Reviews
Too Human made its debut as a 4 disc game on the PSOne. A few years ago, Silicon Knights announced that they would be bringing Too Human exclusively to the 360. Some years and lots of lots of development time later, Microsoft have published Silicon Knights first game in the Too Human trilogy. This a welcome release especially in the Rock Band deprived, tumbleweed ridden ghost town that is the Australian Xbox 360 release schedule in recent months. So after all the hullabaloo and a decade of development, is it any good?
Too Human is a game steeped in Norse mythology. You play the role of Baldur, son of Odin who is a Norse God and one of the Aesir, the Norse type people. The aim of the game is to eradicate an advancing machine army determined to destroy the Aesir, and to dispense the odd bit of justice on the way by means of large slashing, smashing, hammering and shooting weapons. This is a novel concept to run with and you encounter several Norse Gods and legends, and you even get up close and personal with a modern mechanical interpretation of Grendel (of Beowulf fame).
The single player campaign in Too Human starts with character creation, though that in itself is a generous term for character class selection. There are 5 characters classes to choose from, each with a different discipline. You can choose a Champion, Defender, Berserker, Commando and Bioengineer. You can assign that character class a name and use a character slot, so you can have multiple characters of the same or different classes on your console. What isn’t evident at that stage but becomes clear as you play is character progression. As you play and kill bad guys you gain experience points and the more spectacular the kill, the greater the reward. Eventually you level up and this means that you must access the ‘Skills’ area of the pause menu to spend some experience points on a skill tree. This is very similar to the skill tree in Final Fantasy XII except that this tree is more of a shrub in comparison. You must spend several points on a particular skill to max it out and subsequent skills are unlocked once you have spent a specific number of points on the parent skill. Further to all this, at some point in the game you must choose an alignment for your character. This is a permanent choice for that character so must be made wisely. There are 2 alignments, Human and Cybernetic. Both open up a range of skills to your character with Human focusing more on speed in melee and ranged combat whereas Cybernetic focuses more on strength. With character class, skill tree and alignment, you have many branches of character progression to add some replay value to the game.
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