Ezmarii
08-27-2008, 01:52 PM
Story 9/10
The storyline of Too Human is...well...beyond human. It is in the very essense of godlike material. Every time I think of the storyline I think to myself, "The line between unbelievable technology and unbelievable magic may verywell have been broken or grayed out with this game." If you went back in time with today's technology, people might accuse you of being a witch, or a god because you can do unbelievable things. I ask myself what if the Aesir are nothing more than a colony of humans who were isolated as this massive winter started who excelled in technology beyond all hopes and dreams, and being of norse background considered themselves the gods of old, and when they finally met with the other humans to survive thats just how that relationship started.
I was unfortunately displeased with the lack of more information. The ending and the overall storyline clearly has a feel that SK is -banking- on a trilogy to tell the rest of the story, which feels somewhat disheartening. I'd have liked just a little more to nibble on, even if it were a computer records bank that told more side-stories related to the whole. Like a journal baldur kept privately in his quarters that detailed missions and battles etc. You could look at his previous accomplishments before the game's storyline takes place, and it would have stuff like the battle with grendle in the pub in the opening scene. It'd put a more personal twist into the plot allowing them to reveal subtle pieces of information about the universe in which the game takes place.
I liked the voice acting and camera angles during the storyline cut-scene moments, these days to make something epic you want it to look entertaining like you're playing a movie. It's ok to take a piece of the pie that Mass Effect made the most recent reiteration of, because they made it look golden.
Gameplay 6/10
First lets start with the positives of the battle system. The new system of using the right stick to attack is very odd, but fun once you learn how it works. It's incredibly exciting to ping-pong off a hoard of 200 goblins, slaying them with a single swing. This puts your god-powers into functioning reality. Double-tapping to pop-up/serve enemies is also very awesome. There are a few glitches though, atleast, they feel like it. Subtle things that feel like they are the result of an unpolished game rushed 3 months or so earlier than it should have been. I very much feel had the below glitches been fixed before release this game would not have had its low reviews that it recieved(such as this gameplay score.)
Area-of-effect damage and aerial combat is horrible. When enemy goblin missle launchers shoot them at you, if you pop an enemy into the air purposely to avoid the missles and start meleeing(champion) the said subject in the air, the missles will hit the ground 10 feet below you, knock you down out of the air as if you were right ontop of the missle impact site on the ground. This also happens with other area of effect explosions and in particular those dark elf spiders with their ground-pound technique. Inconsistancy in troll behavior is also puzzling. Some of them lose turning speed and movement speed after breaking their legs down completely(armor and hp bars) but some will retain their full turning speed, making it very annoying to get behind them, when they circle as fast as you do. If this is intended function for some form of elite troll then the color scheme should have been changed or the physical makeup should change so they are easier to identify, so the character player can adjust his or her strategy accordingly on the fly.
The lack of any class aside from the bio engineer to heal itself without the aid of item drops is somewhat poor judgement. Especially when you consider the fact that enemies such as dark elves with the cannons on their backs do not need to reload. When they can fire beyond all weapon ranges a player can get and for unlimited ammounts, one cannot overcome the obstacle if they have low health. After an intense fight and needing to enter a long narrow area with a few dark elves shooting at you almost out of sight range, non-stop, and you've got enough HP to take 4 shots, you have no way of proceeding reliably without the possibility of death. You can chance it and dodge/jump but there are no ways to predict their shots and no reprieve as they reload. I think it is poor choice to allow this situation to happen. As a god you should always have a way to do something flawlessly, even if it is very difficult and requires judging where shots will come or some sort of accuracy pattern and/or reload pattern. Maybe even a block command.
If classes cannot self-heal outside the aid of item drops, then there should be a method of completing each encounter without taking damage, even if it means adding a block command or making abilities available that change a fighting stance to adjust offensive and defensive stats in favor of either. I'd also go so far as to ask why a dash ability was not added. Baldur can literally fly like a bullet at enemies when slide-attacking, so why not half this range and allow him to do it in any direction. You can still take damage during the dash from aoe/ranged attacks but not from melee. Troll hammers and spider slam-move should be in a different category from 'melee damage' so they can still damage a dashing baldur. Again, many small things plauge the battle system as a team-effort to lower the gameplay rating; once again I must say it feels like 3 months polishing+testing from non-development team testers would have solved alot of these issues.
