This review contains spoilers
Too Human is apparently an Action RPG (lol) developed by the likes of Silicon Knight and published as an Xbox 360 Exclusive by Microsoft Game Studios themselves; known for seminal titles like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, as well as the Gamecube-only remake of Metal Gear Solid, called Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. However while they might be known for these arguable classic games, they’re also known for their history, or rather history of ineptitude towards their later life due to many reasons, the one that seems to be the most prominent is the founder himself, Denis Dyack. This game originally started as a Playstation Exclusive four disc Cyberpunk RPG before Nintendo took over the company while they were developing Eternal Darkness for the N64 originally.
Fast forward a couple of years, this game was put on hold while Silicon worked on the aforementioned Eternal Darkness and The Twin Snakes before in 2005 they were somehow taken over by Microsoft Game Studios and it was released in 2008 to mixed reviews before eventually getting shut down due to bankruptcy after trying to sue Epic Games over it’s Unreal Engine. Now my feelings are definitely not in the mixed, they’re A LOT worse but I find exclusives to be fascinating due to the history behind it and boy does this game have a history of mismanagement. Now I believe I picked this up over in San Diego last year on a trip though I’m honestly not sure and I wanted to pick it up for a while and give it an honest go, and even beat it to say that I beat it. I have some thoughts here:
ACT 1:
The Story starts off where you play as Baldur, a Bald (heh) amnesiac member of the Aesir in some sort of Sci-Fi take on Norse Mythology. Now I’m gonna start by saying this, I don’t remember this game’s plot too much, maybe because this was one of the most boring fucking games I think I’ve ever played and the story personally wasn’t the most captivating so I’m gonna be taking from a variety of sources while I’ll link them at the bottom. But continuing on, The Aesir Corporation holds reign over humanity during a never ending war against machines led thousands of years ago by some ancient evil kingdom called YMIR? Nuclear Winter happened due to the use of Antimatter weapons and now the Aesir are humanity’s last hope though even that is dwindling in itself. However, the actual story plot starts off with Baldur leading a hunt against an old cyber enemy, known as GRNDL-1, at a place called The Hall of Heroes. Now in the background there’s this conflict between the Aesir and Hel, with something called “The Pact of the Fallen” being dissolved which forbids the collection of dead from being taken from Hel. Freya takes Baldur to the Norns in Cyberspace, with hints of both Baldur being gone for a while and a romance that happened long ago between Baldur and Freya before Baldur got with his now dead current wife Lyanna. The Norns hit on Baldur I guess and give him some info/access to all Cyberspace wells before sending him on his way. In the current day, Baldur continues to fight through the Hall of Heroes, getting introduced to the poisonous Nidhogg (which you can’t get rid of until much later in the game and New Game Plus). You eventually find GRNDL before slaying it in a battle, after which you report back to Midgard (a cyberpunk city) and you have to choose between cybernetic and human abilities.
ACT 2:
While here, you can run into some guards who discuss how Loki is trapped in their prison, and that he was framed and should eventually be out of there soon. Now I personally never encountered this but it’s a nice little bit of foreshadowing to what’s to come. Baldur arrives at the feasting hall, with Heimdall and the others feasting to his victory. Baldur has a flashback to two shadows over him while he’s in surgery and after some banter, Freya and Baldur have a heart to heart about him missing his now dead wife, urging him to move on from the past. However he disagrees and is sent to Heimdall to find information about who killed his dead wife. Turns out another Aesir, Hod, murdered Baldur’s wife and has fled to Svartalfheim to apparently join the machines, with Tyr heading the hunt for him. Baldur insists on taking over the expedition, and he’s suspiciously told to destroy his cybernetics. After he leaves, Heimdall and Thor go to Loki’s torture chamber in his prison and wake him up, only to beat him up and tell him he’ll be tried for Treason before being thrown back into the torture chamber as he apparently killed another god. It’s also learned that the soul of Fenrir, a machine that Loki brought back from the Land of the Giants, was locked into a sword and given to Baldur. They go out to search for Hod in the frost forest and get attacked by machines, only going in further and further. Baldur goes into cyberspace again to have a weird freaky conversation with one of the flirty Norns about Loki’s cybernetic origins and sacrifices in a way that feels like she’s either siding with or is Loki in disguise? Who knows, to be honest, I don’t remember too much of the plot anyways. Eventually Baldur finds Hod and challenges him for killing his wife, however something isn’t right as Hod sees him as Loki; and a narrative flashback shows Hod apparently killing Loki. Loki had betrayed them and staged an attack on Asgard, and had gotten a dome straight through the head for it. Baldur chases Hod down in a frustrating boss battle before Hod finally comes to his senses; he sees that Baldur is most definitely not Loki and is executed for his crimes. However, Baldur does NOT destroy his cybernetics and instead brings them back to the Norns in Midgard and it’s learned that a signal was hacked into these cybernetics, and Hod was set up.
