Swords, robots, space ships, Valkyries and Ragnarok: the thought of all this packed into one game should have any hot-blooded male’s heart palpitating in anticipat­ion, lacking as it does only ninjas and cowboys in the ultimate roll call of man stuff. Unfortunate, then, that Too Human is a bit crap.

Unsure whether it’s supposed to be an RPG or an action game, this updating of the Norse myths – in which the Aesir are cybernetically modified humans sworn to protect the Earth from a mechanistic alien threat – manages to make a hash of the whole thing. The initial class selection shows promise, but the difference in characters is actually marginal. The inventory is clunky, and considering the amount of time spent there, you might have expected the game’s designers to have at least tried to make it less irritating (although it clearly would have been better if they’d simply ensured that you didn’t spend all your time and money building armour and weapons from blueprints only to pick up better ones from dead enemies five minutes later).

Initially, the battles seem grand in scope, with hordes of onrushing enemies and music building to a crescendo, but after a while it all becomes a bit repetitive. And the death sequences are infuriating – the first time a robotic Valkyrie descends from the sky, your face is contorted into a rictus of joy, but this is a short-lived euphoria. These cut scenes are unskippable, happen frequently and go on for far too long, leaving you cursing at the screen and impatient to get back to the action. After a while, however, having dispatched a thousand robotic goblins, you might find yourself praying for real Valkyries to carry you off.

If you’re weary of battle, then the puzzle-solving element seems to have potential, involving entering cyberspace to open doors that are blocking your path in the real world. The trouble is, the game doesn’t provide any actual puzzles to solve. The uncontroll­able camera is also extremely irksome, always seeming to have found something more interesting to look at in a corner away from the action, and there are a number of bugs that really shouldn’t be appearing in a game four years in development. Having said all that, the Norse mythology angle is fun, the story is engaging and there are moments when – repetition aside – you are completely absorbed in the carnage of battle.

The online co-operative mode is the game’s saviour, allowing for tactical battles and trading of weapons and armour, while the combat becomes more tactical, allowing one person to concentrate on ranged weapons while another charges in for the close combat.

The final nail in the coffin of Too Human is that it is the first part of a trilogy. Considering the size of many modern games, this really does smell of money grabbing: Too Human is too much for too little.