Too Human

Throughout this review, I'm going to use the word "game" a lot, but it's not really applicable to what Denis Dyack produced here.  Too Human is really more of a soul-destroying piece of crap in software form, but for ease of reading I'll go with the shorthand. In any event, if you're a fan of shitty games, look no further.  Too Human suffers from the John Romero/Daikatana problem of promising us a tremendous new gameplay experience and then following through with a giant steaming pile.   
 
The development history reads like a warning label.  Seriously, read it.  The game premiered 10 years before its release (shades of Duke Nukem Forever).  It was originally designed for the PlayStation, then the GameCube, then finally the Xbox360.  (In fairness to Silicon Knights, at one point they chose to shelve this game while working on Eternal Darkness, which turned out to be an excellent game.)  They had a terrible showing at E3, and later blamed problems on the producer of the engine they were using (apparently the Unreal Engine works for everyone except Silicon Knights).  And throughout it all, despite evidence mounting to the contrary, Dyack kept claiming the game would be awesome.  It was just surreal watching this develop, like being at a bar with a drunk friend who's talking about some ugly girl he made out with.  He starts out talking about how she's good-looking, and everyone is naturally skeptical, so he starts talking her up more and more, and by the end of the night he's telling everyone he basically banged Megan Fox.
  
It's hard really to know where to begin pointing out the flaws in this game.  The whole thing runs like it was never playtested. The plot is stupid, weapon upgrades are annoying.  I'm a giant loot whore, and even I couldn't get excited about the crap enemies were dropping.  They promise unlimited new weapons, but everything more or less breaks down into just a handful of different types.  There's melee combat too, but it feels really forced.  Monsters have a tendency of being either way too easy or ridiculously hard.  In some levels I just mowed down some enemies, while the next wave would just shrug bullets off.  There is more or less no penalty for dying (except the penalty of watching an unskippable, painfully dull cutscene), so the whole game feels like you've unlocked God mode.  Everywhere you go looks more or less the same (awesome robot future world!), levels are incredibly long and repetitive, and the time you spend back at base largely consists of running across the city a bunch of times, apparently because the developers just wanted to see how much of your time they could waste.  The writers also don't bother to explain why all these Norse deities are cybernetic, or the motivations of the characters.  Maybe they were going for a dark and subtle feel, but it comes across more as stupid and shallow.  In fairness to the game, the cut-scenes are mostly ok, but if I just wanted to watch a bunch of cgi I'd rent that shitty Final Fantasy movie. 

The pluses are much easier to count.  The one thing I enjoyed in this game was turning it off.  It's so satisfying, it's almost worth playing the game just to experience it once.  Almost.