Too Human: The Analysis of bad PR

[markofshame]

I just finished my analysis of why Too Human got such negative reivews. You can view it on my blog/review site: HERE (http://p3anut.wordpress.com)

Please let me know what you think and if you enjoyed the read.

[Lykathea]

The single biggest penalty for death is the loss of combo meter, most people seem to overlook this fact, but since the game is more or less built around this feature, losing it to death is a infuriating (though in a fair way). I have never experience dying 20 times a level, so I cannot comment on the validity of such a statement, other than to say if you die that much, you probably aren't playing the game well enough.

The Ice Forest is a spike in difficulty, I agree, but I think it is a reasonable one--TH shows its true colours here, no hand holding, no meager difficulty level, this is the game as it actually is: a tactical puzzle that requires the player to master the correct strategy for each fight or face certain death (and consequent frustration). Could the transition be smoother? Yes, absolutely but as is, I think it is a welcome sight in the landscape of overly forgiving modern gaming.

Otherwise, a solid review with the exact same score I would award the game (though I do hate numerical review systems).

[Vespasian]

The talk about odd difficulty is somewhat hard for me to understand. I died twice in the campaign, both of those times assailed by somewhat serious glitches that prevented my from firing my weapons while various off-screen trolls bombarded me with ranged attacks. I suppose you could say that the game was going further than "not holding my hand", it was actually failing to cooperate entirely.

I never noticed the loss of combo meter. As a commando, I just shot the enemies over and over, grenade launchered the large clumps, and used the ruiners whenever the camera tried to kill me by refusing to move from a nearby wall and show me the horde of enemies closing in on me.

Still, I only died twice. I wasn't even really paying attention, either: I was talking on private chat with friends most of the time through the campaign, I found it too tedious to do without some kind of other distraction.

Playing through Mass Effect, I've already died more than twice just on the Casual difficulty. Of course, those deaths were purely accidental: when I failed to dodge an enemy one hit kill rocket, my fault alone.

That's why I don't understand what you mean by "overly forgiving" modern gaming, Lykathea. Too Human is a game I died very rarely in. The only recent game I died less in, on default difficulty, was Bioshock. On Hard difficulty, I found Bioshock a rewarding challenge. (if you don't abuse the vita chambers. You could abuse the save/reload systems in most games, but I choose not to.) Strolling through Mass Effect on Casual, I actually got killed more, which says quite a bit about their respective difficulties.

Now, if you were talking about Gears of War on Insane, or Call of Duty 4 on Veteran difficulty, I could understand entirely what you mean. You simply need to go in paying attention with a strategy to get by the tougher parts on the highest difficulty of those games. Too Human? Personally I was able to get through it just lobbing grenades whenever something didn't die from normal rounds. Only when the game actually failed in terms of serious glitches did Baldur get killed.

Even though Too Human was quite easy in my experience, I can see why some call it extremely unbalanced in terms of difficulty. I was poisoned once: the last enemy in an entire room was a poison polarity who I finished off with melee attacks. I had full health when poisoned, and yet the poison effect only stopped dealing damage after reducing my health to about half. This was completely ridiculous and one of the worst game decisions I've ever seen. Not only is there no antidote to the poison, unless you happen to be the one "medic" class, but this was the last enemy for like a 5 minute walk, leaving me with no way to get health pickups.

If I had killed that enemy with only half health or less, I would have slowly watched, unable to do anything, as the poison effect killed the character, then slowly watch an unskippable death cutscene.

So while I didn't die a lot, I can certainly understand why those who had problems, like Darrell, were so angry about it. The balancing is just ridiculously absent at times.

[Dryker]

Good review, but I think that they still used the Unreal Engine just had to do intensive modifications on it.

[Dryker]

This is my first time on Too Human.net and I've read countless posts by Vespasian. Does that guy know how contradictory he sounds. I want to believe everything he claims, but then he goes and says something that completely contradicts the attitude of someone who would do or had done what he claims. Sorry, felt too compelled to share that.

[iron]

People are full of contradictions. Welcome to TH.net BTW.