ACT 3:
Heimdall and others are required by the headless Mimir for information about The Jormungandr, a YMIR war machine that’s the last of it’s kind and the general consensus is to take it give the AESIR the balance of power that could lead to them winning the war once and for all. Baldur and Thor are assigned to take Mimir and go to this “World Serpent” machine and Thor implores Baldur to go to the Norns once again to acquire some knowledge on the machine itself. The YMIR created these machines out of bloodthirst and the need to conquer everyone, and when destroyed their creations continue to fight back, but only with basic programming and no real motives. Again it’s kind of hinted at that this one Norn is actually somewhat related to Loki in disguise due to her dialogue but it might pay off. Another cutscene shows a red haired cyber woman who is replacing her body with another one to try to achieve immortality and both Baldur and Thor leave for the war machine. In one of the game’s only hints of genius, Baldur enters Cyberspace and after leaving believes that Thor has died and that Mimir has gone insane; and then enters another Cyberspace well only to wake up in the first one. It reminds me of an Eternal Darkness hallucination, and again I actually liked this sort of thing and I feel like it would’ve been interesting if they perhaps took more cues from it (the good ones of course). The three fight through the war machine only to learn that Loki has taken control of the machine using his super cyber hacking mental skills and GASP impersonated the flirty Norn. Baldur and Thor fight through the whole ship and end up at the core. Thor wants to destroy the ship while Baldur wants to escape and warn the AESIR, however it turns out that Loki jump started a rebellion in their absence and has recruited humans working on the inside to break him out of his prison cell, which ends in success. The traitors left alive are executed in the feasting hall and it’s thought that Loki took to hiding out in Helheim with his daughter Hel, the red haired woman from earlier. They bicker amongst themselves before ODIN, the AI that controls the AESIR, decrees that they invade Helheim and kill him once and for all. Everyone agrees to stop Loki’s world domination plans and set out.
ACT 4:
If you go to the Cybernetics lady before heading out you’ll catch a little foreshadowing glimpse of a twist to come, everyone departs to assault Helheim. Loki and his daughter Hel embrace and Loki departs to fulfill some master plan I guess. The AESIR fight through only for Baldur and Tyr ro encounter Garm, some robotic beast dog whose battle ends up with Tyr sacrificing himself. Baldur fights his way up the tower to encounter Hel herself, and a number of reveals are thrown out: Hel still wants immortality and has been experimenting with corpses to keep them alive, Nidhogg has been freed (no follow up) and Ragnarok has begun, Baldur had actually died before and had been experimented on, also his wife Lyanna is still alive; when Baldur had died before Lyanna couldn’t move on and ended up trying to kill herself repeatedly, and then the Aesir had dumped her on Hel’s doorstep. Basically confirmed later, Hod had murdered you, and wanting to bring you back to life, brought you back from Helheim after a resurrection experiment but now you have amnesia and glowing blue shit on your face, with this actually breaking The Pact of the Fallen. Anyways you end up finishing Hel by strapping her to some sort of experiment table thing and she gets sawed in half, and before escaping Baldur’s possessed sword murders the Lyanna clone thing. Helheim is nuked with a fusion strike and everyone goes back to Midgard while the dead roam the world. Everyone reunites at the Feasting Hall, with Baldur chiding everyone for causing problems by resurrecting him to begin with: Tyr dying ruined any chance of them understanding the old weaponry, and now Loki roams free. Baldur abandons the Aesir, while the others prepare for the upcoming war with Loki, and the game finally ends with a post credits sequence of Loki meeting up with a cybernetic giant before the game cuts to black.
Final Story Summary:
The game’s story to me personally, as I mentioned, wasn't the most captivating one. Sure there are interesting things that it does with the game, and it’s weird seeing a different version of the Norse gods after having recently played through the two newest God of War games. It has some cool foreshadowing going on here and there, a couple of moments I thought were cool but honestly I personally feel the story is riddled with issues that mainly stems down to one fact: They imagined this game as a three game trilogy. That’s nice and all but if you create a game that leaves unanswered questions and plot hooks, then make a good fucking game first. Because of that there is no conclusion and it’s just kind of left on a strange note. That and make most of the characters interesting please, like who the hell is Hod? Who were most of the people at the Feasting Hall? One of them was apparently Freyr but I didn’t know that because they don’t say much in the way of shit. I kept getting Thor and Tyr mixed up because they look the fucking same. ODIN as an AI is a neat idea but I only ever remember hearing him twice. I don’t know, it just felt underwhelming as hell and deserved better. Again the one point I really like is in arguably the worst Act, Act 3 where he has that little hallucination thing from Cyberspace but other than that it was kind of moot. It’s one of many reasons where I honestly fell asleep a couple times playing this game, other than the worst contender: The Gameplay.
