Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Too Lame *drumroll*

It's really a shame about Too Human. I've been keeping up on the buzz (and rancor) surrounding it because I thought it had potential, and I was a big fan of developer Silicon Knights' prior game Eternal Darkness for the 'Cube. I downloaded first tonight an E3 trailer for the game, which I didn't think was too pretty, and then the playable demo.

To put it bluntly, it sucks. It feels like an early-period Xbox/PS2/Cube game with some 360 textures pasted over the top. The character models make Oblivion's look sexy, and the script and voice acting are trash, and that's just the presentation. The execution is even worse. Baldur, when he isn't ice-skating from one mob to the next, feels about as agile as a sack of bricks, with crappy canned animations that keep you rooted in one place all the time while swinging your sword. The arenas range from bland to dull, and I've seen koopa troopas with more interesting attack patterns than the robot enemies in Too Human.

But worst and most unforgivable of all, the equipment and skill tables are two and three layers deep in a slow-loading main menu, meaning that each trip in there to see what you just picked up or to change gears yanks you right out of the game and into janky menu hell. Did I mention that this is a loot-based dungeon-hack game? Now you see where this is going.

Coincidentally, Blizzard's genre-founding 1996 title Diablo (that's from twelve years ago) still plays fast and smooth and is a whole lot of fun, if you can do without things like bloom lighting, polygonal models, and screen-filling resolutions.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm still on the fence about it. On the one hand, the control seems to need some help. But being able to only play one class, and not having unlocked any abilities, I wonder if as your combos open up, it might play better. If I can get it for free or cheap, I might give it a go. I like the art design, and the story seems interesting. It could be a diamond in the rough.

Count Elmdor said...

There's a couple of glitches you can exploit to play as all of the other classes, involving signing off Live and moving the system clock up to 2009 or 2010. That opens up a couple more, and then to play the last couple you have to flick back and forth between the open ones and jam on the A button real fast.

I read about this last night after already deleting the demo, but I don't think playing another class would address any of my problems with the game.

I agree the story premise is kind of cool, but the story presentation just kills it flat. Baldur looks like an idiot, and he's the best character model in the game. And the dialogue is just painful.

I had hopes that this game would fall into the spot I used to have for Champions of Norrath (you know how much I liked that), but it's not even that well executed. Really makes me wonder how Denis Dyack can be so high on this. Has he not played any other games since 2003?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, the character models are shit, but I rather like the environments. Like I said, cheap or free, I'm there.

LMAO@ "Baldur looks like an idiot"

and wtf is with Nintendo? They just don't give shit about anyone but grandmas and girls, I guess.

FFXIII moving was inevitable with Sony dropping the ball like they have. Morons. Maybe when there's more than, like, 3 games on the system it will sell a little better, eh, jerk-offs?

Greg said...

Wow, who the hell discovers these nonsense glitches to trick the game into yielding access to forbidden content?!

Well, the good news is that when a game ends up sucking like Too Human might, I save $60 bucks! Can't argue with that.

More time for those 12 year old Diablo games Nas...