Camera angles!! Because it is very hard if not impossible to control the camera since both joysticks are busy, the camera needed to be polished and focused on A LOT more. The only way to enhance the camera though would have been to literally play through the game and try to break the camera and such. I do appreciate the fact that when you walk across certain areas the camera pans to give you a good look at the hard work the level designers put into their levels...but okay. Let me look at that with my LB when I'm not being clobbered by 50 goblins, 50 missles, and 1 goblin boss. The fact that LB only lets you turn the camera what, 75 degrees left/right and like 45 up/down? Why even limit that at all instead of 150 left/right and like 100 up/down? Could even put a zoom on it and let us chose first person or third person, so we can enjoy those epic level designs on our own, and NOT during combat. My focus isn't the giant structure in Helheim , it's the zombie hoarde coming at me.
Menu design, Asthetics, and misc. 7/10
Small topic really, but I'd like to take a moment to address the menus first. The online menu is just dumb. Lets say I would like to play online for a few hours this evening. So knowing my connection isn't the most ideal to host a match, I go into 'custom match' from the main menu and it takes me to the lobby for searching matches online. I wait about 10 minutes for a good match to pop up, but nothing piques my interest, so its time to bite the bullet and make my own match. Ok, I'd like to just click 'host match' from here, but you must quit and return to the main menu and that means an inconvenient wait period of 30 seconds while the menus all load up. Online should take you to the lobby immediately where you can do all 3(quick match, host, and search custom match). Also, I cringe every time I have to rotate to my runes or charms menus because they seem to be the worst. They are slow to load up. I know its only a couple of seconds, but if its all just mostly text/numbers and base colors, how can it be anything slower than instant to scroll through the armor lists? The preview button on the weapons/armor menus is there so no major textures or whatnot have to be loaded...whats the deal with the slow to navigate to the runes section?
Graphics wise I love them. I don't have a HDTV but my friend does, and when he first got the game I went over and enjoyed watching him play for the entire evening. I'm not a graphics buff so I don't know the small odds and ends to look for such as imperfections in lighting or 'jaggies' and such-but it looks pretty good, and the one thing I like very much is the character motions. These days a 3d game really needs to have motion capture because many artists do not fully embody the human body's full range of motions. WIthout those realistic movements you can tell its a puppet hanging from virtual strings behind a red curtain'd stage. I don't know if you used motion cap for baldur's animations, but the various movement gaits are all very well done as well as the rest of the main characters you encounter.
I would like to also say there is a serious lack of in-game information for new players. I was overly joyed when I found the different computer panels with information in the armor and weapon shops telling you about the game. I got excited and kept looking for the one that talks about equipment stats, but was thoroughly disappointed. How in the heck are players suppose to discover what smoothing, aggression, hybrid damage stats are doing? Strength and dexterity are kind of givens, but without any definitive source to confirm they are melee and ranged damage respectively, you can speculate without really knowing untill you've sunk the resources into looking at your base melee damage or ranged damage in stats, then adding that str/dex in gear, then going back to see if your base damage changed any. There should have been better tutorial information on these stats and more such as the ablative coating, and the different status effects. Charms should have a small tick in its information window indicating 100% completion of it once you add all the runes to it and have completed the quest for them.
