Epic Spoon

Paul Zero

Too Human (website), the new action/adventure/rpg from Silicon Knights, is a visually stunning game.  Too bad that doesn’t count for anything with actual humans.  I mean, no matter how shiny a game is (Prince of Persia), it still needs other things.  What’s Too Human missing?  How about controls.

Let me make one thing clear: the right stick is only to be used for moving the camera.  It’s not for making your character stop running to swing his swords.  I’m serious.

When you’re making a 3D game, the last thing you want is bad camera control.  Now, Silicon Knights is known for mediocre camera.  Eternal Darkness had some awful angles, but they weren’t as bad as Too Human’s.  Eternal Darkness also have a navigable pause menu full of your characters’ abilities.  Too Human could have used some real humans designing its interfaces.

I wanted to give the game a fair chance.  I wanted to play through more of it.  Bad controls are bad, sure, but I can suffer through them for a while.  And then I got to the boss fights.  Using the right stick for combat is a bad decision in any game that’s not a 2D Geometry Wars or Aegis Wing shooter.  And when you run away from the boss to regroup, the camera swings to what you’re running toward.  The only way to see the boss?  Turn around and press LB.  And whatever you do, don’t hit the right stick.

The game’s hand-to-hand combat system looks like wants to be something like Smash Bros, without all the pesky button pressing (basically, using the C-stick on the GameCube).  But I can’t tell which of my hits are connecting or, indeed, which thing I am attacking.  The ranged combat is no better.  LT and RT fire your weapons, like a shooter, and then the right stick becomes a sort of “aiming” tool.  But it locks onto things.  Does it lock on to the things that are running toward you?  No.  It locks on to the ones slightly to the left, who are well out of range and are taking no damage.

It’s barely playable.

Don’t bother buying it.