As if public speaking isn’t terrifying enough for people, many who stand up in front of a crowd will start off their speech or brief with easily the worst thing you can say to your audience. In the public speaking world, it’s called brief suicide, and I would argue that we’ve all done it at some point in our lives. Starting off a speech with, “I’m sorry you have to sit through this thing”, or, “I know this isn’t the best but …”, will immediately turn off your audience and force you to fight uphill to turn the crowd back in your favor. So WTF does this have to do with Too Human and Jason Statham, aka The Transporter up there? It starts with Silicon Knights, who after releasing Eternal Darkness for the GameCube back in the day (2002), announced a new upcoming “trilogy”, which is (3) different games for all my home-schoolers out there, called “Too Human”, starring a dude who ends up looking mysteriously like Mr. Statham (with a really girnormous, bloated head). By announcing that, Silicon Knights essentially committed game suicide, or at least threatened, because when Too Human finally hit shelves in 2008, it was all over.

Bioware They Are Not

It takes balls to tell the gaming world that an entire trilogy is in the works when the first title hasn’t even been released yet.  It takes even bigger juevos to make that bold claim about a game that was in development, or in this case gaming pergatory, for nearly TEN years!  Only the folks up in Bioware have been able to pull that off with their Mass Effect series, but if you’ll remember they also had put out countless, game of the year type titles for years already with the Baldur’s Gate series, KOTOR, Jade Empire, etc.  What had Silicon Knights done before Too Human?  Eternal Darkness, and that is seriously it.  One game, which got released six years prior, was enough of a successful experience for them to think they were industry “gods”.  With Too Human 2 literally nowhere to be seen or heard from now, I don’t even think an “Empire Strikes Back” type sequel can save this planned trilogy from disaster.

So Much Potential

With similar gameplay elements a la God of War, and with an absolutely incredible loot drop system, Too Human really was poised to bring home the award hardware.  While a review this is not, Too Human’s beyond weak storyline and even worse voice acting really did it in.  On top of that, the “God of War” like gameplay really didn’t even come close to a Kratos adventure; attacking with the right analog stick?  Seriously?  Maybe after ten years of going back and forth in development, the investors behind Silicon Knights finally said enough is enough: publish this thing now and let’s move on.

You know what’s scary though after all of this?  I’d actually buy the sequel.  As lame as the story is, Too Human was one of those games that was still pretty cool, thanks to the art design and ridiculous amounts of different gear you can get and modify Jason Statham with.  If Silicon Knights would just put some elbow grease into the combat system, Too Human 2 might end up being one helluva Action RPG.  But at this point, even though the first one sold pretty well, I think this trilogy is officially dead in the water.

Sucks to see a title with that much development time fall into the proverbial shitter, but I don’t see this one getting revived – and I’m a pretty damn big optimist.