Human body measurements differ. The worldwide average height for an adult human male is about 172 cm (5 ft 7 1 ⁄ 2 in), and the worldwide average height for adult human females is about 158 cm (5 ft 2 in). The average weight of an adult human is 54–64 kg (119–141. Usage notesEdit. The phrase is often used as a part of a longer proverb in English, to err is human; to forgive, divine (Alexander Pope, 'Essay on Criticism').
You play as Lord Baldur.At least the setting is unique. The game is rooted in Norse mythology, yet it takes place in a futuristic sci-fi setting. So there are a bunch of cyber-Vikings running around. Rather than focusing on magic or sorcery, the game trades in cybernetic implants and cyberspace. You play as Baldur, one of Odin's sons. You're delivered right into the action at the beginning of the game, and flashbacks pepper the game's first area in an attempt to fill you in. They aren't terribly effective, though, as there's very little in place to set up the world itself, why it's being invaded by robots, and who is ultimately responsible.
As it's a Norse tale, it doesn't take long before figures such as Thor, Heimdall, and Loki appear, and as it's tapping into the whole Viking thing, there are plenty of moments where important things like 'Valhalla' and 'mead' are discussed. It clashes with the game's sci-fi look here and there, but even though the events of the game are quite convoluted, it's still an interesting combination. The game itself combines inspirations from a handful of different sources, as well. Too Human is an action RPG with similarities to Diablo. You'll run through combat areas, fighting off hordes of robots or zombies, hacking and slashing all the while.
You'll collect scads of loot with different status effects and statistical bonuses and attempt to collect full sets of armor for an even greater protective bonus. The game's four worlds and overall structure, however, have more of a Phantasy Star Online feel to them.
Each area has enemies that do a different type of damage, allowing you to prep a different set of armor for each area, if you wish. Also, like PSO, it seems to be the intent of the developers that you grind through each area multiple times in a quest for better gear.
A straight single-player run through the game took me around 12 hours and left me at level 29. The maximum level, however, is 50. Lastly, the game's combat system attempts to bring in air combos, juggles, and a mixture of swords and firearms that gives it a few check marks in the Devil May Cry column. That doesn't really mean that if you're a fan of all of Too Human's inspirations that you'll automatically love this, though.
Despite attempts to work in some advanced combat options, the action in Too Human feels quite thin. There's a real lack of enemy variety, and your best viable option quickly becomes 'shoot the enemies until they get close, switch to melee and start popping them up in the air with your attacks, then jump up after them to finish the job with an air combo.'
Regardless of the class you select, the same tactics still apply. The classes put focuses on different aspects of your character and give you a different skill tree to fill out as you gain levels.
But other than the offense-focused berserker class feeling a little fragile when playing alone and the bio engineer's latent automatic healing ability, you're looking at basic shades of offensive or defensive specialization. The streets of Too Human are paved with loot.There's a lot of customization that can be done to both your character and your gear.
First, there's the skill tree, which is different for every class. There's also a secondary skill tree that opens up later on.
You can slot weapons and armor all over your character, and the game does a good job of making a lot of the wearables look different, so it's likely that no two Baldurs will look identical. Also, the weapons and armor come in different forms. So you might find a sword that has 'of rooting' on the end, which has a special ability that makes your targets immobile when it activates.
You may also find weapons with empty rune slots on them. You'll find runes along the way with different bonuses, such as Total Armor +5% or Soothing +10% and so on. Fitting these runes into slots on your weapons and armor lets you further beef up any area where you feel like you're lacking, but as a rule, adding to your total armor never seems to be a bad idea. Runes also come into play with charms. Charms are items that you often find in cyberspace, and they act as little miniquests when equipped. Each charm will have a task that must be completed, such as 'collect 10 blueprints' or 'kill 200 undead.'
When you complete that task and feed the charm a specific set of runes, it activates and gives you a listed bonus, like a chance for your attacks to put enemies to sleep or the chance to add lightning to your strikes at random, and so on. While this ensures that you'll almost always have something to work on completing, even after you've finished the game numerous times, most of the charms aren't interesting enough to make repeated trips into the game's four areas much more entertaining. Also, the creatures scale up in level just as you do, so the level of challenge doesn't change much over the course of the game. The thing that's supposed to keep you coming back is the game's online cooperative play, which lets another player join you over Xbox Live. Players can trade items when connected and combining players from different classes can mix things up a little bit.
