Destroy All Humans! 2

This is another personal favourite of mine, much like its predecessor, it comes from its quirky sense of humour as well as the ability to blow up the human population of yesteryear.

Not only have we moved on from the 50s to the 60s, but we're also no longer exclusively in America as we visit the UK, Japan and Russia in a way that feels organic to the story as this is clearly meant to be a parody of the early James bond films. Let me get this out of the way right now, this game isn't racist in the slightest as there was a lot of care put into crafting the takoshima and Tunguska levels specifically to avoid the accusations of racism which yes were prevalent to media even at the time. The real controversy this game always had was a mission where crypto helps a closeted trans woman come out to her wife, said wife being a transphobe and the implication being that crypto only helps this woman specifically to ruin her life. It's a touchy subject that the remake removed to avoid a political shitstorm from modern activists due to how out of place this mission is compared to the rest of the game (personally this was my introduction to the concept of being trans and I thought it was handled reasonably well compared to other media.) Thankfully this is where the backlash towards this game ends as most reasonable people can tell that the takoshima level is a homage to the film Dr no as well as having a Godzilla reference for good measure with its boss battle there. The game is careful in making the kgb the only evil Russians as it depicts Russian civilians as struggling under their regime as a way of not stereotyping them all as evil communists (they're even critical of communism if you read their minds.) Tunguska and the moon are references to the spy who loved me and moonraker respectively, meaning their inclusions feel natural to the story as well. That leaves us with Albion and bay city which the game lampoons the mods and hippies respectively, meaning that if anything, the game is merely critical of these particular subcultures from the 60’s rather than the decade itself. I'm sorry I had to talk about the controversies of this game, but I'm tired of people attacking it for stuff it isn't even guilty of (or at worst, was unaware it was insensitive towards.)

Moving onto the gameplay itself, it retains the mindless fun and action of its predecessor as crypto once again is armed with the zap ray gun, the disintegrator, the ion detonator, sonic boom, quantum deconstructor and the admittedly offensive anal probe (which the game acknowledges as being problematic.) There are also new weapons such as a dislocator, an anti-gravity well, a meteor gun, a burrow beast and my personal favourite, a hologram of gastro who's a furon warrior who fights beside our hero with sassy comments about his hatred of humanity. The story is admittedly nonsense, however, so are the bond films (barring the Daniel Craig entries) so this was intentional. I adore Natalia as this games bond girl as she starts off as your typical girl boss only to slowly but surely fall for crypto’s affections as the story progresses without compromising her tough as nails attitude. This is how you write a compelling female lead as she has strong motivations for aiding our mostly misogynistic hero whilst obviously needing to see past his facade of being a sexist pig to see what a good person (or alien in this case) he truly is. The humour is still top notch, especially with the interactions between crypto and pox as the former is relentless towards how the latter has been reduced to a hologram due to dying at the start of the game much to his annoyance. As I said earlier, there's barely any racial stereotypes to be found in the game, it only goes as far as Japanese and Russian characters speaking in broken English and British characters being overly posh which I can't see offending anyone who isn't terminally online. There’s also a multiplayer aspect of the game where a clone of crypto can play alongside him which is a nice touch the game adds, although I will say the multiplayer content is a bit lacking as it was clearly made to be played in single player.

Much like the previous game, the remake for this game also doesn't have its own entry on this site, so I'll briefly mention it here. It once again streamlines the controls so that they're far more convenient to use which of course leads to slight redesigns of the missions to accommodate for the revamped control scheme. The visuals are once again immaculate, particularly in takoshima which looks gorgeous with its blossom trees that of course blows the bland graphics of the original out of the water.

I apologise for getting political with this review, but I'm sick and tired of people claiming this game is offensive when it really isn't (they're likely thinking of the third game which absolutely is racist and sexist.) Please don't let these morons turn you off from playing this game as I promise you will have a great time with it.