Sound 9/10
Sound is pretty simple when you don't know much about it. I'd say I'm mediocre. I played an instrument for 10 years (7 in school on trumpet, 3 after High School.) I appreciate the cued battle music to really heighten the sense of fast paced action that is coming your way. The vocal based songs like the opening song at the start menu are very nicely done too. Most songs are well done and well executed with timing. My only quip is that none of it was 'epic'- The halo theme song is epic. It's not only well executed but the emotion it builds through rhythem and the use of the different instrument sections/types to help reflect the dynamic changes throughout its course are truely awesome. Because none of the music was epic, I cannot fairly give a 10/10. 9 should suffice though =)
Online 7/10
This should be pretty short too. I like playing with friends. I like co-op. I know the struggles with stat balancing when you introduce PvP and I am very glad it was not put in. It would have distracted too much attention away from the rest of the game, so kudos to that decision. I wish the difficulty could scale better, though. Dt'd be nice to have four people. Two are nice but these levels are so massive and the enemy numbers are already very great, a simple increase to monster HP and DEFINITELY different AI paths, you can have simple AI programming but if you have 5 'simple' AI paths a monster can randomly take for attacking, then the battle become that more dynamic. Having AI programs communicate with eachother adds a new dynamic all together. If 5 goblins are within X range of the player and they are all on AI path C, then move to Y distance and use attack pattern D. Stuff like that. Swarm tactics. To make it even more difficult you could have boss or big enemies like trolls and the dark elf spiders the ability to change smaller helpers' AI types as the battle proceeds(like time variations and their own HP bars etc)
Enhancing the AI in those types of mannerisms make a 4 player coop more feasable as the difficulty can increase without increasing the stress on the game engine of throwing larger numbers of enemies at the players. Simply increasing enemy stats is stupid when they are just as dumb as their lower leveled counterparts.
Overall: The graphics, the story, the (at first) exciting battles, all lead to really fun gameplay. The difference in the classes makes it interesting to replay the game to see different angles of battle, but the lack of depth and mystery to the storyline mean an average to smart player is going to pick up on every little nuance and leave no excitement in watching the story unfold beyond the 3rd reiteration. I like the game, and the ability to farm for gear and the fact that there is epic gear helps encourage additional gameplay hours. Unfortunately there have been duping bugs discovered and unpatched as of yet, as well as (i'm sure) no punishment dealt out to those who do dupe, and the other quirks make the game feel like it was on the very edge of greatness, but lacked polish to take it there. A very solid buy and it is well worth the 50 hours of gameplay, or the 100 hours of gameplay, depending on if you level each class to 50 and get them epic loot or not.
(and off topic: if there are no epic melee swords class/alignment specific to champion/human, and that dumb one handed staff is the best we get I will be really ticked off as our class skill tree clearly has SWORD damage and it says upon creation SWORDs and PISTOLS darn it!! I want to be badass like the model at character creation. Not some huge spikey onehanded stave! =))
The storyline of Too Human is...well...beyond human. It is in the very essense of godlike material. Every time I think of the storyline I think to myself, "The line between unbelievable technology and unbelievable magic may verywell have been broken or grayed out with this game." If you went back in time with today's technology, people might accuse you of being a witch, or a god because you can do unbelievable things. I ask myself what if the Aesir are nothing more than a colony of humans who were isolated as this massive winter started who excelled in technology beyond all hopes and dreams, and being of norse background considered themselves the gods of old, and when they finally met with the other humans to survive thats just how that relationship started.
I was unfortunately displeased with the lack of more information. The ending and the overall storyline clearly has a feel that SK is -banking- on a trilogy to tell the rest of the story, which feels somewhat disheartening. I'd have liked just a little more to nibble on, even if it were a computer records bank that told more side-stories related to the whole. Like a journal baldur kept privately in his quarters that detailed missions and battles etc. You could look at his previous accomplishments before the game's storyline takes place, and it would have stuff like the battle with grendle in the pub in the opening scene. It'd put a more personal twist into the plot allowing them to reveal subtle pieces of information about the universe in which the game takes place.
I liked the voice acting and camera angles during the storyline cut-scene moments, these days to make something epic you want it to look entertaining like you're playing a movie. It's ok to take a piece of the pie that Mass Effect made the most recent reiteration of, because they made it look golden.
Gameplay 6/10
First lets start with the positives of the battle system. The new system of using the right stick to attack is very odd, but fun once you learn how it works. It's incredibly exciting to ping-pong off a hoard of 200 goblins, slaying them with a single swing. This puts your god-powers into functioning reality. Double-tapping to pop-up/serve enemies is also very awesome. There are a few glitches though, atleast, they feel like it. Subtle things that feel like they are the result of an unpolished game rushed 3 months or so earlier than it should have been. I very much feel had the below glitches been fixed before release this game would not have had its low reviews that it recieved(such as this gameplay score.)
