Too Many Humans Episode One Review: Nature's Way

This Too Many Humans review is being assembled with the musical support of Primus. If you’re a fan, you’ll know the tune I’m humming to. Back to some relevant information; this game is pretty fun. It makes a change to play the bad guys with morals.

Mother Earth herself, Gaia, has instructed you, Phthisis (misspelt in the game), to do her bidding. This isn’t a lazy delegation to get the food in but something much more important: eradicating humanity for the crimes they’ve committed against the Earth. Hhmmm, dark.

As you might expect, Too Many Humans, from RealityZ, has a sense of humour. Irrespective of the content and associated claret, it’s all in good taste… and you’ll likely have a mischievous little smile across your face. Like that time you worked out your best friend’s password and created a Tinder profile. Anway…

Phthisis is the leader here in every way. The AI in Too Many Humans is accurate, assuming zombies are brain dead and can’t be left to their own devices – getting frequently killed (again). This happens from walking onto mines, charging into the paths of conveniently placed humans with weapons, or being gunned down by a turret and turned into mush. Here, you lead them with screamers.

They’re undead scarecrows that act as bait to lure your zombies in one direction. A screamer can be created by holding down the left mouse button, then dragging it around with your cursor will move the armies in real-time. It’s possible to create and select screamers using a hotkey, too. Teams are then controlled with stealth (not in the slightest bit discreet) and aggressive, which targets enemies and structures within a nearby radius.

The zombies in Too Many Humans are expendable, so if they die, you create more with a respawner and killing humans. Zombies can also be sacrificed by holding the right mouse over each unit; then, you can spawn a new unit at a respawner. Four ranks include brutes and explosive units that can break down defences and take a lot of damage. However, you can’t assign them willy-nilly and need to have secured the resources to do so.

Initially, I didn’t like the controls as the zombies follow the screamer, a.k.a. the mouse cursor. Though a screamer can be placed on the ground, forcing your army to halt, it’s easy to forget this, and as you scroll up the map, end up sending them to their death. The zombies in Too Many Humans aren’t infinite either, but you can’t seem to trigger a game over when they’re depleted. One of my squads got trapped in the scenery, so I reluctantly sacrificed them to spawn new ones. Unfortunately, with each death, the option for respawning narrowed to nothing. In the end, I stared at the screen moronically, then reluctantly restarted the level – which wasn’t fun.

The tutorial wasn’t great. It was full of typos and confusing in places. On the upside, it does mention that through practice, the controls make sense. In reality, Too Many Humans is pretty intuitive and smooth-moving unless you have a full house of 100 zombies, as there was the odd screen stutter. While the presentation is good, I would have liked to have been able to zoom in a little closer to the action, but that’s only a minor.

For the most part, I enjoyed playing Too Many Humans, but the point where you run out of zombies was quite frustrating. When you’ve spent a good amount of time on a level only to have to force a restart at the end, it can be demoralising. Even if the zombies respawned gradually over time, that would have been better than not having any left. Perhaps I’m missing something fundamental? A brain of my own?

This is a game I found myself getting addicted to, especially when overpowering the enemy with a swarm of the undead. That was immensely satisfying. Bullets? Pfft! Too Many Humans has a lot more potential in the upcoming episodes, and it’ll be interesting where we go next. In summary, RealityZ has done a pretty decent job on the zombie apocalypse.