Fun as Hel or a pain in the Asgard?

User Rating: 7.5 | Too Human X360
After 9 years of development, a nasty lawsuit, and unimaginable hype from a relatively small developer, it's hard to know what to expect after putting the disc into your 360. After many hours of trying the majority of the classes, and killing over 20,000 monsters in the process, Too Human ends up taking a unique twist to the Dungeon Crawler genre, but at a price some won't be willing to pay.

Highway to Hel

Too Human is best described as a futuristic fast paced devil-may-cry variation of a Dungeon Crawler. The melee system uses the analog stick to attack the hordes of killer machines put at you - the ability to slide attacking one to another to another at high speeds makes for an interesting style of gaming... most of the time. Fortunately the gameplay was built a little deeper, adding Jugglers(knocking enemies in the air, and ruiners(Massive AoE), among other abilities to add variety.

The Good, The Bad, and The Locking System

For better or for worse, the ranged abilities use the same system as melee, meaning you'll lock onto the closest baddy you point to. 95% of the time, this will never be a problem, as most of what you'll be facing come in crowds of the same type - The other 5% involve trying to fruitlessly kill a giant AoE spamming behemoth, while locking onto some goblin in front of you instead. If silicon Knights had implemented a system similar to Mass Effect, to freeze time and lock onto another enemy, this could've easily been avoided.

Über Killing Machine

Character customization, oddly enough, turns out to be the best part of Too human. Expanding on the socketing method from Diablo 2, runes are used to upgrade your character's weaponry and armor in countless ways. The equipment menu has a very handy auto salvage system, allowing you to automatically sell any gear of less quality without having to go through each one.

Going out with Class

Classes seem to have a lack of balance. Playing as a commando seemed to be far overpowered compared to the other classes - The survival rate and overall damage by each need to be equal among every class, especially considering most of the health you'll recieve are dropped items, making deaths nothing short of unpredictable.

The Tale of Bad Writing

Too Human takes Norse mythology and tries claiming that the Aesir, the "gods" of the time, were cybernetically enhanced, and a much more advanced civilization than traditionally told. Due to poor writing, the cinematics are more dissapointing than thought-provoking - Freya is labeled the "whore of the gods", Thor is apparently on rune-based steroids, and Baldur himself is about as deep as a Ninja Gaiden's storyline(zing!). This is easily the worst merit of Too Human.

The Bottom Line

All in all, despite the flaws that show every now and then, Too human still makes for an interesting take on Action RPGs, but has quite a few ways to go before being in anyone's top 10. I reccomend renting it first, unless you have a strange hunger for dungeon crawlers, before Diablo III comes out. There's enough good merits to the game to keep you going for a few runs, and is enough to make you hope for a more improved, polished Sequel.

-Vita