The gameplay fucking sucks. The combat feels like Kingdoms of Amalur mixed with Hunter the Reckoning or something; like it felt like it should’ve been an MMO more than anything. Which to be honest, I’m not surprised considering the game used to have a drop in co-op multiplayer, however with this multiplayer shut down, I’m sure it feels a whole lot worse. You fight by moving your right thumb stick in different directions, which is supposed to lock onto enemies automatically and fight them. Now here’s the issue with that, the combat system often clashes with the camera leading you to attack enemies you’re not trying to hit, or you’ll leap across the area to another enemy only to stop short randomly and miss because the game decides it doesn’t want to go that far. Now the camera can sort of stay behind you, and you can sort of change how far or close you want it to be so that’s cool, but the problem is that the camera fucking blows at actually keeping you in the present with combat. There would be times where I’d kill an enemy and I would want it to actually lock onto another one, but sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll work but other times it’ll just keep locking onto the corpse of the enemy you just killed, so you’ll have to wait ten seconds to switch to another enemy, or if that doesn’t work it’ll just do nothing and you’ll be shooting into the fucking void where you’ll have to press it a couple of more times to actually have it lock on and then it won’t even hit the enemy you actually want. When you’re not in combat you’ll sometimes have these Eternal Darkness styled angles which can be cool but when it bleeds into the actual gameplay it makes for a frustrating experience.
I want to use a boss as an example, there’s a final boss in Act 3 called The Everlasting Hate and this made me everlastingly hate this stupid fucking game. So the whole point is to kill this boss you have to actually take it down by ripping off limb by limb, not a bad strategy right? Well, when you factor the actual camera into it, trying to go for these pieces can be a chore if it won’t let you do any actual damage aside from limb damage and you’re only able to hit certain spots like the arms/shoulders because trying to get the camera lock on to actually focus on it and let alone HIT the damn thing is exhausting, and it won’t let me destroy it by shooting so I’d have to break out a melee weapon and seventy five percent of the time the damn thing wouldn’t even hit and then after a minute or so of struggling I’d die. Now there’s a cool detail where if you die a Valkyrie comes and picks you up, bringing you to a golden hole in the sky. This would be better if it was skippable, but it isn’t so you will die and keep dying (not only on this boss but in general) and dealing with the same shit over and over again taking up more and more of your previous time and you will be seeing this nonstop throughout the game (though cool little detail, any soldiers that go with you and die will also get that so it’s kind of cool that way). Oh and also not during this battle but during Act 3 in general it’s a painful process because while you’ll usually have soldiers following you around in the other acts in this one you only have Thor, and he’s fucking useless. Half the time he’ll just run into a goddamn wall, while other times he’ll barely do anything for damage while boasting for the fifth time against Loki that he’ll “crush anything that he sends him” which clearly he can’t. Speaking of trying to crush it in melee combat, since all the melee combat goes with the right thumbsticks, it apparently has a series of combos you can do in order to do special moves like juggling enemies in the air. This has barely worked for me, oftentimes I’ll try to juggle and Baldur will slash like once and then fall down, other times I’ll somehow do some special slide move that I was only able to do randomly flicking the thumbstick around. However, I’m willing to admit maybe I’m just not good at doing combos? Ok, cool. However, I’d at least like to not feel like I’m constantly weak, which of course in these types of “RPGs” (let’s face it, this game is a dungeon crawler with a skill tree) they like to do the Gear based system where you just constantly have to switch armor and weapon types often to fit some arbitrary based number so you can survive for a decent time like the newer Assassin’s Creed or something. There has to be a better way of doing RPG combat than this because truth be told this kind of combat feels lazy as hell, and I don’t want to constantly switch out weapons just to be able to feel like I’m doing something and it isn’t just for this game this is for every fucking game that uses these systems, and these loot systems are necessary for furthering progress in the game and are your only reward for exploring. Sometimes you’ll get these obelisks by moving something in the environment by going into Cyberspace Wells and doing something there, like force pushing a door; these are ok and thankfully aren’t brain teasers but they’re also not even really good puzzles to begin with. You’ll get four powers over the first playthrough: force pushing, force pulling, walking on water, and the ability to burn Nidhogg down in the last one. However, the only way you can actually use this effectively is to play the game on New Game Plus and there’s no way I’m spending any more time actually playing this game only for the reward to be: MORE LOOT. Like I don’t need another weapon that does like five extra damage, how about you actually give me something interesting?
Speaking of weapons, I hate saying this but I mostly just stuck to using a Laser Gun of some sorts while jumping or rolling (which only works sometimes if the enemy has a giant AOE attack) away because truth is that while it’s not that hard to stay alive, it’s also not that hard to die. Sounds weird right? Well, when I was playing there would be rooms where it would be fine and I could just melee them and move on, and then others where they just kind of threw a bunch of enemies at a wall to see what would stick. So you’ll have like five enemies who just spam missiles while twenty five to fifty enemies run at you with a sword and then you have like one or two spiders or giants in the background, which can be manageable if you weren’t trying to constantly dodge the missiles. Luckily for spider enemies, killing them was as easy as abusing the game by dodging as soon as they raised their arms up to hit you with the AOE attack that could knock you down. Now luckily you have big arenas to maneuver around in for the most part which helps things but number one they can close in really quick and also number two as another criticism you’ll for ninety five percent of the game see these big arenas. There is absolutely nothing of interest around them other than the fact they’re giant, they’re confusing to navigate and the only reward you can really get from exploring a bit are little obelisks in which you can activate to get more loot; no lore, no nothing, there’s absolutely nothing of interest in these environments other than loot obelisks. So for most of the game, you’ll just be nonstop fighting enemies in room after room and open arena after open arena and I’ll be honest with you this shit bored me to tears and as I said before, I nearly fell asleep A LOT playing this game. And personally I feel like this is the biggest sin a game can make is having an excruciatingly boring game loop with absolutely nothing redeemable. Sometimes it can even be frustrating as after each death, your loot will degrade with status as your armor loses functionality and weapons lose damage output, further punishing you for the shitty game mechanics THEY put in there.