For example, the bio engineer's healing abilities offset the berserker's utter lack of defense to some degree. While it may be tempting to jump right into co-op and forget that the single-player campaign even exists, you should know that none of the game's story is present when playing online. Also, all friendly AI-controlled characters don't appear at all. So you won't be fighting alongside chattery humans and you won't see them wandering around the game's town area having random conversations, either. No cutscenes, just raw combat. Considering that the game's story isn't so hot to begin with, maybe this is a decent trade-off, but this mostly makes the game feel dated-most modern story-driven co-op games have found a way to integrate some portion of the story into multiplayer play. Baldur likes to stay a'head' of the competition.
Sorry.Too Human makes its four different combat areas look appropriately different, and things like up-close shots of the character models look just fine. But in action, the combat itself looks sort of bad. The game's animation feels completely canned, and there are plenty of cases where you're watching your weapons flail around, waiting for an animation to finish so you can get back in control. Little things, like the way the valkyries' legs clip through the ground when they come down to carry away dead players, or the way two-handed swords aren't actually attached to the player model when stored on your character's back make the whole game feel rough. The way the characters slide around to attack faraway targets also looks strange, as does the way air attacks let you hang in the air for a few seconds and repeatedly swing your weapon or execute a finisher, though there are at least gameplay reasons for those instances. Too Human has a real lack of enemy variety, and the first three areas of the game pit you against what seems like two types of robots, a couple types of larger robots, and perhaps some robots that are colored a bit differently to denote a special ability. On top of all that, the game's frame rate gets unstable in spots.
Too Human has its moments of visual splendor, but they're few and far between. The game uses dynamic music that picks up when combat starts and quickly fades away when there's nothing actively coming at you. But the moments of non-combat are very brief, resulting in dynamic music that always seems to be starting or stopping. When you get to hear more than eight bars of it in a row, the game's music is fine. As the first part of a planned trilogy, Too Human doesn't do a particularly good job of setting things up. If anything meaningful happens in this game aside from establishing a villain, it was lost on me. The only way I got anything interesting out of it was to start searching for web pages devoted to Baldur's place in Norse mythology to see how many liberties Silicon Knights is taking with its fiction and to see what sorts of things could lie ahead in the next games.
As a game, the action is a little too straightforward for its own good. The latent loot fiend in me had fun uncovering new items, slotting runes, and finding blueprints for new items-but even that stuff doesn't feel as fleshed out as you'd probably expect. In short, large parts of Too Human feel like they were designed to the standards of the last generation of consoles, not this one.on Google+.
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Frey: The end is coming, Heimdall.
Heimdall: Then let it come! We shall meet it with weapons in hand and joy in our hearts! Our lives belong to ODIN!
Heimdall: Then let it come! We shall meet it with weapons in hand and joy in our hearts! Our lives belong to ODIN!
Too Human is the first game in a planned trilogy developed by Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain). Originally planned as a four-disc Playstation epic, it shifted consoles to the Nintendo 64 when an exclusive partnership was formed between Silicon Knights and Nintendo. That didn't happen either, and plans to release it for Gamecube were similarly set aside when the development house began work on Eternal Darkness. After nearly a decade stuck in Development Hell, the game was finally released on Xbox 360 in 2008 to unreasonable expectations and largely mediocre reviews and sales -- perhaps due in part to retroactive Hype Backlash (though finicky targeting controls and an unskippable death animation certainly contributed).
The plot is a science-fiction take on Norse mythology, with its characters and events forming the basis for human gods, monsters and legends. The Æsir Corporation and its cybernetically enhanced rulers stand watch over what little remains of humanity during the last days of an ongoing war against sentient machines whose motivations are left unclear at best. Baldur -- seen by the humans as less distant and aloof than his fellow 'gods' -- leads a hunt for a particularly nasty robot, GRNDL-1, and is drawn into a larger plot tied to the mystery of his wife's death.
Much like a few other games originally plannedas part of a trilogy, its poor reception has made a Too Human sequel unlikely -- unfortunate, as it leaves off with many things unresolved.
