Too Human (Xbox 360)
The first part of Silicon Knights' grandiose Norse trilogy turns out to be not so epic after all.
8/20/2008 9:12 PM | 3 Comments | Page 3 of 3
What's Hot: Tons of cool-looking loot; Intriguing fusion of Norse mythology and advanced tech; Controls are button-mashing-free; One of the characters is a severed talking head.
What's Not: Broken camera and targeting system; Unsophisticated enemies and allies; Barren environments; Graphically dated; You have to watch a 26-second cut scene each time you die.
Erin Bell
Status: Bubble Tea: I know the fad is over. I don't care.
If it seems like I'm harping on the combat, it's because that's the meat of the game. The locations are too barren and linear to be interesting from an exploratory perspective, the NORN challenges (brief side excursions that take place in an alternate reality known as cyberspace) are too basic to be true brain-teasers, and the cut scenes are too graphically pedestrian to be breathtaking for their own sake.
Too Human isn't a total train wreck, but it does contain too many examples of gameplay and design that can only be described as primitive -- it's as though beautifully dark epics like
Gears of War or loot-hording havens like
World of Warcraft were still a couple of years away. I, like many gamers, was expecting better from the makers of
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and
Legacy of Kain.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Think the game deserves a shot? Check out David Chapman's
Dissenting Opinion: Too Human.