Now what I can say is that these mechanics also didn’t matter as I just kept switching them out with higher output weapons and lord knows you’ll gather enough cash to buy more loot later on from The World Tree, which is considered this game’s hub. For the most part you can walk over to the weapons store run by Tyr (I think?) and the Cybernetics store run by….whoever the fuck. You’ll also be given the choice of doing a Cybernetic or Human upgrade tree with separate abilities on top of the numerous classes you’re already given which I guess is cool with choices but truth be told I’m not going out my way to experiment because that would require me actually playing more of this game and I’d sooner get my face fucked with third degree burns. Other than that you can walk around, open up MORE LOOT OBELISKS, encounter random conversations that you can’t engage in and some you can, but other than that it’s just kind of boring, though the aesthetics are nice but I’ll be talking about that in the next section. I guess to finish off any criticisms, if people are able to sit down and make a great build and kill shit that’s amazing, but the dungeon crawler MMO combat feels sloppy to play and unintuitive and I can’t believe they decided to make that a thing? I forget if I said how I played before but oftentimes I’d feel like I would have to just keep jumping back and shooting people, while also spamming my delayed healing ability, my shields or an over powered special attack using the RB button to clear some enemies in front of me though even that wouldn’t work out the best as said with The Everlasting Hate or Hod’s boss fight in Act 2. One last thing, but speaking of The Everlasting Hate, you’ll have special enemies sometimes (or a lot in the later acts) that have edgy ass names like “The Cruel Death of the Dark” or “Bone Gnasher” or some really strange shit that you’d see some Norwegian Metal Band take up as a handle instead of actually threatening names? I don’t know, I just found it funny to me.
The Soundtrack/Graphics/Art Style: The art style is cool I guess, they got a whole cyberpunk norse thing going on which is cool and the environments in hub look cool but the actual level design/art design of the dungeons are repetitive and boring, with the same shit over and over again that both helped put me to sleep and confused me on where the hell I was going. The soundtrack was ok, some orchestral stuff but truth be told I don’t remember hearing much of any music in game and what little music I did hear was glitching the fuck out, mostly during The Everlasting Hate boss fight where it would just start warping itself before canceling outright and starting again in a broken loop, I don’t know if anyone else ever encountered that issue but for me it was jarring. Honestly I think the graphics were probably the most interesting thing as it reminded me a lot of that mid to late 2000s Fable-era Xbox 360 styled graphics which I have nostalgic memories over but nothing too exciting.
To finalize my thoughts on the game: I have it in my collection due to the fact it’s fascinating in its history, the development of a game that was tumultuous at best. Before Silicon Knights went into bankruptcy over a lawsuit, they were ordered to destroy all copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny over stolen lines of code from Epic’s Unreal 3 Engine. On top of unsold copies of those two games, Silicon Knights were apparently working on games like a new Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness 2, and the two sequels to this game. Having played the game out of morbid curiosity and a penchant for collecting and playing console exclusive games while ranting about how each of these need a port; I’m glad I played through it once but I don’t think I will ever again except if it’s for a really good reason. The idea that Denis Dydack thought of making a mess of a game in the first part of a trilogy is astounding, and again a BORING mess at that. To me that’s the worst thing a game can do, is not only be bad but BORING bad. I would even go as far to say I don’t think I would care if it ever got a port but it should be preserved not only for history’s sake but as an example of what NOT to do while making a video game. I would also say that I think we would’ve been better off if we had gotten whatever version of Too Human they were making when it was supposed to be a PS1/Gamecube Exclusive. I wouldn’t really recommend this game to anyone unless you’re a fuckin masochist or unless you also find bad games as funny as I do. I’d rate this below a 2 out of 5 but unfortunately it’s still a game with some competent parts in it so I can’t but if you saw a copy of this and thought about giving it a try, I’d say collect it with the intent on sticking it on a shelf and never touching it again and if you played this game as a kid and thought it was cool but didn’t remember any of it? Don’t try it again, it’s a whole lot worse than what you thought it was, though (Un)luckily if you have Xbox Gold you can download it for free on Xbox One and it's in your library to play whenever you want because shoutout to Xbox's backwards compatibility system it's great.