- After the End - The current frozen state of the world is strongly implied to be the result of a nuclear winter.
- A God Am I - All the Aesir, though they're an arguably benevolent lot.
- Ammunition Backpack Robotic example - some of the 'Troll' class enemies use heavy Grenade Launchers, and wear huge, cylindrical ammo-canisters on their back to supply them. These are somewhat problematic, since their presence prevents you from doing your 'jump up on their shoulders and stab them in the neck' insta-kill, and they're hard to destroy since the Trolls always turn to face you ... hence, the grenade-launching Trolls winds up being much more dangerous than their hammer-wielding brothers, but not because of their attack-range...
- Anti-Villain - Hod.
- Arbitrary Gun Power - it is an RPG, after all.
- Awesomeness Meter - The combo meter.
- To expand: the combo meter fills as the player dispatches enemies using varying techniques. The more complex the action, the more combo earned. Combo can then be spent on room-nuking attacks or spells that act as buffs (increasing attack speed, bullet damage, etc.). So the game magic is fueled by Rule of Cool.
- Badass Boast - Half of Thor's dialogue consists of this. Some of what Balder remarks to his enemies would count if they weren't more likely promises rather than exaggeration. See To the Pain below.
—Bjorn 'Don't count on it Wolf! Monsters tell stories of ME to frighten their children.'
- Back from the Dead - Baldur.
- BFS - Several of Baldur's two-handed swords are about his height.
- Blown Across the Room - Goblins and other small enemies tend to fly away in random directions when killed with ballistics. What makes this odd is the complete lack of reaction from every bullet except the last one - the killing bullet will cause the enemy to go cartwheeling across the room, often bouncing into walls. Thank you, Havok.
- Character Customization - Through the Class and Level System and Point Build System, as well as cutomizable armor pieces.
- The Chessmaster - Loki.
- Class and Level System - combined with a Point Build System. Baldur can be one of five classes, each of which has a skill tree. As the player gains levels points can be spent to traverse the trees, providing several benefits. Additionally, the player can also choose an alignment that provides another tree with more (but different) upgrades.
- Colossus Climb - Taking down Trolls requires either wearing down their shoulders, arms, and legs individually; or climbing up their back and plunging a blade into the beast's head.
- Continuing Is PainfulandDeath Is a Slap on The Wrist -- when you die, after the death animation you're dumped right back into the fight with no loss of progress, but on the other hand, your equipment is damaged and your combo meter is reset to zero, meaning if you're in a bad situation, you have fewer resources to deal with it than before you died.
- Also, the cutscene is completely unskippable. This in and of itself can also be considered a punishment of sorts.
- Coup De Grace Cutscene - On Hod and Hel. Separately, of course.
- Crate Expectations - Various containers are scattered through the levels, conferring money or health. Very rarely they can also drop epic (read: very very rare) items.
- Cut and Paste Environments - The last two levels suffer from some of this, as they just drag on and on.
- Cyberpunk - Midgard is essentially a Cyberpunk world ruled by a Mega Corp, cybernetic augmentation and artificial intelligences are significant technologies.
- Development Hell - Notorious for it.
- The game was first announced all the way back in 1999, with a trailer at E3 the same year. It then hopped from console to console, and even through three different generations, starting with the original Playstation, going to the Game Cube, to finally settle on the Xbox 360. The only game to be in development hell longer and be released would be Duke Nukem Forever, and, as most people will tell you, that's not even a safe bet either.
- Disney Death - Thor kinda pulls one off. But it was all just a lie, as it happened when Baldur got into cyberspace, and 'got out' of it when in reality he was in a simulation of the real world during his time in cyberspace. Notably, Mimir also goes crazy during this fake reality segment.
- Dynamic Loading - Loading is done behind cutscenes between levels and dynamically during levels. You'll only see loading screens by skipping cutscenes or jumping right to levels in online multiplayer.
- Empathic Weapon - Baldur's sword Fenrir.
- Exposition Break - Between levels, and (irritatingly, to some) during levels. There's a reason the story is excised in online multiplayer.
- Fan Disservice - Hel.
- Frickin' Laser Beams - One of the ammo types. Averts several problems, as they hit instantly and have no recoil. When using Laser ammo, guns 'heat up' to full damage - the longer held on an enemy, the more damage (up to a cap) they do. Watching the damage ramp up on the scrolling damage meter is often very satisfying.
