Destroy All Humans! joins a growing list of remakes and remasters that are set on capitalizing on your nostalgia, and given the properties that THQ Nordic bought up upon its resurrection, we’re likely not going to see a stop to them anytime soon. Nearly every publisher across the industry is keen on revamping and applying a new coat of paint to an old classic. While several of them shape the original to play a bit more modern, others tend to keep the gameplay systems as they were. Destroy All Humans! leans towards both camps as while the game has certainly seen a change to several core systems and its visuals for the better, the outdated mission design, poorly implemented stealth mechanics, and writing keeps the game firmly set in the past.
Developer Black Forest Games has done something rather interesting with this remake, as while the story and mission structure has remained the same, the feel and flow of the game was altered to make it feel like players remember. Often, when we think back about an older game, our brain tends to fill in gaps regarding the experiences we’ve had, and more often than not, we tend to remember things better than they actually were. Going back and watching several playthroughs of the original, and what I recall about it myself, it is certainly a title that hasn’t aged as well as I remember. The updated visuals are certainly pleasing and do a great job at enhancing its gameplay, but as I’ve mentioned a few times thus far, the core mission design could have used a bit of enhancing itself. I’ve seen several remakes keep poorly implemented and outdated mechanics that are often more than a decade old, and frankly, that should be something to address and fix when revamping it to modern audiences. While part of handling a remake is to honor what came before it, the most important aspect of any video game is to ensure you are making the best possible product you can.
Destroy All Humans! released on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 back in 2005, and while it wasn’t the most revolutionary game of its time, it was certainly an enjoyable experience where you would wreak havoc as an angry alien in fairly large human-occupied environments. You’d travel on foot as Crypto-137, taking over the forms of humans for some light stealth sections, or go in guns-hot with an assortment of alien weaponry, electrocuting or disintegrating humankind as you saw fit, as well as cutting loose in an alien saucer and blowing up buildings and decimating the enemy forces in your way. This remake sees all of this come back in glorious high definition, making for the most visually pleasing entry in the series by far. While some of the more urban areas don’t quite reach the highs of the more open areas like Turnipseed Farm, which is strangely only used for the tutorial, or Area 42, which contains a whole new mission added for this remake, there are still plenty of solid-looking areas that elevate this remake over some of the more recent ones.
Taking place on Earth in the late 1950s, you play as a Furon named Cryptosporidium 137, better known to us as Crypto-137. He’s the clone of Crypto-136, who exists because the Furon people have relied on cloning due to their races’ lack of any genitalia, a result of unregulated atomic weapon usage causing a mutation in the species. This excessive cloning led to a massive long term degradation of their DNA, but thanks to a scout ship sent out into the far reaches of space, it was discovered that Earth housed an ancient strand of Furon DNA, one powerful enough to kickstart the Furon race all over again. This caused Crypto-136 to be sent to earth to harvest brain stems from the human populace, only to be captured and be followed to earth by Crypto-137 in an effort to take over the mission, as well as track down his cloned brother in the process.
This remake features a wealth of new features that go a long way to ensuring the game feels fun. You can now multitask between powers as many can be mixed and used at the same time, such as lifting objects or people and firing your gun at the same time while also mashing down the button to extract brains for a boost to your shield. You can also grant more instructions to the humans you brainwash, such as having them follow you around, and if they have weapons, they can use them to protect you. You can also transmog items into ammo, which was a feature that wasn’t in the series until its sequel, making it easier to accumulate more ammo for the weapons that don’t recharge automatically. You’ll also have more upgrades for Crypto-137 and your ship, and missions will contain bonus objectives so you can earn more DNA currency to afford those enhancements. Movement is also more flexible as the jetpack is much easier to control and given more importance to the overall gameplay. Crypto can also hover around as if he is floating just above the ground, making for some extremely satisfying traversal, that plays into the racing activities later on and makes some boss battles far more engaging. This remake also sees the inclusion of a cut level from the original, where you’ll investigate an airforce base in Area 42. It’s a decent enough mission that feels perfectly added in such a way that it doesn’t feel out of place and if you had told me it was a new mission, I likely wouldn’t have remembered it not being there some 15 years ago.
Across the 23 missions you’ll have as Crypto-137, you’ll fall into a gameplay loop of just a few different styles of gameplay, some overused more so than others. Several missions have you using a hologram-like device to disguise yourself as one of the human’s walking around, using your mind-reading capabilities to extract important information from a variety of NPCs to unleashing hell with your alien weaponry. While there are some satisfying moments with those first two aspects of gameplay, it’s the latter where Destroy All Humans! not only gets its name from but with how extremely fun combat in this game can be is where the sweet spot of this game resides. The stealth systems are a bit clunky, and while you’ll have a few obstacles that look to counter your efforts, such as secret agents and EMP devices, you’ll often just hit the hologram button when its energy is low, ensuring your disguise is still up and running, as long as there is another human nearby, that is. It’s an alright system but it never really feels exciting or engaging.
