New on the Xbox Live marketplace under the Demo tab you'll find Too Human, the latest offering by Silicon Knights studio which promises to put fresh bells and whistles on the old RPG warhorse.
There is a steady trickle of titles on all the next-gen consoles that try to recreate the nuts n' bolts mathematics of the classic role playing game into a shiny high-def pair of shoes, to varying degrees of success. Mass Effect was launched last year with much trumpeting and critical praise, but despite its impressive scale it ended up going out of its way to hide its stat-building nature behind graphics, like an embarrassing old relative at a party or a bonkers ex-wife in the attic.
Too Human is shaping up to be a rare marriage of involving character personalization inherent to RPG and the crunchy, Technicolor action that your modern console can deliver.
The plot premise is, on first blush, fairly noodles. The game world is that of Norse legend, complete with valkyries, monsters, warriors, gods, fates and magic spells but completely transposed into the far future rather than the past. You will play as Baldur, a man elevated to the status of a god by the power of his cybernetic implants and magical technology, and tasked with protecting humanity from monstrous machine entities. It has to be said that the Norse mythology / high tech motif is not exactly a natural fit, and it's often as fascinating to see how the plot will hammer the round mythical peg into the square techno hole as it is to follow the plot itself. However, the makers took this slightly awkward fledgling concept and ran with it, and the story actually works due to being told with sufficient panache and style, complete with twists, mid-level flashbacks, and actually engaging character development. The artistic style that at once suggests being in an old fable and being in a galaxy far, far away backs up the writing and we can only hope that it will all hold together with as much aplomb through the whole of the title come its August release.
With this vast McGuffin that allows monsters, drop-ships, guns and magic swords to co-exist swallowed, it's on to the actual gameplay. The play will be instantly familiar to any who played through the multitude of excellent isometric hack n' slash RPG's on the Xbox or Playstation 2 - such as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, the X-Men Legends series, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, or appropriately the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series. Everything from combat to inventory management to special items to runic weapon upgrade follows very familiar models laid down since the great and venerable Diablo showed us how to make the genre fun again. Some literary boffin or other once said "Good poets borrow, great poets steal", and for the time being I for one believe that Too Human might just be great enough to get away with open larceny. Its always better to do something well than to do something new.
There are a host of special moves to unlock through skill-tree character progression, but the bulk of combat relies on mle attacks mapped to the right stick and ranged attacks on to the triggers. This sound simple to the point of risking degeneration into button-bashing, but the animation and modeling are done so well and so energetically to put the player more in mind of Devil May Cry's Dante then Anonymous Dwarf Warrior of most dungeon crawlers. Independently aimed twin pistols will be fired over shoulders and under crossed arms as Baldur leaps over groups of dozens of cyber-goblins, landing in the thick of it to start laying about him with chained directional mle attacks that connect satisfyingly, with the occasional spectacular Finishing Strike or Critical Hit.
Too Human will likely live or die by the strength of its developing plot and the ability for the player to really make their own mark on Baldur's character progression. Silicon Knights already promises this to be the first of three instalments, with your personally beefed-up Baldur transferable from one to the next, but how this will be balanced against difficulty and replayability has yet to be seen. Too Human looks like it will have a serious crack at taking the top spot in the elusive action-RPG genre, and the tantalising demo now available on Live is well worth your bandwidth.
Duncan Lawson
By: Duncan Lawson
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