- Fun with Acronyms - ODIN (Organically Distributed Intelligence Network) and the NORNs (Non Organic Rational Nanosystems).
- Ghost Ship - The World Serpent.
- The Hecate Sisters - The NORNs.
- He Who Fights Monsters - The Nietzsche quote for this trope is directly stated in one trailer. From a work separate from the Literary Allusion Title, however.
- Hollywood Cyborg - Almost everyone.
- Hot-Blooded - Baldur.
- Hot Scientist - Idunn.
- Instant 180-Degree Turn - Not all of Baldur's animations are smooth, especially this one. Jumping while moving the stick in circles as quickly as possible makes Baldur pirouette several times in midair.
- Involuntary Group Split - After Thor's Disney Death. Though, he gets better.
- It's Personal - Baldur's pursuit of Hod.
- Level Grinding - And How! 5 Character Classes, 50 Levels each. Have Fun!
- Level Up Fill Up - Played straight. It's saved many a life mid-battle.
- Literary Allusion Title - to Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.
- Mega Corp - Æsir Corporation, although its arguably a benevolent Mega Corp.
- Monsters Everywhere - Absolutely everywhere. Except cyberspace and Asgard.
- More Dakka - A slug rifle in the hands of a Human Commando, with rate of fire and ricochet maxed and additional Metalstorm charms, can fire and kill entire rooms faster than the game can render the bullets. Add in another player in co-op, and well... yeah.
- Narm - 'IT'S A VALKYRIE, COME TO TAKE ISTBOR TO VALHALLA!'
- Norse Mythology - The basis for the plot and every character therein.
- One-Hit Polykill - Each alignment gets a different skill for this, and the effects can be given to anyone via Charms.
- With Metalstorm (Human), bullets ricochet and can hit additional enemies the character's ballistic distance away. That is, entire rooms away. And proc effects go with them, so it can happen again. On every bullet. This can happen with grenadesas well.
- Cybernetic characters get pass-through, which lets bullets pass through opponents, hitting others behind them. Not as fun, but still useful.
- One-Man Army - You are supported by human soldiers, but all they seem to do is talk in the background and get killed. Occasionally shooting something.
- Our Monsters Are Different - Goblins, trolls, elves - all robots.
- Randomly Drops - And they're drawn to the player magnetically. Auto-looting at its finest.
- RPGs Equal Combat - The only way to gain EXP is to fight. And fight you will.
- Rule of Cool - Played to the hilt, for example with Baldur able to 'juggle' enemies in midair with the stream of bullets from his gun. These kinds of moves also charge a combo meter that can be used to activate special abilities, making those abilities literally powered by cool.
- Run Don't Walk - Baldur runs by default, and slowing his down a walk via the control stick makes him walk incredibly slowly.
- Sidetrack Bonus - One of the best ways to get epic loot is to go off the beaten path. A few places mid-level, but the World Tree is one giant sidetrack with several loot-dropping obelisks in it.
- Smug Snake - Loki.
- Stillborn Franchise: Safe to say that the rest of the trilogy won't ever get made.
- This is open for debate.
- Suicidal Overconfidence - The machines never stop attacking. Though... they sometimes do win.
Balder: 'All the pain and cruelty you inflicted, I will carve into your flesh. Your agonized shrieks shall be your only monument!'
- Unbreakable Weapons - Interesting mix with Breakable Weapons: weapons and armor do not degrade with use, but instead lose durability at death. When durability reaches zero, weapon strikes only do damage based on Baldur's strength, and armor pieces no longer offer any protection. Both can be repaired at shops. Given that gear typically has enough durability for at least 15+ deaths, it's obvious the designers knew the player would die many, many, times.
- Unwitting Pawn - Hod.
- The War Sequence - The whole freaking game.
- We Can Rebuild Him - Part of Baldur's backstory, also the Valiant Warriors/Einherjar made from the soldiers fallen in battle and retrieved by the Valkyries. In addition Hel reanimates corpses as technological zombies.
- What Could Have Been - The pre-release information back in the late 90s depicted a very different game, with a much harder brand of science fiction bordering on cyberpunk and no Norse deities in sight.
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