TL;DR I’d rather play Forspoken ok thanks bye.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aAJRDHn8I&ab_channel=GamerPete
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3TIfOKG74Q&ab_channel=MattMcMuscles https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TooHuman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVlVq3pStk8&ab_channel=GVMERS
https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/11/too-human-playstation-1-cancelled/
Fast forward a couple of years, this game was put on hold while Silicon worked on the aforementioned Eternal Darkness and The Twin Snakes before in 2005 they were somehow taken over by Microsoft Game Studios and it was released in 2008 to mixed reviews before eventually getting shut down due to bankruptcy after trying to sue Epic Games over it’s Unreal Engine. Now my feelings are definitely not in the mixed, they’re A LOT worse but I find exclusives to be fascinating due to the history behind it and boy does this game have a history of mismanagement. Now I believe I picked this up over in San Diego last year on a trip though I’m honestly not sure and I wanted to pick it up for a while and give it an honest go, and even beat it to say that I beat it. I have some thoughts here:
ACT 1:
The Story starts off where you play as Baldur, a Bald (heh) amnesiac member of the Aesir in some sort of Sci-Fi take on Norse Mythology. Now I’m gonna start by saying this, I don’t remember this game’s plot too much, maybe because this was one of the most boring fucking games I think I’ve ever played and the story personally wasn’t the most captivating so I’m gonna be taking from a variety of sources while I’ll link them at the bottom. But continuing on, The Aesir Corporation holds reign over humanity during a never ending war against machines led thousands of years ago by some ancient evil kingdom called YMIR? Nuclear Winter happened due to the use of Antimatter weapons and now the Aesir are humanity’s last hope though even that is dwindling in itself. However, the actual story plot starts off with Baldur leading a hunt against an old cyber enemy, known as GRNDL-1, at a place called The Hall of Heroes. Now in the background there’s this conflict between the Aesir and Hel, with something called “The Pact of the Fallen” being dissolved which forbids the collection of dead from being taken from Hel. Freya takes Baldur to the Norns in Cyberspace, with hints of both Baldur being gone for a while and a romance that happened long ago between Baldur and Freya before Baldur got with his now dead current wife Lyanna. The Norns hit on Baldur I guess and give him some info/access to all Cyberspace wells before sending him on his way. In the current day, Baldur continues to fight through the Hall of Heroes, getting introduced to the poisonous Nidhogg (which you can’t get rid of until much later in the game and New Game Plus). You eventually find GRNDL before slaying it in a battle, after which you report back to Midgard (a cyberpunk city) and you have to choose between cybernetic and human abilities.
ACT 2:
While here, you can run into some guards who discuss how Loki is trapped in their prison, and that he was framed and should eventually be out of there soon. Now I personally never encountered this but it’s a nice little bit of foreshadowing to what’s to come. Baldur arrives at the feasting hall, with Heimdall and the others feasting to his victory. Baldur has a flashback to two shadows over him while he’s in surgery and after some banter, Freya and Baldur have a heart to heart about him missing his now dead wife, urging him to move on from the past. However he disagrees and is sent to Heimdall to find information about who killed his dead wife. Turns out another Aesir, Hod, murdered Baldur’s wife and has fled to Svartalfheim to apparently join the machines, with Tyr heading the hunt for him. Baldur insists on taking over the expedition, and he’s suspiciously told to destroy his cybernetics. After he leaves, Heimdall and Thor go to Loki’s torture chamber in his prison and wake him up, only to beat him up and tell him he’ll be tried for Treason before being thrown back into the torture chamber as he apparently killed another god. It’s also learned that the soul of Fenrir, a machine that Loki brought back from the Land of the Giants, was locked into a sword and given to Baldur. They go out to search for Hod in the frost forest and get attacked by machines, only going in further and further. Baldur goes into cyberspace again to have a weird freaky conversation with one of the flirty Norns about Loki’s cybernetic origins and sacrifices in a way that feels like she’s either siding with or is Loki in disguise? Who knows, to be honest, I don’t remember too much of the plot anyways. Eventually Baldur finds Hod and challenges him for killing his wife, however something isn’t right as Hod sees him as Loki; and a narrative flashback shows Hod apparently killing Loki. Loki had betrayed them and staged an attack on Asgard, and had gotten a dome straight through the head for it. Baldur chases Hod down in a frustrating boss battle before Hod finally comes to his senses; he sees that Baldur is most definitely not Loki and is executed for his crimes. However, Baldur does NOT destroy his cybernetics and instead brings them back to the Norns in Midgard and it’s learned that a signal was hacked into these cybernetics, and Hod was set up.
