Too Human has surprising depth, too bad it's only slightly less flawed as it is epic. Still worth a try.
Too Human is an action RPG. You traipse through four fairly lengthy levels hacking, slashing, shooting lasering at hordes of enemies. You start of picking a class, you assign skill points on talent trees, you get new equipment, levels. There actually is a fair bit of story, I would say it's not exactly classic fiction, except it is. The story is the start of Ragnarok, the Norse mythological twilight of the gods. The story is recast with technology and super science taking the place of magic but apart from that and a couple of divergences it's quite faithful to the various classical versions of Ragnarok. Too Human never really expands upon the world which puts a sci-fi twist on Norse Mythology, explains its history. This might be something the developers knew but just didn't share.
The levels are too few and too long, they get repetitive. You walk too slowly and there are too many large empty areas which make you really feel that. Enemies are too numerous and the amount of damage they take to kill feels out of whack with those numbers and the amount of damage they can do. You don't ever really feel despite upgrading your equipment, levelling up, picking talents that you are getting any stronger because the enemies are level scaled. If you get unlucky with item drops you actually seem to get weaker relatively as you level up. Some times you have a special enemy dropped on you, which explodes doing a lot of damage or leaving a damage over time effect on you for far too long. Alternatively they might be an Elite, meaning they are 10 levels higher than you. For most characters the only way to get health back is random drops, which means you can get an unlucky streak and die.
If you die you get an unskipable cut scene where a Valkyrie descends and takes you away, then you reappear and continue the fight. I think this one feature is the bane of this game. When it happens a few times in a row instead of being poignant as I assume it's meant to be it just becomes comical. When it happens a lot it passes from comical and becomes really very annoying. I get the feeling the exploding enemies, the elites, the stupid durability of enemies, level scaling, Silicon Knights must have thought it doesn't really matter if they unbalance too far against the player, they'll just respawn. But it really does matter, repeatedly being forced to watch a cutscene is annoying, being randomly killed by an exploding enemy is annoying, killing wave after wave of enemies without a single health drop while your health is chipped away is annoying.
A couple of days ago I was all set to quit the game halfway through and write an angry review giving Too Human 3/10. "How could anyone make a game this bad?" I thought to myself, but with still over a week until Arkham Asylum is out I gave it one more shot. Suddenly I sort of clicked with the game. A few things that weren't explained properly I figured out.
The game which too human is most like is Phantasy Star Online. You've got a few levels, which you can play over and over, levelling up a bit, gaining equipment. You can play it cooperatively. You try out different classes with different talent and equipment set ups. Suddenly the game makes sense. I can imagine the folks at Silicon Knights with their early beta version, late night at the office playing it co-op, quickly it seems that it gets too easy as you level so add level scaling, a while later it's still too easy so add exploding monsters, and so on and so on until you end up with the game as it is. Even the Valkyrie starts to make sense: In co-op you have to have some cost to dying so a brief time out so the other player is on their own.
The thing is Phantasy Star Online is upfront about what it is, how you play it, It's a hack slash RPG geared for co-op with a handful of levels vaguely connected by an overarching story. Too Human sells and presents itself as a story driven single player action game with RPG elements and impressive as it's value added features actually are that's not how most people will play the game. The game is too heavily tuned towards the value added features at great expense to the single player experience. At the same time the presentation goes against the value added features, it doesn't have strong enough online features for what it seems to want to be. Sort of the worst of both worlds.
You have to play Too Human on its terms, not yours and while that isn't a forgiveable flaw it doesn't entirely negate what is good about too human either. There is a lot of depth and as you start to get a better handle on how to play it has its good moments as well as its frustrating ones.