourage you not to die. 2/5
Music: The sound effects and music were alright, nothing special but it did the game right. The only issue sound wise is that of the mismatch of mouths moving and the voice overs which tends to be annoying. So maybe we are perfectionists at Play This, but it can’t be that hard to spend an extra day making it look presentable. 4/5
Multiplayer: It seems a new way for game creators to force a multiplayer function into the usual one person game, is now becoming ever so common. Even in Fable 2 (although they did a much better job of this) it allows random people to join your game for co-op while in the middle of a game. This usually only is beneficial when it comes to those big hammer smashing enemies so one of you can distract it and the other making it your bitch. Mercenaries II also used this exact type of multiplayer, while it can be nice, it seems a bit uneven when a character with a level of 50 joins your game while you are at level 5 and pretty much does all the work for you. There is no balance to who can join and it’s not essential, you can’t even kill them! 3/5
Replayability: The game gets tiresome rather quickly and once you hit level 50 chances are you can just breathe on things and they will die. If you want to help out some n00bies by doing all the work for them it’s ok but otherwise it’s best to just rent this sucker.
Achievements: Where there even any? You get the basic complete level ones and some random 10G ones for doing stupid basic story line stuff. Nothing great here and it seems most of the things you need to do for achievements are specialized.
Overall: What else is there to say? It ended up being rather disappointing from the time we played th demo until the actual release. It is worth a try, but definitely not worth the money.
3.5/5 burritos for you Mr. halfass game. Oh… we mean Too Human: 
Development History via wikipedia.org
Too Human was originally in development for the PlayStation as a 4-disc action-adventure game. It was shown at E3 1999, and a teaser trailer was shown at SpaceWorld 2000 showing what appeared to be a re-building of the PlayStation game. Development halted when Nintendo announced an exclusive partnership with Silicon Knights, and the game was moved to the Nintendo GameCube in 2000. Prototyping for the game took place on the GameCube, but the staff at Silicon Knights soon devoted their efforts towards two other releases, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.
In the May 2005 issue of EGM, Silicon Knights announced a partnership with publisher Microsoft to develop a trilogy revolving around the Too Human universe exclusively for the Xbox 360. The game was originally being developed using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3, but is now being developed using an internal engine. On July 19, 2007, it was announced that Silicon Knights was using Epic Games due to “breach of contract”, including “inadequacies” of Epic’s support, service, and cooperation with Silicon Knights concerning Unreal Engine 3. On August 9, 2007, Epic Games counter sued Silicon Knights, claiming that they were using their engine as they pleased without any cost. If Epic wins the case, Silicon Knights would be forced to pay in excess of $650,000.
Clearly this game and it’s concept is just a weeeee bit out of date.