ACT 3:
Heimdall and others are required by the headless Mimir for information about The Jormungandr, a YMIR war machine that’s the last of it’s kind and the general consensus is to take it give the AESIR the balance of power that could lead to them winning the war once and for all. Baldur and Thor are assigned to take Mimir and go to this “World Serpent” machine and Thor implores Baldur to go to the Norns once again to acquire some knowledge on the machine itself. The YMIR created these machines out of bloodthirst and the need to conquer everyone, and when destroyed their creations continue to fight back, but only with basic programming and no real motives. Again it’s kind of hinted at that this one Norn is actually somewhat related to Loki in disguise due to her dialogue but it might pay off. Another cutscene shows a red haired cyber woman who is replacing her body with another one to try to achieve immortality and both Baldur and Thor leave for the war machine. In one of the game’s only hints of genius, Baldur enters Cyberspace and after leaving believes that Thor has died and that Mimir has gone insane; and then enters another Cyberspace well only to wake up in the first one. It reminds me of an Eternal Darkness hallucination, and again I actually liked this sort of thing and I feel like it would’ve been interesting if they perhaps took more cues from it (the good ones of course). The three fight through the war machine only to learn that Loki has taken control of the machine using his super cyber hacking mental skills and GASP impersonated the flirty Norn. Baldur and Thor fight through the whole ship and end up at the core. Thor wants to destroy the ship while Baldur wants to escape and warn the AESIR, however it turns out that Loki jump started a rebellion in their absence and has recruited humans working on the inside to break him out of his prison cell, which ends in success. The traitors left alive are executed in the feasting hall and it’s thought that Loki took to hiding out in Helheim with his daughter Hel, the red haired woman from earlier. They bicker amongst themselves before ODIN, the AI that controls the AESIR, decrees that they invade Helheim and kill him once and for all. Everyone agrees to stop Loki’s world domination plans and set out.
ACT 4:
If you go to the Cybernetics lady before heading out you’ll catch a little foreshadowing glimpse of a twist to come, everyone departs to assault Helheim. Loki and his daughter Hel embrace and Loki departs to fulfill some master plan I guess. The AESIR fight through only for Baldur and Tyr ro encounter Garm, some robotic beast dog whose battle ends up with Tyr sacrificing himself. Baldur fights his way up the tower to encounter Hel herself, and a number of reveals are thrown out: Hel still wants immortality and has been experimenting with corpses to keep them alive, Nidhogg has been freed (no follow up) and Ragnarok has begun, Baldur had actually died before and had been experimented on, also his wife Lyanna is still alive; when Baldur had died before Lyanna couldn’t move on and ended up trying to kill herself repeatedly, and then the Aesir had dumped her on Hel’s doorstep. Basically confirmed later, Hod had murdered you, and wanting to bring you back to life, brought you back from Helheim after a resurrection experiment but now you have amnesia and glowing blue shit on your face, with this actually breaking The Pact of the Fallen. Anyways you end up finishing Hel by strapping her to some sort of experiment table thing and she gets sawed in half, and before escaping Baldur’s possessed sword murders the Lyanna clone thing. Helheim is nuked with a fusion strike and everyone goes back to Midgard while the dead roam the world. Everyone reunites at the Feasting Hall, with Baldur chiding everyone for causing problems by resurrecting him to begin with: Tyr dying ruined any chance of them understanding the old weaponry, and now Loki roams free. Baldur abandons the Aesir, while the others prepare for the upcoming war with Loki, and the game finally ends with a post credits sequence of Loki meeting up with a cybernetic giant before the game cuts to black.
Final Story Summary:
The game’s story to me personally, as I mentioned, wasn't the most captivating one. Sure there are interesting things that it does with the game, and it’s weird seeing a different version of the Norse gods after having recently played through the two newest God of War games. It has some cool foreshadowing going on here and there, a couple of moments I thought were cool but honestly I personally feel the story is riddled with issues that mainly stems down to one fact: They imagined this game as a three game trilogy. That’s nice and all but if you create a game that leaves unanswered questions and plot hooks, then make a good fucking game first. Because of that there is no conclusion and it’s just kind of left on a strange note. That and make most of the characters interesting please, like who the hell is Hod? Who were most of the people at the Feasting Hall? One of them was apparently Freyr but I didn’t know that because they don’t say much in the way of shit. I kept getting Thor and Tyr mixed up because they look the fucking same. ODIN as an AI is a neat idea but I only ever remember hearing him twice. I don’t know, it just felt underwhelming as hell and deserved better. Again the one point I really like is in arguably the worst Act, Act 3 where he has that little hallucination thing from Cyberspace but other than that it was kind of moot. It’s one of many reasons where I honestly fell asleep a couple times playing this game, other than the worst contender: The Gameplay.
