In case you didn’t know the Too Human demo came out on the Xbox Live marketplace today. Here are my impressions of it and they’re not pretty.

Let me start by getting the things I didn’t like about Too Human out the way first.

As soon as you go into the game, you are introduced to a cut scene. That wouldn’t be too bad if the cut scenes were enticing and enjoyable, but in reality they are poorly acted and boring. I felt no interest in the story line whatsoever, which meant I wasn’t really motivated to work my way through the level (though I did). Now, I’m not entirely sure whether the demo level is taken from the beginning of the game or somewhere in the middle – if its from in the middle of the game, I can partially excuse it, but if it’s from the start, then I don’t see myself buying it.

Of course the story in Too Human is just one aspect of the game, so lets get onto another major part – the gameplay. The interesting thing about Too Human is that, as well as being a third person action game, it also has a very deep RPG system, with upgradable skills, tons of weapons, and item hunting, but we’ll get onto that in a minute.

First of all I want to talk about the actual combat, which is split into ranged and melee. Silicon Knights have chosen to control the melee combat with the right analog stick, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s intuitive to use as you just have to point the stick in the direction you want to attack in order to unleash a whole lot of pain on your enemy…but that’s also the problem. The combat feels so easy. To me it feels as though I’m not controlling what is happening on screen, but merely telling my character where to attack – it doesn’t feel like I’m pulling of loads of really cool combos. For instance the character might knock a guy into the air and slash him repeatedly with a sword before throwing him to the floor, but all I’d be doing is moving the right analogue stick forward, then pressing A, then moving the right analogue stick forward again. It’s just not satisfying. Right about now you’ll probably be thinking that ‘in all games you just press buttons to pull of moves’ and you’d be correct. The problem is that in other games pulling of a combo is a hard thing to do, in Too Human it just feels easy. For fear of repeating myself I’ll just say that I felt detached from the action in the game.

There are more problems. The camera in Too Human is terrible and needs more than a just little bit of work. The only way the player can control the camera is by putting his sword away and then holding LB while moving the right analogue stick around, the rest of the time it’s done automatically which means there’s no camera control during combat. When the camera works it works very well, but all too often I found the camera pointing away from the action or wherever I wanted to look.

As the game is half RPG, half action game, it takes the form of a dungeon crawler where fighting enemy after enemy in bland environments is number 1 on the agenda. However, I’m not going to complain about this too much as:

1. I like dungeon crawling, despite the bland environments and endless enemies.

2. The demo was single player only, and in co-op I’d imagine it would be more fun.

Now, onto the good parts, or the good part, as i should say. The only thing that went some way to redeeming Too Human was the RPG elements. The game features a skill tree, tons of weapons and items and various other RPG-like features. But even these have problems. The skill tree is very short and in order to falsely increase its length, each skill has to be leveled up individually multiple times in order to access the next skill. For example, I had to get the first skill up to level 6 before I could choose another. This just seems lazy considering the game has been in development for over 10 years.

Overall, I’m not impressed by the demo. The camera, boring story (from what I’ve seen), bad voice acting, poor controls, and lack of satisfaction completely overcome the shimmer of potential that was shown by the RPG elements. Hopefully they can fix some of this stuff before it’s released this August.

Disagree? Then post a comment, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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