Destroy All Humans 2!, the sequel to my favorite childhood mayhem machine, was an exciting prospect at the time of its release. I always deemed it as a satisfying successor to the first game, but I always believed that the first one was still the superior of the two. The main reason for this was because the premise of alien invaders in a game spoofing the 1960s didn’t make any sense to me. Horror films of the 1960s catalyzed what I would consider the beginning of the elements that we still associate with the genre. The 1960s revisited gothic horror and made it gorier, Night of the Living Dead laid the foundation for the zombie subgenre, and controversial movies like Psycho and Peeping Tom chilled us with killers that felt too close to home. The “atomic age” of horror films that featured alien invaders immediately became laughably quaint, and Ed Wood’s notorious Plan 9 From Outer Space only contributed a minute fraction of the cause. Obviously, the overall premise of Destroy All Humans does not represent the horror landscape of the decade. Fears regarding the Cold War still lingered, but events like the war in Vietnam shifted the context of our overseas tribulations. Alien invasions in the 1960s seemed all too out of place. However, I now realize that Crypto still has an integral role in the 1960s. Destroy All Humans! 2 (Make War, Not Love as the original additional subtitle) shifts the atomic age horror tribute direction from the first game to focus on the satirical aspects, with Crypto as the roastmaster general. Also, one must consider that sticking to the familiar ground of the 1950s could’ve inhibited the evolution that comes with a sequel, which Destroy All Humans needed.

A decade might be a lengthy span of time, but Destroy All Humans 2 is still a direct sequel that continues the story after the events of the first game. Crypto’s unimpeachable reign as “president” of the USA has been going swimmingly for the past ten years. Everything has been smooth sailing for the malevolent, pint-sized extraterrestrial until the KGB intercept the location of the Furon mothership hovering over Earth’s gravitational pull and blows it to smithereens with a launch of heat-seeking ballistic missiles. Pox is pulverized on impact but manages to store his essence in a mobile holographic device as a convenient means of communication. Crypto’s mission of recovering the flotsam of the Furon mothership isn’t only a task spurred by necessity; it’s also fueled by vengeance, to make the Ruskies pay for hitting the Furons closer than any other earthling ever has.

The areas in the first Destroy All Humans were confined to American soil. While the restrictions made sense in its attempt to concisely illustrate the culture of America during the 1950s, the narrative direction limited the span of areas the game could cover. We cannot forget that Crypto’s imperialistic endeavor in the first game was to conquer Earth, and simply seizing power over America is small potatoes for the Furon empire. Ten years later, Crypto’s mission of world domination is still a work in progress. Fortunately, the United States is but a small fraction of the globe left unsubdued. One of the biggest appeals of Destroy All Humans 2 is expanding the settings of areas past the entrapments of America’s territories as the player gets to take Crypto on a world tour. The game starts on American ground in Bay City but soon after spending some time in Crypto’s kingdom, he will fly his saucer over the Atlantic to the cloudy streets of Albion in Britain, the Asian metropolis of Takoshima, the remote tundra of Tunguska, all the way to landing on Earth’s moon. An alien’s operation to overtake the Earth isn’t thorough enough without claiming our orbiting celestial body that shimmers in the night sky. Each of these areas have a direct correlation with real-world places that hold historical significance with the 1960s. Bay City is intended as a broad metropolis that could be any city situated along California’s central western bay; but it’s pretty obvious that it’s mirroring San Francisco, the de facto capital of the American hippy movement in the latter half of the 1960s. Albion, also known as London with the moniker of England’s original name, depicts the stylish Mod culture that ran rampant across the country's youths throughout the decade. Tunguska is a contrasting taste of the Soviet Union and let’s just say that moon setting coincides with the game’s time of July, 1969 for a reason. The only area whose connections to 1960’s counterculture and the historical relevance is unclear lies with the Tokyo-inspired Takoshima area, but who needs an excuse to be able to wreak havoc all over this picturesque island metropolis?

