Too Human is Awesome

As you remember a couple of weeks ago I took my game geek status to a new level. I pre-ordered Too Human and lamented on how that pushed me over the edge from normal gamer to geek. Well it came and went. I got the game played the shit out of it and traded it in. This is a kind of misty eyed bookend nostalgia view of the game.

I played Too Human through twice. Once with mike as the commando on co-op multi and then once one single player with the defender. The game is rad. Rad rad rad. I loved every second of it but I do admit that there were some flaws.

The first giant flaw was there wasn't enough of it. there was only 4 levels and I played through them in 16 hours. When I finished I wasn't ready to quit I still wanted more. I wanted more gear, I wanted more ruiners most of all I wanted more of that delicious combat control style. Holding down the r trigger and pressing the right stick in which direction you want to shoot is such a natural ergonomic feeling way to shoot in this style of game that I am surprised shitty internet girls don't exploit it to become popular. I mean if something feels this good there has to be some way of bribing me into paying too much to watch it on a webcam. At the very least my seven hour game sessions were not marred by sore thumbs.

I know the lack of story and tutorials in co-op mode is a bit of a problem with mike. Actually it was a game killer problem for him so it might be of concern for some of you as well. I however played the single player mode as well so I got punched in the face with a million cut scenes and quit frankly got more than my fill of story. I still think It is a very cool idea for a game for the story to be optional like that. If you are choosing to play co-op with a friend you are choosing to forego the cut scene and total immersion style of the game. The ripped the narrative from your grasp and gave you nothing but lumps of glorious boner inducing combat.

One thing you must know is my opinion of trilogies is that usually in trilogies the first installment is wasted with boring introductions and too much character development and things don't get really fucking good untill the third installment. Think of how good the first lord of the rings would have been with out building your belief in that quasi homosexual hobbit bond and just cut to the epic battlescenes.

Nope too human didn't go there they took the delightful root of if you want to know more do research. There was a disclaimer on the Too Human website. They gave you a list of ways to prepare for the games launch. One item stated that if you wanted to know more about some of the characters you could read the norse mythology of which they are based on. It even had hot links to some very helpful stories.

I think the story was done perfectly it showed you characters told you their motivation and left it at that. Love it. There is nothing worse than video games that take a cliche character and ram it down your throat. Pretty much every fantasy character you can think of has been fully mapped in one media or another. I am very appreciative that this game didn't have the final fantasy disease. Oh look a new main character that is pretty much the same as the last one but guess what were are going to spend hours of cut scenes telling you what this character is about, GOODIE.

Don't get me wrong I pretend that I love story. I put in a modest effort and it takes me at least 4 hours of game-play to start skipping the story. On occasion though I will want to know more about the characters like their history and past feats and what really makes them tick. Thats what fucking wikipedia is for and not my valuable monster killing time.

I want to know more about a character I will go online and search their history. Like Dhalsim I recently went online and found out about his character. True it took me about 14 years to care enough to search it out but could you imagine how much street fighter would have suffered with hours of game-play being rededicated to character back story. It would have sucked then and it sucks now.

I want to move from that subject as me and mike have already argued the subject to death and I don't really want to re-live that with any of you... ever.

The best part of this game is the gear. Although my opinion might be swayed because I am a giant gear whore this game really hit the mark when it came to stuff. You pick up items by the ass load and although you do end up spending a lot of time in your inventory screen ever second of it is majestic. If it wasn't enough looking at comparing and juicing the stats on all the items you picked up you could also look at the blue prints you picked up of better items that you would have to pay to create. If after that point you still don't have a giant item erection you could just go back to "town" and shop for weapons armor and socket inserts and then jump right back into the story.

The look of the game is a mix of old norse mythology mixed with the classic fantasy armor mixed with futuristic robotics. What this means is you can make your character look like anything you want from a rubber jumpsuit ninja to giant armored to fuck knight to mega man to samus. Since you can also color your armor you actually really do look like mega man and samus. Which I did and it was awesome.

It may seem weird that I have already moved on from a game that I was in love with in less than two weeks. But let me tell you this even the sweetest game tastes sour when you play it for 27 hours in 8 days. Another interesting side note is that this game holds my record for unlocked achievements which is 32.

My final judgement of this game is 8.5 with marks docked solely for the shortness.