I right stuff, write?

Apologies to my two readers out there for the lack of updates. I’d think of a reasonable excuse, but in reality I just forgot that this existed. Which is really bad, considering I missed the entirety of E3. How about that Nintendo conference?

So let’s talk about Too Human while we’re here.

If you played the demo at all (which should be a good amount of people, considering it was the seventh most played thing on Xbox Live at one point), you got a great idea of what the game is all about. Point the right stick in the direction of some robots, and pick up the stuff they drop when they’re dead. It’s clear that Silicon Knights was really shooting for a “Diablo-on-consoles” sort of thing, and they did it well, or at the very least better than any one has in recent memory.

Despite mediocre scores (C- from 1UP, and a 68 on metacritic at the time of this posting), I expect it to still sell well, thanks in no small part to the hype its built up over the better part of a decade during its development. There’s a vocal part of the gaming community (/wave NeoGAF) who won’t buy it simply because the man behind it, Denis Dyack, has become so closely tied to the project that anything he says apparently hurts the game. Let me soothe those worried few by saying that he hasn’t hidden any subliminal messages about a one console future in the game, so you can safely check it out.

To the game itself, it plays well. The controls take some getting used to, or rather, it take time to relax your button mashing thumb. Honestly, thinking about going back to button presses for every attack is just uncomfortable. Sure, it dumbs down the combat, much the way two-stick shooters have dumbed down the arcade shooter genre, but it’s nice to be able to sit back and watch Baldur smash through some robots with a hammer. The RPG elements are also toned down, such that the talent trees for each class aren’t too diverse from each other, and even converge at the end, so the only real benefits from each is how your spider behaves, as well as the effect of your battle cry.

Hopefully the story picks up towards the end (I’m in the final act) enough to warrant this being called a trilogy and not just Too Humans 1-3.