Destroy All Humans!

Destroy All Humans has one of the greatest video game premises of all time. It flips all those cheesy B-rate sci-fi movies from the 1950s on their head by letting you play the alien invader, zapping Midwest farmers and getting chased by G-Men. Yet, despite having a killer premise and the ability to poke fun at everything from the Cold War to the outdated thinking of the time, the series stalled out after only a few sequels. The just-released remake of the 2005 original is a reminder of all the promise and potential this series once had, while simultaneously demonstrating the repetition and lack of vision that would ultimately doom the franchise.

I stand by what I said at the top, Destroy All Humans has the kind of setup that most video games can only dream of. You play Crypto-137, an alien from a race who has been forced to clone themselves in order to stay alive. After a ship carrying the previous clone is shot down over the desert hideaway of Area 42, Crypto is sent to Earth to rescue 136. It's while on this mission that he discovers that those pesky Earthlings might be more dangerous than they thought, so it's off to investigate the human race ... and then crush them!

Now admit it, there's a part of you that wants to jump in that spaceship and blow everything up. We may have rooted for Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to save the world, but the reason you bought the ticket to Independence Day is to see the aliens destroy your favorite landmarks. Now you can be the alien, which means zapping humans with ray guns, infiltrating the people in government and, yes, even boarding a spaceship and blowing up cities.

For the most part, Destroy All Humans plays out as a third-person shooter with platforming elements. Crypto is usually tasked with finding missing parts, destroying evidence and anally probing humans for information. The good news is that he has come to Earth with pretty much everything he needs, including a jet pack that he wears, the power to read people's minds and an ability that lets him pick up objects and fling them about. A lot of this is plays into the types of missions you take on, while the rest is just for fun.

One of Crypto's most impressive tricks is using his cloning ability to mimic the humans around him. This allows him to sneak around the city streets and army bases without being detected, something he'll be doing a lot of in the stealthier stages. These missions require Crypto to continuously read people's minds in order to stay hidden, something that is only made tougher by the human's dastardly jamming technology. If he's outed as an alien, then the entire army will turn their attention to you or, more likely, the game will fade to black and you'll have to start the stage over from the start.

When he's not jetpacking over the city and pretending to be human, Crypto will also board his flying saucer and lay waste to every building and monument in his way. This never ceases to be fun, even when the game starts throwing tanks and mechs at you. Everything blows up in the most satisfying way possible and there are a few different types of weapons you can fire at the pathetic human cities, all of which can be upgraded between the game's two dozen stages. In fact, you'll also be able to improve Crypto, by giving him a better shield and more powerful guns.

At first, all of these types of missions are a lot of fun. The action is fast-paced with cool weapons, the stealth adds a nice challenge and just flying around and blowing stuff up is cathartic in a morose way. The problem is that these are the only three notes the game knows how to play. Every mission is either about the action, the stealth or blowing buildings up. The game does try to add tougher enemies and more restricted areas, but it's not enough to keep Destroy All Humans from becoming repetitive and, to put it bluntly, kind of boring.

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It doesn't help that the alien weapons aren't all that exciting. Don't get me wrong, zapping people with the ray gun is great and I especially like how you can kill multiple enemies at once, but the rest of the arsenal is lacking and only needed in certain circumstances. The anal probe gun, for example, is funny in concept, but isn't as useful or effective as your regular weapon. What this game needed to do was take a page from the Ratchet & Clank playbook and overwhelm the player with all kinds of fun and zany alien guns. The four we get in this remake are lame and forgettable.

And that's true of so much of Destroy All Humans. The game is in so much of a hurry to get to the good stuff that it doesn't have time to figure out where it's going. Some of the best stuff in the game is toying with the rural Midwest farmers at the beginning, but we're done with that after only a couple short training missions. The different locations (which include stops in fictional Southern California and Washington D.C.) are largely underutilized and not much fun to explore. It's as if the game goes on auto-pilot for the middle chunk, drowning us in small locations running the exact same types of missions. It's not until the very end when things ramp up again, but even that feels like it comes out of nowhere and the comedy isn't as biting as the setup would suggest.

It's also not very long. Considering the era it came out in, I was expecting a 12- or 15-hour adventure, but the developers wisely kept the run time to about half that. This is one of those times when I'm glad they didn't try to make the game as long as possible, because even at 7 hours, Destroy All Humans still has a lot of repetitive filler. With a setup this fertile, it's frustrating that the game can't even maintain the momentum for a half-dozen hours.

As remakes go, this one gives you everything you want and not much more. The graphics have been dramatically improved, though they aren't going to blow you away, either. The big improvement comes to the combat, where players can now combine attacks for more varied action. You'll also find elements from the sequels (including the dash move, skate ability and lock-on system) have also been implemented, making the third-person combat a lot easier to control. This is the stuff the long-time fans of the series are going to care about, and at least in that sense the game more than delivers.

If you have strong nostalgia for Destroy All Humans, then you're going to like a lot of the changes and upgrades made to this loving remake. This new version takes everything you love about the 2005 original and gives it a fresh new coat of paint and some much-needed gameplay tweets. Unfortunately, they didn't fix the story mode, which never fully commits to the gag. Although it's initially fun, the concept of playing the alien invading Earth runs out of steam quickly by repeating the same three missions for seven straight hours. This Destroy All Humans remake only scratches the surface of the incredible things you can do with such a great concept.