I don’t know if it’s Stockholm syndrome, or if Denis Dyack really knew what he was talking about a couple of years ago, but Too Human is slowly winning me over. Actually, make that very slowly. I’d only ever played it as a weekly rental when it was first released back in 2008, and at the time I thought it was a strange beast that I didn’t know how to handle - there were aspects of it that I quite liked, but the game as a whole seemed to be holding me at arm’s length.

So many elements seemed to defy my gaming instincts. The combat method seemed confusing and inexact; the story seemed like a mishmash of ill-explained ideas that were probably cooler and easier to follow if you sat in on a bunch of Silicon Knights design meetings; and I think we’re all aware of the drawn out death animation that appears too often and cannot be skipped.

By the end of that first single week with Too Human, its personality seemed to border on sociopathic: it knew all the things it had to do to appear a competent and deep experience, and it was simply performing all these actions to try and fool me that it was a normal, functioning game. Ultimately, though, it all came off as a bit soulless. As I returned Too Human to the video store, I didn’t really feel ripped off by my time with the game. I merely felt a slight edge of bemusement and dissatisfaction. What the hell did I just play?

Now, let’s go all wobbly and strike up the harp music as we return to 2010, shall we? Are you with me? Neat.

A couple of weeks ago I found Too Human in a bargain bin for $8. I think we all know where this is going, right? Well, sort of. There are still a bunch of design decisions in the game that I can’t get behind, but after sinking more hours into it I’ve started to come around to the way it all functions. While the combat still feels a bit like Cyber Dynasty Warriors, I found myself dying way less this time around. I don’t know why, but things just seem to be… clicking.

I’ve only recently come to love loot in games (cheers, Mass Effect and Borderlands) and I think this new outlook has certainly added to this title’s appeal. Loot is both a boon and a nuisance in Too Human – there’s so much and so many different ways to manipulate it that the player is spoiled for choice. The problem came when I realised that a disproportionate amount of my game time was spent faffing about in the pause menu, managing all the armour, glyphs and weapons that Too Human vomits at you in thick, colour-coded torrents. Oh, and to top it off, pausing the proceedings doesn’t stop the game clock from ticking over. Ugh.

What I have been enjoying are the environments found in each level. I remember at the time that their flavour was written off as being cribbed from Halo, but I feel that Too Human’s offerings definitely have their own identity. The textures are crisp, the lighting is nice, the normal mapping is used in some pretty cool ways and the level of grime applied in some of the more menacing areas is implemented in a nicely grotty manner. The only time the look of the levels falters is, perhaps ironically for the game's title, in some of the game’s more organic areas. These can look a bit like something from Silicon Knights’ GameCube days, but you barely spend enough time in them for it to be a real issue.

The other thing I find impressive about the environments is the way they manage to capture a sense of vertical scale. Despite the fact that my television’s landscape format should be at odds with the grandiose high-ceiling architecture, I still periodically find myself taking a few seconds to appreciate how tall and cavernous some of the chambers can appear.

I don’t think I’m dishing out any sort of exclusive scoop when I say that Too Human is a flawed effort. But I’ve not finished my first playthrough, and I find that I’m already wondering what I’m going to do the second time around. I think that means that, for me at least, the game isn’t the bewildering failure that a lot of people wanted it to be. If I’m being honest, I was probably one of those people, at least in part. I mean, nobody wants bad games to be made, but it’s human nature to get a bit of a buzz from someone else falling on their face. Well, it is in my circles, anyway.

I guess this all amounts to a pretty backhanded compliment to Silicon Knights and the storm in a software teacup that they created. In 2008, the podcasts that Denis Dyack appeared on as part of his verbose media blitz were all filled with promises that the game was a slow burn, becoming more rewarding the longer you played and replayed (those same podcasts were also filled with the word “reciprocity”, but I digress). Guess what? He wasn’t all wrong. Mind you, with the amount of words per second he was spitting out, the laws of probability would suggest that was bound to happen at some point.

As an interesting postscript to all this, I revisited Jeff’s video review of Too Human. I draw your attention to this not for the content but the way it’s delivered. Jeff seems to be going off the head way more, the music levels are a bit off and it doesn’t seem as tightly edited as the site’s current content. While the video is still well made (it’s certainly a million times better than any video I’ll ever make) you can really tell how much Giant Bomb has grown and groomed itself into a slicker, more polished outfit. And, dear user, you can’t want much more than that kind of progress.