Due to the loot, runes, and charm system, you will be spending a lot of time going into your inventory menu.

While I've certainly seen worse systems, my biggest complaint is that it's just a little unresponsive and doesn't quickly or smoothly change from one menu to the next. This obviously isn't a show stopper, but considering how much time you will spend navigating these menus it would have been nice if they were quicker and easier to get around. I have a similar complaint regarding how long it takes running around some of the bigger areas in the game (especially Cyberspace). Perhaps a better option would be if they made your characters automatically move quicker in these empty areas just so you could get around faster while playing.

 

So, who are you in this Norse tale? Well, you play as the Norse God Baldur (who was the most loved of all the gods in Norse mythology, for those who skipped history class). At the start of the game you will choose which class you want to play as out of the five options: there's the Berserker who is your melee damage dealer, Defender who is your tank, Commander who is your range shooter, the Bio Engineer who is your healer and finally The Champion who is the most balanced between range and melee as well as an expert in air combat.

While at first there seems to be some good diversity between these five classes, it reduces as you level up. This is mostly because there is generally the same way of dealing with all enemies, and this in turn is due to their similar AI patterns. All enemies generally will try to swarm you (the exception being ranged enemies, giant troll machines and some pretty decent boss fights). However, there is a decent variety of enemies, and similar to Diablo you will start to notice different coloured versions of the same enemies. The different colours symbolise different effects or debuffs these creatures can have on you. While this definitely adds some more strategy to how you will have to deal with the situation, you will still end up handling most fights in more or less the same way. The only real difference is in choosing what to target first, as some enemies are bigger threats to certain classes.

 

Each class also has their own skill tree, and each tree is broken down into three different paths. You will get to choose early on whether you want to stay more human or be cybernetically enhanced. This alignment choice will have no effect on the story (perhaps in later games?) but will give you one additional skill tree (either Human or Cybernetic) to dive skill points into as you level up. Some classes have more diversity than others based on the skills chosen in their trees, but these don't seem to change the game too drastically depending on what you choose - except perhaps in online co-op, where there are more options for different strategies.

Online co-op cuts all the story content out of the game leaving only the action. At first I thought this was a bad idea, but as I started playing, I realised it was actually a wise move. After playing through the story once (and possibly twice) you won't really need or want to go through it again; so just killing things with a friend is fine by me! The downside is that this originally was meant to be a four-player event. While I can understand why it was dropped down to two (they found during play testing that four players was just too chaotic) this game really needs the ability to play with more people, especially once you reach level 50.

 

Too Human seems to be lacking end game content, as once you get to level 50 there isn't much to make you want to keep playing with that character. Yes, there is the promise of elite armour sets and weapons, but that can only keep you interested for so long. It would have been great if Too Human had special missions or arenas designed for high level online co-op. This is a game that screams for a strong online community to keep it going, and the only way to do that is to allow us to play together in groups.

It would have been great if they made a few different four- or five-player arenas where you had to defeat wave after wave of enemies that get tougher with each wave. That would have made all the classes stand out so much more - it is obvious they were all designed with larger player groups in mind. It also would have given players the chance to feel powerful (during earlier waves) and challenged (during later, tougher waves) long after reaching level 50. This is important because currently all the enemies scale with you, which creates a constant challenge but also takes away the feeling that you are indeed becoming more powerful as you level up and get better loot. As it is now, playing online co-op with a friend is a lot of fun, but I do wonder how long it will stay interesting and how many people will be willing to play with strangers or if most will only stick with their friends.

 

Too Human can be a lot of fun if you just give it a chance. It's definitely a lot deeper than anyone will realise going in. It's not perfect, it's unpolished (I hate the extensive use of invisible walls) with a few odd bugs and glitches here and there but none of that really matters when you are having fun. And in the end that's what we play games for, right?

What Too Human really needs is to develop a strong online community in order to keep the game alive. The drop from four-player co-op down to two is going to make it a lot tougher to build that community in the game (showing off my cool gear to everyone is a slower process when it's one friend at a time). However, if Silicon Knights can keep it going long enough until the sequel comes out, hopefully they can expand the amount of players in co-op then. That could make this game the first truly addictive dungeon crawling RPG action game on the Xbox 360.

As I mentioned earlier, Too Human is one of those games where people seem to be having strong opinions towards it before even playing it. It is because of this that most people will either really love it or really hate it with the odd few sitting around the middle.

 

Most game scores can be somewhat justified for good or bad, and usually settle on an average score that most can agree on. With Too Human it is different, and you will probably find many reviews swinging in different directions. Therefore more than ever you should take this review (and all others for Too Human) as simply one opinion of a game. An opinion that may be very similar to or greatly differ from your own.

I wouldn't recommend taking anyone's advice on whether to purchase Too Human but would rather recommend you download the demo from Xbox Live and try it for yourself - but be sure to play through the whole thing and give yourself a chance to get used to it before making up your mind.