I'm a PC gamer. I don't try to hide this from friends and family like you might if you were still being breastfed in your mid-thirties. No, PC's got their first with a lot of things game related, and while through the ages we've had many a debate about which is better to have, it doesn't really matter for the point of this article – I just wanted to give you the background to perhaps why things went the way they did with this review.

Still, I imagine I wouldn't be alone with all the feelings that Too Human has invoked in the course of the little over 12 hours gameplay. You might wonder if that's really long enough to play and review a title, but I hope to shed some light on this as I try and explain everything. Like the end of one of those really intense and dramatic movies you might have watched at some point in your life, I feel like I need a really long walk after completing this title.

Too Human, the overly hyped 3rd-person action RPG from Silicon Knights, has a great little story concept, which you'd hope in the million years wait (PS1 era? Seriously?) for this game to come out it would have. You play Baldur, one of the Aesir, a race of Gods governed by Odin and spending your time protecting cannon fodder – the Humans. Merging fantasy and SCI-FI, while it seems based on Norse Mythology (you know, Vikings and such), you're also a bunch of Gods reliant on cybernetics in a war against a bunch of robots with names you might recognise: Goblins, Dark Elves and Trolls? Cool. So a nice spin on the usual hack-n-slash setting. To throw a spanner into your general grasp of things you can also travel to a fantasyland that is a digital representation of cyberspace inhabited by NORNS. Which is just weird.

You'll get the storyline as you go along for sure, but it's one of those kinds of story. Not exactly one of the ones you can sum up nicely, although I notice they've tried in the manual. It just doesn't mean very much unless you're actually playing the game. If I were to say to take a normal fantasy setting and replace everything with technology instead then you'd probably grasp it well enough.

The gameplay pretty much involves you running around smacking everything with your weapon of choice, or at least what you're restricted to based on your class. The classes you can choose from number 5 and while the diversity of class might mean something at the start, you soon realise that it doesn't actually matter what you pick. You see, you can't die. Sure, your health depletes to the point of dying, but then after a little cutscene where one of Valhalla's angels comes down, picks you up and floats off, you respawn. The only penalty it seems is to damage your armour slightly, which doesn't seem to actually make that much of a difference. It's like playing a multiplayer game where they've gone for using that feature of “If one of you is alive you can keep playing” but kept it in for singleplayer. As you can imagine, this kind of null and voids any risk factor in the game and lets you be as daft or experimental as you'd like.

So, while you have a choice of class allowing you to pick one that perhaps suits your playing style, a couple of these choices seem a little pointless, the Bio Engineer perhaps being the most pointless as his main feature is health regeneration, which at the end of the day seems like a bit of a waste if you don't care about dying. But anyway, you pick the one that appeals or looks the coolest and begin the game. Not that looks mean much as the one really good thing about Too Human is the sheer amount of weapons and armour and the customisation process you can go through to kit your guy out just how you want him.

The game starts with you wandering around what looks like an Aztec-style ruin as it takes you through how to play the game with a series of tutorial prompts and mobs to thwack. To begin with the combat system seems really fluid as the main focus seems to be zipping between enemies over long distances performing combos to get your experience, damage and combo meter higher - the higher the combo the more powerful abilities you can use. All this is performed on both the analogue sticks; left to move and right to attack via holding the stick, or tapping it, in the given direction. Of course this has an adverse effect on how you control the camera as by now we've all got used to controlling it with the right stick. So what have they done to counter this? What indeed. You're pretty much either constantly snapping the camera in the direction you’re facing or letting a cinematic camera completely fudge up where you want to look, especially through boss fights I noticed.

Yeah...boss fights. Heh. They seemed to hire in a guy who I'm going to call Captain Imbalance, who got hold of the bosses that already existed and said “You know what would be really cool? If we made pretty much all the bosses have insane health, hard to hit locations, or...or better yet let the player have no idea where to hit... yeah! And, and, on one of the bosses you know how melee combat is such a large part of the game, lets have one of the bosses have all those features but you can't get close enough to hit him!”

Captain Imbalance was a twat.

Sigh. I liked the fact that you're a God amongst mortals, you want the game to show that you're all-powerful, I get it. Unfortunately the enemies scale in level with you, so you'll never truly experience Lord Sauron-esque army slinging moments even if you find the best armour and weapons in the game, which, I might add, only happens obtaining blueprints that you find throughout the game and manufacture by spending quite a bit of cash. So, after you've saved up enough cash to purchase and don this super-special-armour, and the Sword of the Badger or whatever it's called (there are some really silly naming conventions in the game) plus infinity – you want to go out an stick it to the man, but unfortunately that 'man' is in fact an enraged 'Dark Elf' that shrugs to himself and decides that chowing down on some Mega-Gain and levelling to whatever you can throw at him will sort you out no problems.

I mean why!? Why in Odin's knackers did you do it?

Seeing as when you progress through the game, the moves that you perform pretty much remain the same, the monsters level with you and you can't die – you might as well stick on the first level and rinse and repeat that a few times to save yourself a headache. No? OK, well another point then is the levels. They're actually pretty damn nice artistically. Sure, it all seems a little unpolished but that looks more resolution related than anything. I actually like how epic the environments look... it's just that, well, they don't really change. The levels are about as long as my face was by the end of playing this – really bloody long. I would've loved for a 'run' button, but that wasn't allowed. I would've loved for secrets not to take me off into the middle of nowhere so I'd have the joy of a joyless walk back to the main storyline path. It's not even as if the levels where non-linear in that regard. The collision on objects and paths was as tight as a fat chimney sweeper half way up eating a baguette. You couldn't jump from one platform to another to save time, you had to do it by the book. Stupid book.

Now and then you'll find the odd well dotted around the levels which take you off to NORN land which is a place of magic, mystery and puzzles, and all that you do tends to have an effect on the 'normal' world. Well, that's what it said on the tin, but it seems generally speaking what you're doing is spending a bit of loading time to go lift a tree so a door opens back where you were previous. I was enthralled, I tell you... I really was.

You see, the reason I justified being a PC gamer was that I was driven into playing this game by a console gamer (you're so dead). He wanted to know whether this was a good answer to games like Diablo 2, and whether it answered the beck-and-call of players who wanted a PC RPG equivalent. I very much doubt that this game would be anywhere near what it would need to achieve even in a multiplayer sense seeing as they allowed you, in the end, to play with up to 8 players.

Heading into a multiplayer game could've been the saving grace as it's certainly a lot more fun taking on the mobs with a mate, but then you can only play in a 2-player game, which is a bit odd considering you have 5 classes to pick from. So it seems to fall into a hybrid between a standard shooter and a hack-n-slash RPG. I suppose you could argue that the replyability of this title through multiplayer or single player could justify forking out the cash for the title, but unless they patch the enemies to remain at a constant level you'll never feel like you've made any progress.

I completed the game, so that gives it some credence, but the degradation of my sanity has been the cost. OK, more so than usual. I'm certainly interested in what will happen in the next title and whether any of the feedback from the community will help shape it into a better sequel with Too Human apparently coming in the 'trilogy' flavour. We shall see.