Too Human on 360: Hands On

Going into E3, this past week, we here at SPOnG weren't totally sure what to expect from the big three console manufacturers.

Would Sony deliver on it's promises and unveil a significantly more next-gen experience than the 360? Or would they yet again be shown to be chronic ‘promisers’ with fantastic marketing, but ultimately under-delivering?

Would Nintendo's new revolutionary Wii control system live up to all the hype, or will the power-glove reminiscent motion control spell the beginning of the end (again) for the big N?

And where now for Microsoft’s Xbox 360? Would a system that has been out for a good six months now actually have the second generation firepower to outshine it's slightly newer, slightly shinier competitors? Or would pre-rendered Halo 3 footage slow the rampant fan-boyism that gives MS such a decided headstart into the latest generation?

Many questions, lots of strange and vague answers. In terms of the actual games on show, after all the dust of the pre-show conferences had cleared, it seemed as though Microsoft probably had the best showing of the three overall. Nintendo had the most intriguing and breath-baiting event. And Sony actually seemed to faulter a bit in terms of overall execution. Plus, there is that outrageous PS3 price point, but more (much more, we expect) on that later on.

Then the show itself opened and Nintedo's promise of belief on contact quickly came to be less vague promises, and more actual amazing truth. Sony's show-stoppers remained, as SPOnG had suspected for some time, for the most part unplayable, but their recently announced Nintendo-ripoff controller (if you think otherwise you're kidding yourself) performed admirably in the one game it was being used for, and overall the future of the PS brand seems to be fairly bright.

Microsoft however had, by our standards at least, a relatively dismal showing on the floor itself. While many other companies had some very exciting 360 titles in the works (Assasins Creed, Bioshock, Alone In The Dark, to name a few which caught SPOnG’s eye) the first party big guns seemed to lack the wow-power we had been expecting. Probably the biggest offender in this regard was Too Human.

Set to be published by MGS and developed by Silicon Knights (famed developers of the GameCube classic Eternal Darkness), before the show we where convinced this game was going to be right alongside Gears of War in the AAA onslaught this holiday season. After our hands on play this past week, SPOnG has some serious doubts if this game will perform as MS is hoping.

Now before the Xbox faithful get worked up into a tizzy let us assure you that this brief hands on preview is in no way a condemnation of what may well end up being a contender for game of the year months from now. However as it stands currently we are decidedly underimpressed.

First off, in the game's favour, the graphics are definitely some of the best seen on the system to date, especially when a good number of enemies are on screen and the bullets and swords really start to fly. But this early on in the game's development the frame rate seemed to chug more often than not and the distance the camera hangs at (completely controlled by the computer in a sort of moving but prescripted/stationary way) makes some of the more impressive character model details seem to be a waste of valuable resources. The few cinematic moments (all in game) that we saw made excellent use of some depth of field effects and really showed off the amount of detail available, but during game play the characters were often so small that a much simpler model probably could have been used and no one would actually notice.

Control wise, the game is elegantly simple, but at this early stage perhaps too simplistic to be shown to the public. Shooting of your two weapons is handled by the two triggers, while targeting is left up to the computer. Swordplay is creatively mapped to the right analog stick, allowing you to swing in any direction relative to your character with ease, making group combat simple. However, the amount of variety this led to was somewhat underwhelming and we couldn't shake the feeling that as of right now it's nothing more than a very shiny Streets of Rage.

One of the examples of how the control scheme could lead to creative plays was that an enemy could be knocked into the air by a sword strike and then gunned repeatedly as they fell to the ground. However, while this was indeed entertaining, it was nothing particularly inventive and we couldn't for the life of us figure out anything else of note to do. Any time you can play a game for less than ten minutes and already be a bit bored with it is a bad sign in our minds. Especially when that game is being touted by the biggest software company in the world as one of its brave new hopes for next generation gaming. Ho hum.

Another point of moderate annoyance, which we are sure will be ironed out by the time of Too Human’s release, was that the auto-targetting in the game would not seem to relocate itself to a new target once your current victim was dispatched. We often had to release and redepress the trigger in order to point our weapons at an actual threat as opposed to a rather shredded, bloodied corpse. While this is certainly a minor issue, it was just one of many things that, as of this point in the dev process, felt more than a bit off.

We here at SPOnG still hold out hope that the team behind this game will eventually put out a stellar product, but if we were gambling men, and some of us very much are, we would wager that this one may indeed miss its projected holiday launch in favour of a brief return to the drawing board. Feel free to correct us where you feel we might be wrong in the "ultra useful for things like that" forums below.