The gameplay fucking sucks. The combat feels like Kingdoms of Amalur mixed with Hunter the Reckoning or something; like it felt like it should’ve been an MMO more than anything. Which to be honest, I’m not surprised considering the game used to have a drop in co-op multiplayer, however with this multiplayer shut down, I’m sure it feels a whole lot worse. You fight by moving your right thumb stick in different directions, which is supposed to lock onto enemies automatically and fight them. Now here’s the issue with that, the combat system often clashes with the camera leading you to attack enemies you’re not trying to hit, or you’ll leap across the area to another enemy only to stop short randomly and miss because the game decides it doesn’t want to go that far. Now the camera can sort of stay behind you, and you can sort of change how far or close you want it to be so that’s cool, but the problem is that the camera fucking blows at actually keeping you in the present with combat. There would be times where I’d kill an enemy and I would want it to actually lock onto another one, but sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it’ll work but other times it’ll just keep locking onto the corpse of the enemy you just killed, so you’ll have to wait ten seconds to switch to another enemy, or if that doesn’t work it’ll just do nothing and you’ll be shooting into the fucking void where you’ll have to press it a couple of more times to actually have it lock on and then it won’t even hit the enemy you actually want. When you’re not in combat you’ll sometimes have these Eternal Darkness styled angles which can be cool but when it bleeds into the actual gameplay it makes for a frustrating experience.
I want to use a boss as an example, there’s a final boss in Act 3 called The Everlasting Hate and this made me everlastingly hate this stupid fucking game. So the whole point is to kill this boss you have to actually take it down by ripping off limb by limb, not a bad strategy right? Well, when you factor the actual camera into it, trying to go for these pieces can be a chore if it won’t let you do any actual damage aside from limb damage and you’re only able to hit certain spots like the arms/shoulders because trying to get the camera lock on to actually focus on it and let alone HIT the damn thing is exhausting, and it won’t let me destroy it by shooting so I’d have to break out a melee weapon and seventy five percent of the time the damn thing wouldn’t even hit and then after a minute or so of struggling I’d die. Now there’s a cool detail where if you die a Valkyrie comes and picks you up, bringing you to a golden hole in the sky. This would be better if it was skippable, but it isn’t so you will die and keep dying (not only on this boss but in general) and dealing with the same shit over and over again taking up more and more of your previous time and you will be seeing this nonstop throughout the game (though cool little detail, any soldiers that go with you and die will also get that so it’s kind of cool that way). Oh and also not during this battle but during Act 3 in general it’s a painful process because while you’ll usually have soldiers following you around in the other acts in this one you only have Thor, and he’s fucking useless. Half the time he’ll just run into a goddamn wall, while other times he’ll barely do anything for damage while boasting for the fifth time against Loki that he’ll “crush anything that he sends him” which clearly he can’t. Speaking of trying to crush it in melee combat, since all the melee combat goes with the right thumbsticks, it apparently has a series of combos you can do in order to do special moves like juggling enemies in the air. This has barely worked for me, oftentimes I’ll try to juggle and Baldur will slash like once and then fall down, other times I’ll somehow do some special slide move that I was only able to do randomly flicking the thumbstick around. However, I’m willing to admit maybe I’m just not good at doing combos? Ok, cool. However, I’d at least like to not feel like I’m constantly weak, which of course in these types of “RPGs” (let’s face it, this game is a dungeon crawler with a skill tree) they like to do the Gear based system where you just constantly have to switch armor and weapon types often to fit some arbitrary based number so you can survive for a decent time like the newer Assassin’s Creed or something. There has to be a better way of doing RPG combat than this because truth be told this kind of combat feels lazy as hell, and I don’t want to constantly switch out weapons just to be able to feel like I’m doing something and it isn’t just for this game this is for every fucking game that uses these systems, and these loot systems are necessary for furthering progress in the game and are your only reward for exploring. Sometimes you’ll get these obelisks by moving something in the environment by going into Cyberspace Wells and doing something there, like force pushing a door; these are ok and thankfully aren’t brain teasers but they’re also not even really good puzzles to begin with. You’ll get four powers over the first playthrough: force pushing, force pulling, walking on water, and the ability to burn Nidhogg down in the last one. However, the only way you can actually use this effectively is to play the game on New Game Plus and there’s no way I’m spending any more time actually playing this game only for the reward to be: MORE LOOT. Like I don’t need another weapon that does like five extra damage, how about you actually give me something interesting?
Speaking of weapons, I hate saying this but I mostly just stuck to using a Laser Gun of some sorts while jumping or rolling (which only works sometimes if the enemy has a giant AOE attack) away because truth is that while it’s not that hard to stay alive, it’s also not that hard to die. Sounds weird right? Well, when I was playing there would be rooms where it would be fine and I could just melee them and move on, and then others where they just kind of threw a bunch of enemies at a wall to see what would stick. So you’ll have like five enemies who just spam missiles while twenty five to fifty enemies run at you with a sword and then you have like one or two spiders or giants in the background, which can be manageable if you weren’t trying to constantly dodge the missiles. Luckily for spider enemies, killing them was as easy as abusing the game by dodging as soon as they raised their arms up to hit you with the AOE attack that could knock you down. Now luckily you have big arenas to maneuver around in for the most part which helps things but number one they can close in really quick and also number two as another criticism you’ll for ninety five percent of the game see these big arenas. There is absolutely nothing of interest around them other than the fact they’re giant, they’re confusing to navigate and the only reward you can really get from exploring a bit are little obelisks in which you can activate to get more loot; no lore, no nothing, there’s absolutely nothing of interest in these environments other than loot obelisks. So for most of the game, you’ll just be nonstop fighting enemies in room after room and open arena after open arena and I’ll be honest with you this shit bored me to tears and as I said before, I nearly fell asleep A LOT playing this game. And personally I feel like this is the biggest sin a game can make is having an excruciatingly boring game loop with absolutely nothing redeemable. Sometimes it can even be frustrating as after each death, your loot will degrade with status as your armor loses functionality and weapons lose damage output, further punishing you for the shitty game mechanics THEY put in there.
