Usually when a next-gen game fails to live up to the hype, you can say,
"Well, at least the graphics are good…" Not here. The character models all look
lifted from a high end PS2 or Xbox game, the environments are bland and the
enemies are all pretty much variations on the same 5-7 robots. The sound is no
prize either; the characters are only semi-believable in their speech and, most
bizarre of all, the human troops that accompany you in some places do little
more than grunt every three seconds. If you were to flip off the television and
listen only to the game's audio, you'd have a tough time distinguishing Too
Human from an all-male porno. Gross, weird and a little unsettling are all
adjectives that spring to mind.
Why do you play games?
A.) Fun?
B.) Challenge?
C.) An unexplainable crush on that pink DS that you could swear is eyeballing
you?
Most people will pick either of the first two, leaving choice C. for the
sickies. Too Human absolutely fails to deliver anything even remotely close to
options A. or B. Simply put, feel free to die over and over, because you'll soon
be returned to life with all the enemies still vanquished and whatever else you
might have interacted with completed as well. You don't lose experience, you
don't lose equipment, heck, you don't even lose your progress. While games like
Bioshock and Prey also had this little annoyance, they had fantastic gameplay,
which, in turn, made it excusable. Since Too Human isn't that great a game,
insta-life and the consequence-free gameplay stick out as a sad reminder that no
matter how tough things get, you'll have millions upon millions of chances to
get it right.
Another trip-up is the character class selection in Too Human is oh, so
broken. At the beginning, you'll have to pick between five different characters,
each with special abilities. But with the no-death rule, all choices but the
Champion (well-rounded) and the Defender (defends – duh) are either completely
useless or only able to find minor success in multiplayer games. Adding to the
headache is a choice you are forced to make early in the game, a choice that
sets your future in stone. But again, the no-death biz allows you to be as fast
and loose with what you've got to work with as you desire. What follows is a
series of experience points that are awarded whenever you gain a level. You then
spend them on a skill tree, which supposedly strengthens whatever you choose to
assign points for. But who needs special attacks? Just wail on enemies until you
die, then get right back up and finish the job. This strategy works on every
enemy, boss or challenge you come across.
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