Area-of-effect damage and aerial combat is horrible. When enemy goblin missle launchers shoot them at you, if you pop an enemy into the air purposely to avoid the missles and start meleeing(champion) the said subject in the air, the missles will hit the ground 10 feet below you, knock you down out of the air as if you were right ontop of the missle impact site on the ground. This also happens with other area of effect explosions and in particular those dark elf spiders with their ground-pound technique. Inconsistancy in troll behavior is also puzzling. Some of them lose turning speed and movement speed after breaking their legs down completely(armor and hp bars) but some will retain their full turning speed, making it very annoying to get behind them, when they circle as fast as you do. If this is intended function for some form of elite troll then the color scheme should have been changed or the physical makeup should change so they are easier to identify, so the character player can adjust his or her strategy accordingly on the fly.
The lack of any class aside from the bio engineer to heal itself without the aid of item drops is somewhat poor judgement. Especially when you consider the fact that enemies such as dark elves with the cannons on their backs do not need to reload. When they can fire beyond all weapon ranges a player can get and for unlimited ammounts, one cannot overcome the obstacle if they have low health. After an intense fight and needing to enter a long narrow area with a few dark elves shooting at you almost out of sight range, non-stop, and you've got enough HP to take 4 shots, you have no way of proceeding reliably without the possibility of death. You can chance it and dodge/jump but there are no ways to predict their shots and no reprieve as they reload. I think it is poor choice to allow this situation to happen. As a god you should always have a way to do something flawlessly, even if it is very difficult and requires judging where shots will come or some sort of accuracy pattern and/or reload pattern. Maybe even a block command.
If classes cannot self-heal outside the aid of item drops, then there should be a method of completing each encounter without taking damage, even if it means adding a block command or making abilities available that change a fighting stance to adjust offensive and defensive stats in favor of either. I'd also go so far as to ask why a dash ability was not added. Baldur can literally fly like a bullet at enemies when slide-attacking, so why not half this range and allow him to do it in any direction. You can still take damage during the dash from aoe/ranged attacks but not from melee. Troll hammers and spider slam-move should be in a different category from 'melee damage' so they can still damage a dashing baldur. Again, many small things plauge the battle system as a team-effort to lower the gameplay rating; once again I must say it feels like 3 months polishing+testing from non-development team testers would have solved alot of these issues.
Camera angles!! Because it is very hard if not impossible to control the camera since both joysticks are busy, the camera needed to be polished and focused on A LOT more. The only way to enhance the camera though would have been to literally play through the game and try to break the camera and such. I do appreciate the fact that when you walk across certain areas the camera pans to give you a good look at the hard work the level designers put into their levels...but okay. Let me look at that with my LB when I'm not being clobbered by 50 goblins, 50 missles, and 1 goblin boss. The fact that LB only lets you turn the camera what, 75 degrees left/right and like 45 up/down? Why even limit that at all instead of 150 left/right and like 100 up/down? Could even put a zoom on it and let us chose first person or third person, so we can enjoy those epic level designs on our own, and NOT during combat. My focus isn't the giant structure in Helheim , it's the zombie hoarde coming at me.
Menu design, Asthetics, and misc. 7/10
Small topic really, but I'd like to take a moment to address the menus first. The online menu is just dumb. Lets say I would like to play online for a few hours this evening. So knowing my connection isn't the most ideal to host a match, I go into 'custom match' from the main menu and it takes me to the lobby for searching matches online. I wait about 10 minutes for a good match to pop up, but nothing piques my interest, so its time to bite the bullet and make my own match. Ok, I'd like to just click 'host match' from here, but you must quit and return to the main menu and that means an inconvenient wait period of 30 seconds while the menus all load up. Online should take you to the lobby immediately where you can do all 3(quick match, host, and search custom match). Also, I cringe every time I have to rotate to my runes or charms menus because they seem to be the worst. They are slow to load up. I know its only a couple of seconds, but if its all just mostly text/numbers and base colors, how can it be anything slower than instant to scroll through the armor lists? The preview button on the weapons/armor menus is there so no major textures or whatnot have to be loaded...whats the deal with the slow to navigate to the runes section?