As one can imagine, broadening the range of Earth settings in Destroy All Humans 2 satisfyingly expands the bounded scope presented in the first game. While I much prefer laying waste to a wider selection of cultures, there is more substance to each of these areas besides being spaced out more widely on the globe. Each area in the first game acted as a compact sandbox for Crypto as he hops around causing chaos. The only level in the first game that effectively exuded that sense of freedom was Santa Modesta due to its widespread area and reasonable level of backlash against Crypto. The wrath of the humans progressively became more immense as each subsequent area increased the rate of fire, which unfortunately created an imbalance of the earlier levels feeling too relaxed while the later levels could potentially trounce Crypto in seconds. Crypto’s continued presence across every area in the second game will progressively increase five alert levels instead of four, with the forces that come with accumulating these levels being less defined. Nevertheless, they attack Crypto with the same amount of fervor. In the first game, Crypto simply walking among the humans was enough to garner the attention of the Majestic, the loftiest alert level faction, in only a few minutes. The sequel’s highest alert levels will only commence if Crypto really flexes his might and does some serious damage. Police squadrons and military forces are also relatively the same in size and presence in every area, which greatly aids a sense of equal opportunity for freedom matched with consequence across each area.

As for the areas themselves, the developers wisely chose to compound on what Santa Modesta presented and used it as a template for every area in the sequel. Specifically, Santa Modesta offered a breadth that fostered exploration more so than the other small compact areas in the first game. Capitol City might also be an exception, but it hardly feels fair when giant tesla coils immediately eviscerate Crypto’s saucer and the entire Majestic agency is waiting for him with their guns locked and loaded at every landing site. The way that each area in Destroy All Humans takes inspiration from Santa Modesta’s example is by offering vast playgrounds with a consistent geographical theme while presenting districts throughout the area to diversify the layout. Being that most of these areas are thematically based on some of the most populated cities in the world, mapping out an assorted urban plain most likely wasn’t difficult. Bay City features most notable San Francisco staples like the outdoor hippy mecca of Golden Gate Park, the steep streets of Haight-Ashbury, and the American base of the KGB situated in the middle of the map is vaguely similar to Alcatrazz Island. Takoshima presents the most congested city setting in the game, with backroad streets littered with beautiful cherry blossom trees that connect the concrete jungle to a maze-like Zen Temple. Off the main road, islets feature feuding ninja communes, a castle on a hill, and an active volcano. While the remote setting of the frigid Soviet industrial town Tunguska recalls the fact that Destroy All Humans areas are better when they are sprawling, it still manages to exude the same design philosophy as the others nevertheless. Solaris, the name of the Russian research settlement on the moon, is the only area that is not formatted like the others, mostly due to the barren nature of the setting. However, it can be excused here because the moon is the perfect last area, for no other place on Earth could serve as the pinnacle of the planet’s expedition. With the addition of a much coveted map that highlights every district, the areas in Destroy All Humans 2 finally emulate the quasi-open world format of the first game consistently and adequately.

These areas also feel more lived in because they all offer more content. The main missions in the first game seemed implemented by the developers due to obligation more than anything. Most missions in the first Destroy All Humans end as quickly as they started, with only one or two objectives before the player could hightail off to murder people at their own leisure. Destroy All Humans 2’s story is far more intricate than the one from the previous game, so the developers accommodated the campaign with weightier missions. Every area has at least five main missions, and each of these offer a hearty range of objectives to keep the player occupied. One may assume that longer missions would bloat the experience, but elongating the tasks is exactly what the missions needed to uphold the story without seeming like an afterthought. A better sense of organization aids these missions because returning to the mothership to unlock the next mission in the first game and hopping around the map tended to be a jarring upset in pacing. Since the mothership has been wiped out of the stratosphere, Crypto now begins a mission by conversing with Pox or another NPC somewhere on the field, and it feels much more like how missions are started in typical open-world games. All of the missions in Destroy All Humans 2 are all killer with no filler, and surpass any of the missions from the first game. The climactic point of Takoshima where Crypto and Natalya scale Mount Seiyuki and take down a Kaiju rampaging through the city streets is so bloody epic that the game runs the risk of peaking half-way into the campaign. Other than the main missions, the player can also complete odd jobs that range in objectives or Arkvoodle missions where Crypto manufactures an international cult using that lascivious idol who grants him places to land his saucer as its omnipotent figure. The missions across the game still have a difficulty curve wonkier than a slinky, but perhaps that’s just a trope of the open-world genre.