Now what I can say is that these mechanics also didn’t matter as I just kept switching them out with higher output weapons and lord knows you’ll gather enough cash to buy more loot later on from The World Tree, which is considered this game’s hub. For the most part you can walk over to the weapons store run by Tyr (I think?) and the Cybernetics store run by….whoever the fuck. You’ll also be given the choice of doing a Cybernetic or Human upgrade tree with separate abilities on top of the numerous classes you’re already given which I guess is cool with choices but truth be told I’m not going out my way to experiment because that would require me actually playing more of this game and I’d sooner get my face fucked with third degree burns. Other than that you can walk around, open up MORE LOOT OBELISKS, encounter random conversations that you can’t engage in and some you can, but other than that it’s just kind of boring, though the aesthetics are nice but I’ll be talking about that in the next section. I guess to finish off any criticisms, if people are able to sit down and make a great build and kill shit that’s amazing, but the dungeon crawler MMO combat feels sloppy to play and unintuitive and I can’t believe they decided to make that a thing? I forget if I said how I played before but oftentimes I’d feel like I would have to just keep jumping back and shooting people, while also spamming my delayed healing ability, my shields or an over powered special attack using the RB button to clear some enemies in front of me though even that wouldn’t work out the best as said with The Everlasting Hate or Hod’s boss fight in Act 2. One last thing, but speaking of The Everlasting Hate, you’ll have special enemies sometimes (or a lot in the later acts) that have edgy ass names like “The Cruel Death of the Dark” or “Bone Gnasher” or some really strange shit that you’d see some Norwegian Metal Band take up as a handle instead of actually threatening names? I don’t know, I just found it funny to me.
The Soundtrack/Graphics/Art Style: The art style is cool I guess, they got a whole cyberpunk norse thing going on which is cool and the environments in hub look cool but the actual level design/art design of the dungeons are repetitive and boring, with the same shit over and over again that both helped put me to sleep and confused me on where the hell I was going. The soundtrack was ok, some orchestral stuff but truth be told I don’t remember hearing much of any music in game and what little music I did hear was glitching the fuck out, mostly during The Everlasting Hate boss fight where it would just start warping itself before canceling outright and starting again in a broken loop, I don’t know if anyone else ever encountered that issue but for me it was jarring. Honestly I think the graphics were probably the most interesting thing as it reminded me a lot of that mid to late 2000s Fable-era Xbox 360 styled graphics which I have nostalgic memories over but nothing too exciting.
To finalize my thoughts on the game: I have it in my collection due to the fact it’s fascinating in its history, the development of a game that was tumultuous at best. Before Silicon Knights went into bankruptcy over a lawsuit, they were ordered to destroy all copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny over stolen lines of code from Epic’s Unreal 3 Engine. On top of unsold copies of those two games, Silicon Knights were apparently working on games like a new Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness 2, and the two sequels to this game. Having played the game out of morbid curiosity and a penchant for collecting and playing console exclusive games while ranting about how each of these need a port; I’m glad I played through it once but I don’t think I will ever again except if it’s for a really good reason. The idea that Denis Dydack thought of making a mess of a game in the first part of a trilogy is astounding, and again a BORING mess at that. To me that’s the worst thing a game can do, is not only be bad but BORING bad. I would even go as far to say I don’t think I would care if it ever got a port but it should be preserved not only for history’s sake but as an example of what NOT to do while making a video game. I would also say that I think we would’ve been better off if we had gotten whatever version of Too Human they were making when it was supposed to be a PS1/Gamecube Exclusive. I wouldn’t really recommend this game to anyone unless you’re a fuckin masochist or unless you also find bad games as funny as I do. I’d rate this below a 2 out of 5 but unfortunately it’s still a game with some competent parts in it so I can’t but if you saw a copy of this and thought about giving it a try, I’d say collect it with the intent on sticking it on a shelf and never touching it again and if you played this game as a kid and thought it was cool but didn’t remember any of it? Don’t try it again, it’s a whole lot worse than what you thought it was, though (Un)luckily if you have Xbox Gold you can download it for free on Xbox One and it's in your library to play whenever you want because shoutout to Xbox's backwards compatibility system it's great.
TL;DR I’d rather play Forspoken ok thanks bye.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aAJRDHn8I&ab_channel=GamerPete
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3TIfOKG74Q&ab_channel=MattMcMuscles https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TooHuman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVlVq3pStk8&ab_channel=GVMERS
https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/11/too-human-playstation-1-cancelled/