I Think I Liked Too Human

Too Human is a game that I've owned for a very long time, and yet have only just recently completed. I bought it off of eBay months, maybe years ago, and played through the first couple of hours before deciding that even at a lousy $9, the purchase was a mistake. And it was a shame, too, as Too Human was really a game I was anticipating for a long while prior to its release. When all of the reviews hit, though, it just turned me off. Well, I've finally wrapped up a bit of unfinished business and finished Too Human the other day, and uh... I think I liked it.


The thing about Too Human is that the systems and UI in the game make it hard to get into. The systems that are laid out for equipment and skill trees seem archaic and overly-complicated at first glance. Well, let's be honest here, they simply are archaic and overly-complicated, but after spending some time with them, they're as least functional and somewhat understandable. I was probably about five hours into the game before I really started to understand how to make sure my version of the cybernetic god, Baldur, was rolling into battles wearing the best gear possible. That's entirely too long to figure that stuff out, but once you do, the game becomes much more enjoyable. Gear--surprise, surprise--makes a huge difference in combat and really keeps you from dying a horrible death within about 10 seconds of engaging enemies. So upgrading gear is key, which is fine because there's lots of it to be looted. You can also craft gear from blueprints. Some of the wildly varied gear even looks legitimately awesome on Baldur. What holds this constant need to be upgrading gear back, is the inefficiency of the menus. Opening menus to cycle through all of your loot category-by-category every thirty minutes or so to make sure you're going into battles with the latest stuff, and thus not being killed, is tedious. It simply takes too long to equip Baldur. The game would benefit greatly from either a way to auto-equip the best items in your possession as they're picked up, or just a menu system that doesn't look strait out of an original Xbox game.

I forgot to mention that Too Human takes place
in the Futurama universe.

The combat in Too Human is interesting. It doesn't always feel as powerful or as fluid as I'd like it, but it has its moments. The games gives the player a wide variety of moves and it's up to the player to make it interesting. In the rare moments when everything came together, I felt in control of a hard-hitting cybernetic god. When things didn't come together, however, I wondered why I was still playing Too Human. It really does all hinge on the combat. This is probably why I started to enjoy myself more and more as I became more familiar with it. Popping an enemy up into the air is fun. It's more fun when Baldur jumps up to meet them in the air and take their health all of the way down, just to land and finish them off in the air with cyber-pistols (No really, the pistols vanish into thin air after you're done using them.). Using Baldur's slide move to attack multiple enemies in quick succession feels nice--especially later in the game when you're weapon is beefy and you're sending weaker enemies flying long distances with a single swing. It's actually sad that it takes so long for Baldur to become powerful, since most players will likely never see the extent of Baldur's strength; it wasn't until I started a new game with my leveled Baldur that I started seeing enemies really flying crazy distances after strikes.

I'm glad that the combat has its moments, because the story sure doesn't. Well, OK, that's not fair--the very last scene of the game is kind of badass, but c'mon, that's literally the only part of the story that had me interested; certainly a case of much too little, entirely too late. I won't spoil the end if anyone is still considering playing this game, but just know that if you're going into the game for the story, you're going to be disappointed. That is unless you're a huge fan of Norse mythology already. I, however, am not. I can see that there are probably all kinds of references to Norse mythology in place, but I really don't have any sense of that stuff, and to someone like me, the game doesn't do a good job explaining it.

At the end of the day, I'm glad I went back to Too Human. I found, buried deep under some menus strait out of 2003, a game that is actually very satisfying and enjoyable in spurts. The combat is--dare I say--great once you get a handle on it. The loot systems are certainly interesting, but the methods for managing it should have been rethought. The story's not told an in interesting way, but that can be overlooked when just approaching this game from the perspective that it's simply a decent action game that contains mad loot.

Against all odds, I've found myself liking Too Human much more than I reasonably should.