Review By

Brad Gallaway

It's not often that we see game reviews split down the middle, but in the case of Destroy All Humans! , my opinion is the opposite of Dan's in many ways. For starters, there's no way that this game is the most gratuitously violent game in recent history; that title clearly goes to BloodRayne 2. Little ol' Crypto can't hold a candle to the kind of heartlessly wholesale slaughter that a half-vampire pinup model can pull off.

Seriously though, I never had a problem with the game's violence or the attitude of the extraterrestrial main character. I guess I just generally assume that 50's style aliens are going to automatically be a-holes and go from there. I didn't much care for the voice actor's Jack Nicholson-esque delivery, but besides that, Crypto was a fittingly antisocial visitor to our fair planet. After all, if the main tasks in the game are going to be anally probing farmers, shattering buildings with a death beam, and harvesting brain stems from unsuspecting cityfolk, it wouldn't really work to have a main character that was easy to identify with or root for. It might sound a little backwards, but I thought having a mild dislike for Crypto was entirely appropriate considering the dirty work that needed to be done.

Another area where our opinions diverge is the appreciation for game's humor. It wasn't at all subtle or nuanced, but then again, I don't think it was meant to be. From the get-go, Destroy All Humans! makes no secret that parody and satire are the order of the day. I enjoyed a lot of the snarky quips, and was amazed at how much of the game's quasi-commentary is as applicable to today's "War on Terror ©" as it was to the great Red Scare fifty years ago. Terrorists, Communists, or Aliens-not-from-Mars… regardless of the source, reacting to the point of absurdity is always going to be a valid target for humor, clever or otherwise.

Looking at the nuts and bolts, Pandemic does a good job of combining the B-movie storyline with a decent variety of missions and objectives. Crypto is surprisingly well-equipped with a range of abilities and powers, and following the main plot to its conclusion kept my attention until it ended somewhere around the six-to-eight hour mark. A wise choice, since boredom didn't have a chance to set in. I was a little surprised at how often the game forced me to perform tasks on foot with such a keen flying saucer at my command, but otherwise, this aspect mostly satisfied.

However, even though we disagree on a lot, Dan's correct in saying that the side missions are a bad idea any way you slice it. Overly simple and not very interesting or in tune with the storyline, requiring players to achieve a certain number of DNA points to progress is worthless from an entertainment perspective, and doesn't do anything except interrupt the game's flow. To be fair, I only had to make two or three of these unplanned excursions into brainstem collecting over the course of the entire game, probably not more than an hour total. Was it the worst decision ever made? No, but it was still a bad choice that shouldn't have been made in the first place. Making players do boring things for the sake of making a game longer is never appreciated.

It does get a little too difficult for its own good at the end and taking a forced detour away from saving (or is that destroying?) the world for the sake of a few tedious minigames was ill-advised, but Destroy All Humans! still managed to deliver a better-than-expected weekend of rampant destruction and sarcastic remarks. Throw in a pizza and some cold drinks, and there's no need to leave the house until Monday.

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