Graphics wise I love them. I don't have a HDTV but my friend does, and when he first got the game I went over and enjoyed watching him play for the entire evening. I'm not a graphics buff so I don't know the small odds and ends to look for such as imperfections in lighting or 'jaggies' and such-but it looks pretty good, and the one thing I like very much is the character motions. These days a 3d game really needs to have motion capture because many artists do not fully embody the human body's full range of motions. WIthout those realistic movements you can tell its a puppet hanging from virtual strings behind a red curtain'd stage. I don't know if you used motion cap for baldur's animations, but the various movement gaits are all very well done as well as the rest of the main characters you encounter.
I would like to also say there is a serious lack of in-game information for new players. I was overly joyed when I found the different computer panels with information in the armor and weapon shops telling you about the game. I got excited and kept looking for the one that talks about equipment stats, but was thoroughly disappointed. How in the heck are players suppose to discover what smoothing, aggression, hybrid damage stats are doing? Strength and dexterity are kind of givens, but without any definitive source to confirm they are melee and ranged damage respectively, you can speculate without really knowing untill you've sunk the resources into looking at your base melee damage or ranged damage in stats, then adding that str/dex in gear, then going back to see if your base damage changed any. There should have been better tutorial information on these stats and more such as the ablative coating, and the different status effects. Charms should have a small tick in its information window indicating 100% completion of it once you add all the runes to it and have completed the quest for them.
Sound 9/10
Sound is pretty simple when you don't know much about it. I'd say I'm mediocre. I played an instrument for 10 years (7 in school on trumpet, 3 after High School.) I appreciate the cued battle music to really heighten the sense of fast paced action that is coming your way. The vocal based songs like the opening song at the start menu are very nicely done too. Most songs are well done and well executed with timing. My only quip is that none of it was 'epic'- The halo theme song is epic. It's not only well executed but the emotion it builds through rhythem and the use of the different instrument sections/types to help reflect the dynamic changes throughout its course are truely awesome. Because none of the music was epic, I cannot fairly give a 10/10. 9 should suffice though =)
Online 7/10
This should be pretty short too. I like playing with friends. I like co-op. I know the struggles with stat balancing when you introduce PvP and I am very glad it was not put in. It would have distracted too much attention away from the rest of the game, so kudos to that decision. I wish the difficulty could scale better, though. Dt'd be nice to have four people. Two are nice but these levels are so massive and the enemy numbers are already very great, a simple increase to monster HP and DEFINITELY different AI paths, you can have simple AI programming but if you have 5 'simple' AI paths a monster can randomly take for attacking, then the battle become that more dynamic. Having AI programs communicate with eachother adds a new dynamic all together. If 5 goblins are within X range of the player and they are all on AI path C, then move to Y distance and use attack pattern D. Stuff like that. Swarm tactics. To make it even more difficult you could have boss or big enemies like trolls and the dark elf spiders the ability to change smaller helpers' AI types as the battle proceeds(like time variations and their own HP bars etc)
Enhancing the AI in those types of mannerisms make a 4 player coop more feasable as the difficulty can increase without increasing the stress on the game engine of throwing larger numbers of enemies at the players. Simply increasing enemy stats is stupid when they are just as dumb as their lower leveled counterparts.
Overall: The graphics, the story, the (at first) exciting battles, all lead to really fun gameplay. The difference in the classes makes it interesting to replay the game to see different angles of battle, but the lack of depth and mystery to the storyline mean an average to smart player is going to pick up on every little nuance and leave no excitement in watching the story unfold beyond the 3rd reiteration. I like the game, and the ability to farm for gear and the fact that there is epic gear helps encourage additional gameplay hours. Unfortunately there have been duping bugs discovered and unpatched as of yet, as well as (i'm sure) no punishment dealt out to those who do dupe, and the other quirks make the game feel like it was on the very edge of greatness, but lacked polish to take it there. A very solid buy and it is well worth the 50 hours of gameplay, or the 100 hours of gameplay, depending on if you level each class to 50 and get them epic loot or not.
(and off topic: if there are no epic melee swords class/alignment specific to champion/human, and that dumb one handed staff is the best we get I will be really ticked off as our class skill tree clearly has SWORD damage and it says upon creation SWORDs and PISTOLS darn it!! I want to be badass like the model at character creation. Not some huge spikey onehanded stave! =))