Video game of the week: Too Human

In the future, we'll all be Norwegian and live in space. Promise...

We'd feel better about reviewing Too Human if we could first work out what in the hell it's trying to be. At first glance it feels like Devil May Cry had a deep-space collision with World Of Warcraft, forgot to pack the massively multiplayer suitcase and picked up Serious Sam on the way back to the garage. The garage run by Vikings.

There's been a worryingly prolific spate of games released recently with, frankly, bonkers subject matters. It leads us to the only viable conclusion that game developers have taken to writing random words on scraps of paper, throwing them in a hat and picking words out until they have premise. Seriously, we tried it earlier and came up with some corkers. Observe:

Calrissian Cowboy - Realtime strategy sneak-'em-up where your task is to smuggle aliens dressed as cattle through the Wild West while running from your evil stepfather.

Paperboy Psy-hunt - A lowly paperboy fends off an invasion of Giants from Belgium, armed only with a keen telepathic sense and a hunting knife (actually, this already sounds a bit like Shadow of the Colossus).

Our point is, we'd like to see developers doing something simple but well, rather than taking all the drugs and going with whatever the cosmos tells them. Too Human, while a formidable and pretty-looking effort, is just bogged too far down by its own identity crisis.

With little explanation other than some oddly contrived cut-scenes, you're plunged straight into battle against what can only be described as robot badgers. And this is how it seems to go. Hoard after hoard of oddly similar beings running at you like an intergalactic game of British Bulldog. And you'll undoubtedly fall into the same cookie-cutter routine: fend them off with a gun until they get too close, then chop them up with an eight-foot sword. And it's all good fun the first seven or eight times, but pretty soon the veneers start to fall away. it's the same bloody thing for the whole game. An endless war of attrition, broken up only by some oddly simple puzzles you're put through by a trio who appear to be the Wyrd Sisters from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Don't worry, we'd given up on the references by now too.

While the combat in itself is nothing particularly original, the swordplay in Too Human runs the risk of almost being entertaining. The combo list is a short one, but juggling your foes like a grim circus act before finishing them in a big ball of flames can prove cathartic. The ranged weapons get far more interesting once about a quarter of the way through, and there's tons of swag to collect and upgrade your kit, including armour blueprints and ancient Nordic runes (yes, just lying about in people's pockets, collecting fluff along with the car keys).

But this unfortunately leads us to another gripe. All the questing looting, trading, manufacturing and upgrading in Too Human belongs in a massively multiplayer game, not a solo adventure. The fun of finding this stuff is the value it brings to other players as well as yourself - which encourages you to interact more. Developers Silicon Knights do win a shiny penny for adding an online two player co-op mode, but they're several thousand players short if they wanted this sort of game to have a point.

You may have a brief period of fun with Too Human, but it's only a matter of time before you'll realise that it essentially doesn't work - as an idea, as a story, or as a game.