Too Human

Now that I'm nearly through with it & on the last level, I can clearly say that it's a horrible game worthy of a lower score than what Game Spot gave it. I hate to say that since I was pretty happy with the demo earlier. The demo was fun, hell, even part of the game up to the last level, but the last level is a completely unforgivable piece of crap...unless you like dying all the time & leveling up as you die & the level-up does nothing to keep you from dying further...basically dying your way through the level. Who likes doing that??

Also, they give you a 5-point achievement score for dying 100 times. What a treat. When they were thinking of inserting that achievement, about dying 100 times, they should have been thinking: you know we ought to fix this game. They should have made it 11 years to release it instead of 10. Bottomline: if this is what we have to look forward to with the next two games in the trilogy, they should just dissolve the franchise & company.

It's harsh, but it's better than getting frustrated from a source of alleged entertainment. Here are a few other things I observed in my heightened sense of agitation.

There is a load of dumbness about the game. One thing is the map. You walk around on these huge roads. You have all this hi-tech gear, but you don't have a motorcycle or golf cart or anything to move faster from one long stretch of road to the next.

The next thing are the items: you collect these rare, expensive items & they don't make a difference. If they make you more powerful, will it matter in the sequel? If a sequel comes out & you have all of these powerful items, do they get transferred to the new game? If they don't really do any good for fighting monsters, what good is it to transfer them?

Then there is 'cyberspace'. They could have used these forest/cyberspace areas for further storylines or even more as a puzzle quest to unlock other areas of the real-world map. However, all they do is offer loot droppings locations. Only in the demo/first level do they actually get used in a puzzle-like way. The demo makes you think that further levels will have complex locks in cyberspace & puzzles to figure out. There isn't anything in the other three non-demo levels!

The challenge levels of the first demo, are no where to be found. If you stumble into one, if you get killed it locks you out & auto-saves to make sure you can't get back in. Sure enough, except for the demo secret rooms, the other rooms kill you off quite easily with streams & streams of monsters.

The storyline is cryptic & ridiculous. The home base where you collect things or get on with your quests are 100% linear. Just go to a map & it states two things: You Are Here with a location GO HERE to the next part of the story! It completely removes the thinking process. There are no multiple paths, there is no haggling, there is nothing that makes it feel like you are part of an RPG...so I don't know why it tries to put in a few elements at all. If you were to compare to Ultimate Alliance, UA is years ahead in terms of quality & the way it works with everything syncing together for an enjoyable & lengthy game.

To me, it seems Too Human kills you a lot in an effort to keep you from finishing the game too fast. If the mobs were easy to get past when you leveled up, the game would probably only take 3-4 hours to finish. So the short game is made long by setting it to a nightmare difficulty & then having the Valkryie waste your valuable spare time scooping up your corpse! How about giving us a SKIP sequence???

Frankly, after thinking about the game & writing up a review of sorts, I'd probably give this game a 2 or 3 out of 10 stars. They didn't finish this game before they released. This release should have been the beta for QA to test.

Another bad element of the game was that it didn't drop enough health to keep you alive as the mobs constantly knocked your health down to zero. Several times, I found myself with 1 second to live, or worse, the death cinematic sequence, AND THEN see a health icon drop down, when I can't reach it & it doesn't do me any good.

The masses are wrong about the mechanics of TH game being bad. That is probably the best part compared to the overall playability of the game. It's just a half-baked release of a game that didn't have everything fleshed out & the developers throttled it up to Nightmare mode to keep people from finishing it in 2-3 hours.

Lastly, attacking zombies & robots is getting tiresome. Can't they come up with any other creatures to blast? There isn't enough variety in the type of mobs you have to kill. Which is yet another reason the game has that half-baked feel to it. Mass Effect had zombies & robots to attack too, so there was too much overlap in the game since you could just go back to enjoy Mass Effect rather than TH, since at least in Mass Effect, the harder difficulty setting was workable & could be throttled down if it was too hard (fortunately that was never the case).

I still want to finish Too Human, I am on the last level, but I don't look forward to the infinite deaths it's going to take to finish it. I mean, heck, I have completed Halo 3 in Legendary mode & I'm calling Too Human too hard a game to play! That has to have some merit.