Unfortunately, that desire and patience is too much of a price in the face of Too Human’s more tiresome elements. Chief among these are its delusions of grandeur: a story that believes it’s far cleverer than it really is, coupled with loftily ambitious, gargantuan environments that, while certainly giving a sense of scale, serve only to erode even the most forgiving gamer’s resolve. The dungeons can last for hours at a time, and you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief at each location’s end, as though it were some terrible burden.

For a game that requires you to replay levels time and again to salvage rare loot and accumulate skill points, it beggars belief that each dungeon needed to be so relentless in its recycling of scenery and textures, and so miserly in its offering of distinct enemy types. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so disheartening if you weren’t required to walk so far and spend so long chipping away at each journey.

Cyberspace, a world which exists in parallel to Baldur’s, is the best example of just how unwieldy and overwrought Too Human can be. At intervals you’re required to enter the zone to manipulate objects which have an effect on the dungeons. It’s an idea popularised by so many games (Metroid Prime 2 being the best example) but here the idea is squandered as a convoluted, completely unnecessary means of unlocking doors – further aggravating your progress.

It’s as though, sealed away from the rest of the world, Silicon Knights has completely lost sight of what a player (naïve of the plot points and mythology, and lacking an encyclopaedic knowledge of game mechanics) will ultimately experience. In some cases it’s inconsiderate, in others it’s downright obtuse.

The irony is that many of Too Human’s problems wouldn’t exist if another pair of human players were allowed to enter the fold (as was originally intended) – speeding up play considerably and making ‘just one more run’ into something a little more manageable, a little more palatable.



Project director Denis Dyack himself has stated that this is down to a matter of balance. But given Too Human’s protracted gestation period, could this not have been addressed? Four-player dungeon crawlers are not, after all, that unusual – sometimes to the detriment of ‘balance’, admittedly, but (as anyone who has Force-nuked their way through PSO’s Ruins with a full party will testify) in the name of amusement this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the name of making a game significantly more enjoyable, fostering camaraderie and introducing that all-important human element, it’s a necessity.

6/10