Too Human

Rating: 1 out of 3 Stars (why only 3 possible stars?)
Genre: Dungeon Crawler RPG 
ESRB: T (violence against dumb robots, although the cut scenes are almost gory enough for M)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 16/12
Developer: Silicon Knights
Wiki page

This is another retro review as this game came out in 2008. But it's so fun to talk about and I will also be bringing it up in future reviews as an example, so I figured I had to cover it at some point. This game is about Norse mythology as told through some kind of futuristic setting. The premise, while arguably not original, is incredibly enticing. How Goddamn ridiculous it is. Man. In the game you play as Baldur. For those in the know, he's not as beautiful as the myths suggest, but I think Crispin Freeman's voice makes up for that. Also, those in the know might think this is an odd choice for main character, since someone like Thor, Tyr, or Sigfried would make for a more typical video game character. Well, I don't want to ruin the story with spoilers, but it has a lot to do with avoiding Ragnorok and fate and such. The game then has Baldur fighting a bunch of goblins, elves, and trolls, but they are all depicted as robots. You may have guessed by looking at it that this is a God of War clone, but you'd be sort of wrong.

This is probably the same game. I forget.

The game actually does something that I wish Dynasty Warriors and God of War did in that it has fully separated classes, itemization, and actual talent trees for developing your character. But that just means the "RPG elements" are less watered down. The actual combat does NOT use the standard X/Y combinations. Not even X like in the Batman Arkham games. No, in this game you use the freaking right analog stick. You hold it in the direction you want to attack, and Baldur auto-attacks. This actually makes the game more of a dungeon crawler. I know it sounds terribly weird, but it actually is a welcome deviation from the usual button masher. Baldur also slides to meet enemies, reducing the times you will awkwardly misjudge the distance of his melee. He also has more variety in his combat that does not rely on idiotic memorization of long combos. For example, you can click both sticks in the same direction at the same time to do a "fierce attack". This is a long range attack using your melee weapon. If something is in melee range, Baldur will instead perform a finisher using that same command. He also carries a ranged weapon regardless of class that is rather powerful, and not just some combo extender. There are also three cooldown abilities and a "super meter" to manage, so his combat tends to feel more varied than most beat-em-up's and dungeon crawlers. And he can roll with glorious invincibility frames.

No, I started rolling! I'm invincible! Nyah!

So why does this game get one star? Well, it's a horrible mess. It was first announced back in 1999 as a game for the original Playstation. It was in development hell for a long ass time and didn't get released until 2008. During that time, the entire game changed around a lot. It went from platform to platform as Nintendo snatched it up to be a GameCube exclusive at one point. It changed game engines which resulted in legal troubles. On and on. I don't know if this is obvious, but being in development hell tends to automatically produce ruined art.

Heaven help you if it takes 30 years to get your art finished.

That said, I can't be entirely sure what were the overall effects of this hell. I will say that the game is uneven in a lot of ways: class imbalance, higher levels mean instant death, healing is not frequent enough, etc. It seems pretty clear they didn't get much of a chance to polish the gameplay experience, but rather managed to get the game to just work. What's also unfortunate is that in the 4 years the game has been around, I don't think there has been a single patch. Silicon Knights has had no second chances to fix the awkward bits. I had to replay the game to write this review. While I did notice some fond things, I was also pretty quickly reminded of its poor choices. I kept dying from Damage Over Time debuffs because the duration of these DoT's was roughly three times the length of my health bar. With no means of healing or removing the debuff, death is inevitable. And the camera has very limited functionality. That would be fine IF they took the time to make sure it would be perfectly positioned in every level. And while the enemies are randomized (more so on a new game+), there are very few enemy types. There are also only four levels. They are very long levels, but still. The biggest thing for me was that melee combat is better than ranged simply because there are creatures that seem to be 99% resistant to ranged damage, but at the same time 100% of the bosses are best fought with ranged attacks. This is so binary and directly fucks up your choice of build.

Every time you die, a Valkyrie flies down and retrieves your body. It's super slow and unskippable.

Multiplayer is laughable as well. It is limited to just two people. You'd think it'd support larger groups, what with having "tank" and "healer" classes, but no. And even then, there's not even a way to know what class your partner is. I don't remember all the details like how it handles loot and level disparity, and right now replaying seems impossible. But I do remember giving up all hope on it pretty much immediately. Also, there is no split screen mode. Bullshit!

Conclusion:
This one is probably in the bargain bin by now, so you could potentially get your money's worth. But with the pile up of problems this game has you'd need to be more than a little curious to be able to put up with it. Unless you just really love space Vikings.

By the way, Thor has jaundice for some reason.