Action seems to take precedence over any other gameplay elements in Destroy All Humans 2. With the James Bond-esque intro sequence in the main menu, it’s easy to see which fictional 1960s icon the game draws its inspiration from. The bevy of stealth missions that the first game offered are blown to the wayside in favor of more overt destruction. Given that the name of the game is “Destroy” All Humans and not “Evade” All Humans, the player can be eternally grateful. To encourage the more bombastic direction, the game endows Crypto’s arsenal with some new toys. Every weapon from the previous game is back in its full glory, with an upgraded Anal Probe now serving as a useful weapon instead of a extraction tool. For what already proved to be an extensive bunch, Destroy All Humans 2 doubles the total of Crypto's weapons on foot. The Dislocator launches discs that send people and vehicles on a nauseatingly bumpy ride, the mothership’s janitor Gastro blasts at foes from a hovering hologram, and the Meteor Strike summons a barrage of meteors that can level skyscrapers. Not since the peacemaker nuke from Jak 3 has a gun inspired so much awe with its destructive potential. The Burrow Beast is an optional weapon unlocked via completing the Arkvoodle missions, and unlocking a monster that gulps up people from under the ground would’ve been more exciting if the player didn’t have to beat the game first. Each saucer weapon from the first game also reappears, with only one lackluster Anti-Gravity Field added to the roster. The weapon selection in the first game was practical, but it’s hard to return to what is now a piddly number of options with so many tools of chaos at the player’s disposal here.

Even without weapons, Crypto can create enough of a commotion with just his mind. The essentials of Crypto’s psychic powers also carry over to this game, but they’ve been tweaked a bit instead of being directly built upon like the weapons. Crypto’s abilities are no longer inhibited by a psychic gauge, so now he can whisk anything off of the ground and suspend them in the air perpetually. However, this does not mean that Crypto’s brain is an inexhaustible source of unlimited potential. Upgrades are much more commonplace in the sequel with the plentiful Furotech Cells funding the expansion purchased at Pox’s mobile marketplace. Crypto’s psychic powers, however, are upgraded via the “geneblend” system where he slurps up people across many nationalities and vocations using his saucer’s Abducto Beam and splices their genetic material. Although the process may seem like a fetch quest grind, Crypto’s perverse scientific experiment pays off because the ability to transmogrify any vehicle for ammunition is a godsend. Instead of using the transparent holobob, Crypto rather “body snatches” an unsuspecting victim off the street and can literally walk miles in their footsteps before their life meter depletes completely due to Crypto’s presence in their bodies. It’s disturbingly parasitic. To avoid causing attention while body snatching, Crypto can use a timely named distraction technique called “Free Love” where every human in the vicinity will dance around nonchalantly to a groovy guitar lick. I appreciate all of the new abilities, but psychokinesis was more fun in the first game. I don’t know what’s changed over the course of a decade, but everybody in the 1960s is so resistant to being flung into walls by psychic powers that the impact barely leaves a scratch. One could argue that this was part of an improvement to fix something broken from the first game, but Destroy All Humans 2 is already rife with graphical glitches and framerate issues as is.

