When the demo for Too Human first came out, I hated it.  But something kept drawing me back in, probably because I liked the idea of the loot.  Everyone likes loot, and it had been a while since I had played a good loot game.  The combat just wasn’t clicking though.  I think I tried it three times and, as it usually goes, third time was the charm, it clicked, and I loved it.  I played that demo over and over and over until the game came out.  In fact I remember taking the chance that the game may have come out a day early and spent hours trying to locate a copy, just so I could have an extra 24 hours with it.  Since then I played the game twice with one character and a third with another.  Needless to say, I did like Too Human.

I’ve played games for a while, I know people who have played games, and I like to keep myself up to date on what’s popular with games, gaming news, and so forth.  I mean, I do have a gaming site.  That should say something.  So let me use this knowledge and give you just three examples of things people like in games.

People who play games like loot.  Loot is popular for a number of reasons.  For one, people like to get stuff, fake or not, especially if that stuff improves your life, or in the case of games, improves your stats.  Loot allows you to customize your character and you can sell it for whatever currency that particular game has.  Loot is great.  Series like Diablo and Phantasy Star are well known for loot, as are pretty much all MMOs.  Too Human has loot.  Why don’t people like Too Human?

People who play games enjoy the hack and slash genre.  God of War is an immensely popular series, as is Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden.  Dante’s Inferno and Bayonetta did fairly well too.  People like dungeon crawler games.  Too Human is a hack and slash game.  Why don’t people like Too Human?

People who play games like dual stick shooters.  It’s become an insanely popular genre, and of course the one that really got the ball rolling was Geometry Wars.  After its success, many more dual stick shooters popped up, all holding their own, such as Super Stardust HD.  Dual stick controls have been adopted in other games.  One of the earliest examples, even predating Geometry Wars, is the Warthog in the Halo series.  Too Human uses a dual stick control system for combat.  Why don’t people like Too Human?

I could go on.  Space marines, adopting old mythology in a modern setting, light/dark world puzzles, etc.  I could even talk about the negative comments and show that they don’t hold much weight either, like the fixed camera.  I’ve already mention Devil May Cry and God of War as two popular hack and slash games.  Even in their modern iterations, both have fixed cameras, and are both highly regarded games. 

In a way, Too Human is even better than both those series.  The combat is way smoother; in fact it’s some of the smoothest flowing combat in this type of game.  The addition of loot makes the game way deeper than either God of War or Devil May Cry.  Even the story holds up well, and just like God of War, it’s an adaptation of older mythology. 

Now I’m not saying that this game is perfect by any means.  It has its flaws.  The death/rebirth animation takes about 45 minutes.  I’m not a fan of any game where the enemies level up with you, because that sort of ruins the point of leveling up.  Also the leveling up seemed to be about one step behind where it should be, nor was it that easy early on in the game to go back and grind a bit more before going into another area to try and eliminate that issue.  You want more?  The character design was pretty boring, and the backgrounds were pretty repetitive.  There were areas where the landscape was gorgeous, but for the most part the artwork was kind of lazy.

Despite those flaws, it held up where it counts:  the gameplay.  I still cannot grasp why people hated this game.  In fact the only thing I can blame is the negativity that surrounded the game’s early previews, and the subsequent behavior from Denis Dyack and his battle with the board-dwellers at Neogaf.  If you’ve ever read any Norse mythology, you have to admit the end of Too Human is pretty awesome.  Sadly we’ll probably never see the rest of the series because of trolls, and not the kind from Norway.