I've always been enthralled by aliens. Astonishing stories like what happened in Roswell have rippled through pop culture for nearly a century, and as a result, aliens have made regular appearances in every form of media. Humanity has an indubitable fascination with what lies beyond the stars. It seems increasingly unlikely that we're alone in the universe, so maybe we'll be seeing real aliens before too long. I think many of us have science fiction-influenced fantasies of humanity existing alongside massive numbers of otherworldly, intelligent creatures. A great number of people are understandably terrified though of encountering some malicious alien civilization who seeks only to enslave or destroy us all.
While the nightmarish idea of aliens wiping us out is obviously quite scary, that same concept has provided plentiful material for interesting and entertaining stories. Aptly named, Destroy All Humans!, is one such video game that explores this very notion, though this is from the aliens' perspective, and it's a comedic take on the whole scenario. Our protagonist is Crypto, an alien that looks a great deal like the iconic "Grey aliens" that dominate our cultural vision of what aliens might look like. He belongs to the Furon civilization, and together with another Furon named Orthopox, they visit 1950s America to rescue yet another of their kin who has gone missing. At least that's the primary mission; Orthopox also aims to harvest human brain stems to study our peculiar behaviors.
Crypto invades a number of distinct American settings as he searches for the lost Furon. All the while, Orthopox has him conducting a massive number of experiments on the American populace. His search takes him to a Southern farming community, a small, picturesque, Midwestern town, a beautiful city on the Southern California coast, a top secret military base and lastly Washington D.C. Naturally, the story gets significantly more complicated as it progresses, and delves into the kind of secretive American intelligence projects that the CIA were conducting during the Cold War.
Destroy All Humans! is divided into just over twenty missions, with each of those settings that I listed receiving a handful of missions apiece, as well as plenty of secondary objectives. The individual settings each serve as small open worlds, where you can explore a surprisingly wide sandbox of a map and just get into random, chaotic fun by messing around with the largely unexpecting and underequipped citizens. You can easily arouse the authorities' suspicion though and get into some explosive Grand Theft Auto-esque battles with law enforcement and the U.S. military.
Crypto is equipped with a full-blown arsenal of incredibly powerful sci-fi weapons and tools, all of which can be extensively upgraded. He has access to weapons like a gun that fires bolts of electricity or another gun that fires superhot balls of energy that can melt a person down to their bones. Easily the most versatile and enjoyable tool at his disposal is the ability to use psychokinesis, where he can throw people, objects, vehicles, etc., with his mind. This can be a major asset when you're running low on ammo and have a swarm of enemies around you that need to be annihilated. On the topic of mind-based abilities, Crypto is also able to rapidly brainwash civilians and enemies to follow him or ignore him. Another massive aid to Crypto's moveset comes in the form of his dash ability, which you can use to evade incoming attacks. This move can be upgraded to give him a sort of hoverboarding like ability, where he can glide over the ground and quickly zip away from trouble.
Besides Crypto's weapons and tools, he also access to his flying saucer which is obscenely powerful. The saucer isn't available in every mission, as he's frequently enlisting stealth-based tools to navigate around the humans without causing a scene. But, given the title of the game, Crypto does often come to the conclusion to hop into the saucer and absolutely devastate the various towns and settlements that you encounter in the game. The saucer can use a tractor beam to pick up all manner of objects that his personal psychokinesis ability couldn't typically lift. It can also fire an intense death ray that scorches everything in its path and can quickly burn down entire buildings. I generally preferred the missions where I was on foot and had access to Crypto's arsenal, but it was always a fun diversion to go berserk in the saucer and just obliterate everything in sight.
Destroy All Humans! originally came out in 2005 on PS2 and Xbox, and this remake came out in 2020. The remake sought to fully recapture the tone, humor and gameplay. The new graphics are genuinely stunning. I was consistently rotating the camera around and taking in the beautiful new visuals. They maintained the original recordings from the 2005 original game, though they did improve and refine the quality of the recordings to better fit the updated presentation of the remake. The developers, Black Forest Games, did manage to rescue a scrapped mission from the original game and work it into this remake, which I think is awesome, and I'd love to see that happen with more remakes.
Destroy All Humans! is absolutely worth your time and money. If you have fond memories of the original, I have no doubts that this remake will impress you with its faithfulness to recreating that wonderful energy from Pandemic Studios' 2005 cult classic. If you've never played a Destroy All Humans! game, there's no better place to jump in than right here. Just go in with an open mind - it will give Crypto an easier time harvesting it.
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