The satirical scope may not be as pronounced here unlike the first game, but at least the sequel is as side-splittingly hilarious. I lamented that more missions in the first game didn’t feature conversations where the player could cycle through dialogue options but in the sequel, the player can make Crypto spout countless lines of caustic comments while talking to NPCs. I never get tired of hearing him talk. I’d implore the player to try a drinking game whenever the game makes any timely pop culture references or intentional anachronisms, but I do not want to be responsible for any alcohol-related deaths. Some of the humor is racy (especially in Takoshima) and based in stereotypes, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t guffaw whenever Crypto made immature prank calls, a Japanese cop spoke unfitting jive, or Crypto enacting his plan to sic the Russian cosmonauts on the Furon’s Blisk rivals by telling them that they plan to take away their vodka. Crypto gleefully rides away with the bedlam that this causes with the hippy-dippy song “She Changes Like the Weather” playing like the stinker he is. It’s comedic gold. However, none of these humorous moments are enough to establish a concise ethos, but there is still something substantial here.

The prime point that Destroy All Humans 2 seems to convey with its satire is that even in what was perceived as a new age of enlightenment, mankind and the society that they created hadn’t changed all that much. No amount of LSD can cure human vices or their stubborn obliviousness. Reusing some of the same types of jokes while reading people’s minds might have signaled a lack of new humorous material, but it could possibly illustrate that nothing has changed. Crypto consistently comments that his cult is the “opiate of the masses,” a phrase that correlates drugs with religion. Dirty, hubristic iconoclasts that defined the counterculture of this era throw down their values in exchange for the most appealing thing Crypto can offer, which of course is a bunch of empty promises. The first game expressed that people were stupidly impressionable, and the sequel comments that things like drug-induced “enlightenment” and “free love” are just as big of a farce as the patriotism that fueled the 1950s. Crypto’s status as an alien gives him a position of an outsider looking in, an unbiased being without the follies that beset mankind.

That is, Crypto was the perfect specimen for critiquing human nature in the first game. Crypto was an exceptional alien soldier with a sense of snarkiness behind his venomous contempt for the human race. In the sequel, he’s practically gone native. Too much time masquerading among the humans has caused Crypto to adopt a sense of appreciation for their ways of life and has softened him up quite a bit. One could argue that this is due the sequel’s Crypto being a clone of the one from the first game after that one unexpectedly died, but Planet Furon just doesn’t possess the same frills of sex, drugs, and rock and roll like Earth does. That, and his newly acquired sexual appendage almost makes him one of us, and Pox detests it more than anyone. Crypto’s character is explored thoroughly here as more than an intergalactic harbinger of death and persecution. His arc is detailed through his relationship with Natalya, a rogue KGB spy and Crypto’s love interest who aids Crypto throughout the game. Despite approaching Natalya in a sleazy manner that makes Andy Dick look gentlemanly by comparison, the two have an odd chemistry with one another that works. Eventually, she starts to warm up to Crypto’s advances and starts to like him. When Natalya gets killed by Blisk/Russian leader Milinkov at the climax of the game, the player almost feels as devastated as Crypto. Maybe I can sympathize with Crypto trying to bat out of his league here, but maybe Crypto’s newfound admiration (in many forms of it) is a testament that Furons and humans aren’t so different. Through fraternizing with humans and understanding them, it could lead to a peaceful society between the two (although it's not likely). Crypto ends up saving the human race from the Blisk at the end of the game and if that's not ironic, I don’t know what is. After all, Arkvoodle, the benevolent creator of the Furons, is just as self-righteous and hedonistic as any of the hippies.

It is now very apparent to me that Destroy All Humans 2 is vastly superior to its predecessor. The game is a sequel that knew the previous title had much to improve upon and thus made an effort to do so and succeeded. Destroy All Humans 2 adds so much to the first game’s template and augments everything from the weapons, areas, missions, etc. I thought that continuing the premise of an alien imperialist taking over Earth in the 1960s was inappropriate, but delving into the material has proven to me that it can still work. The augmentation has even uplifted the B-movie fabric of the premise and presentation to a depth unseen in the first game. The most unfortunate aspect of all is that despite all of the improvements, the myriad of technical issues in Destroy All Humans 2 that were already present in the first game deter it’s overall quality. I wish I could overlook this with all of its positive attributes, but it’s too significant of a detractor. Nevertheless, at least Destroy All Humans 2 maintains the same maniacal thrills that the first game had.