Too Human - Demo

So today I was a bit bored, not much to do around the house but clean and as you know, when the only thing to do is work, you somehow manage to find something to do, so I quickly signed into Xbox Live and downloaded the Too Human demo. Now I must admit, I went into this with a bad view. I mean although the rumours that the games been in the works for 12 years are untrue, it has been in development for a long long time. Also the constant bad reviews I've seen and heard don't help you to keep a positive head, but never the less I downloaded the game and booted it up.

Now keep in mind this game was a demo. Now a demo as far as I understand is a way to give the player a chance to try before they buy, but also a means for developers to sell their product to people who would normally be a bit untrusting of just some screen shots and videos. So how do you sell a game? Of course you give a bit of your plot, but enough to leave people asking for more. You also show off your game play and environments to capture the gamer and make them want to buy the full game just to enjoy more of what you've created...Too Human fails to do all 3 of these right.



The demo started with a long and quite boring intro, even when "game play" started, it hadn't as you could only walk forwards (no matter what direction you pushed) so you was "part of the intro movie". After what I'd say was between 5 and 10 minutes of boredom I finally got to the good bit, I got to kill some stuff and try out the game play! And once again the game fell on its face, it felt like Ninety Nine Nights done badly with the same boring bad guys thrown at me over and over and all I had to do was push a joystick in the direction of the thing I wanted dead (and whoever thought 'hey, Blade 2 on the Xbox did well with its battle system! let's rip it off!' should be shot cause that’s the one thing I couldn't forgive Blade 2 on the Xbox for!). Admittedly after a while they threw in a bigger bad guy, but this was only after ANTOHER video which was randomly stuck into the action and seemed to be talking about what I was doing in game as a past tense including talking about the big monster I was about to fight, taking away any shock or surprise. So anyway, after fighting this bad guy for a while (a.k.a Pushing the joystick in the direction he was in) suddenly...and no joke...he disappeared. Unsure what to do i walked up to an alter and suddenly I got another Flash Forward. This one took me into some boring story about how the 3 witches we know from Macbeth and so on are some kind of computer programs in this world god it was just silly. Anyway, the game play continued like this throwing me random cut-scenes I didn't wanna know about and boring game play which after an hour playing felt like I should have finished the game twice! To make things worse half way though killing stuff you'd have to go into a stats screen and read a load of crap to judge which skills you should level up and what armour and weapons you should use, all of which didn't do much for my head on an SD TV screen. They have NOT mixed RPG and Action well at all, do not trust what’s been said about that.


So, moving onto the fancy environments. The demo shows you two. One is a kinda floaty grass covered islands in the sky with forests and so on, the other was a dungeon/temple in a blizzard. Needless to say the dungeon/temple was boring, just a lot of grey, white, and black, the kinda thing you can forgive Gears of War for but not this pile of steamy turd. The forest/grassy-island place I'll admit looked kinda nice, but this was spoilt by random frame-rate lag and the fact even the smallest of bushes was dipped in a vat of invisible walls, hell the entire game was, and in this technological day and age I think we should be able to cut down on the use of these ugly things.

I'm a bit all over the place in this...well I can't even call it a review, let's say rant about Too Human. I literally just got off the demo unable to finish it because it's gotten so horribly boring and I'm a bit pissed off that I've made even a dent this small in my bandwidth for the month for this crap. The game isn't very well polished. The graphics are not amazing and if anything feel like they are lacking a lot (the faces on some of the characters are just horridly low quality, and the main characters face is creepy, like they have just photographed someone and stuck their face in the game, it looks out of place), the controls are horrid with the lack of a good camera movement in place of a bad and boring battle system, the level up process is slow and breaks up the boring fighting with even more boring stat screens which would even made a Dungeons and Dragons player weep, the story is horridly boring and the concept is just silly...thinking about it I think the ONLY thing I can say was ok in this game was the voice acting, which is a nice change after playing a few hours of Two Worlds (ooooh I'll be ranting good about that soon, trust me).


So yeah, don't get this game, hell, don't even download the demo...seriously, get the Castle Crashers trial instead, that's what good games are made of!