Crypto-137 has the ability to read minds, and this leads you to discover important things about the mission, or passwords to areas you don’t have clearance for. While disguising your self as someone who has clearance is mostly effective in some areas, there are a few missions where you’ll have to pay attention to what is said during your mind reading. You can mind-read anyone you come across but there are only a small handful of different thoughts and this becomes far too repetitive. The developer mentioned in an old interview that they recorded new dialogue given they were able to populate the world with more characters, but honestly, in most levels, I rarely heard more than a dozen different thoughts, several of them all by the same voices. Hearing the same “Stella!!” by over a dozen guards on the same army base gets old real fast.
While some missions result in you just unleashing hell, either on foot or in your ship, most of these encounters are far too short and in fact, some missions can end while you are still engaged in battle. Once the two or three objectives are completed in the mission, the level just ends. While the game sticks true to the original, this abruptness is far too noticeable and some levels are done in just minutes. It’s a shame that more wasn’t done to flesh out the missions and allow you to get more time in with some locations. There are whole levels that you won’t really spend a lot of time in or some sections of those levels that are completely neglected during a mission. While you can revisit these areas for activities I’ll dive into shortly, it still feels somewhat disappointing in how short some missions end up being. Again, I know this is in keeping true to the original, but there should be some type of responsibility to make the most engaging product you can, regardless of it being a remake, a remaster, or a whole new experience.
The mission objectives and ability to revisit locations do add to the overall game’s length and replayability, allowing you to perform a series of objectives like killing the farmer’s wife with a chicken, not touching the ground as you hop from rooftop to rooftop altering resident’s antennas, or eliminating enemy forces with certain weapons or hitman style murders, such a dropping a crate on a scientist or causing their BBQ to explode in their face. Missions do have a fun variety added to them with these objectives that I wish the game had a reload checkpoint feature in case you mess up an objective and don’t want to restart the whole mission just to see it through. As you complete an area, you can go back and revisit it, taking part in 4 different activities such as racing, abductions, or causing a ton of carnage either on foot in rampage or via your ship in the armageddon activity. You also have the freedom to track down the collectible space probes that are scattered around each of the six locations. This revisiting allows you to really see much of the new visuals as some locations that don’t get the justice they are deserved throughout the campaign. While there are some invisible walls here and there, each location is still plenty big for what you’re able to do within each environment.
Combat is easily the most changed aspect of this remake as the ability to multi-task abilities can make for some really engaging encounters. You can pick up another agent, all while still shooting at nearby threats, then use the targeting lock to whip him into another enemy, all while slamming down the button to extract a brain, an item you’ll use to refresh your shield a small portion. Combine this with flying around in your jet pack, or using your hoverboard-like abilities to skate around them, all while target locking your various death rays and you have an extremely satisfying combat experience. Crypto-137 has a few weapons to use; a disintegrating ray which turns its targets into a pile of ash, the Zap-O-Matic which slowly zaps the enemy’s health away, the Ion Detonator which launches an Ion Bomb that you can trigger for an explosion, and finally the Anal Probe which is largely useless and mostly there as a gag for one single level. The weapons all feel fun, and while the majority of the game is pretty simple, the final level really puts your skills to the test with two back to back bosses, the latter of which can destroy your shield in seconds, should you not be agile enough to avoid damage. It was certainly a fight that felt a bit at odds with the rest of the game in terms of its difficulty.
For your ship, which can finally move up and down, it has own assortment of weaponry as well; You can fire constant blasts with your death ray, a sonic boom that deals some pretty substantial damage, another devastating attack with the Quantum Deconstructor, and the ability to pick up objects and throw them with the Repulse-O-Tron. In many ways, much of what you can do in your ship is a mirror to what Crypto-137 can do himself. You can also trigger a shield should missiles get too close and damage your ship. Should your shield take damage, you can target vehicles or the robotic mechs walking around to refill them by sucking away at their energy, and this becomes essential in one of the final two boss encounters. Flying around in the ship is fun, but only a few levels actually let you really have fun with it.
One of the last issues I have with this remake is the audio. While it’s nice to hear the original voices again, especially the Jack Nicholson type tones J. Grant Albrecht gives to Crypto-137, the audio quality isn’t terribly great and would have benefitted from not just being re-recorded, especially since Richard Steven Horvitz, who voices your alien leader, Orthopox, still sounds exactly the same, sporting the exact voice he gave to Kaos in the Skylander games. But the chance to just add more voicework to aid in some of the titles painful writing would have been a welcome change here. While some new audio was recorded for the new level added into the game, and the additional thoughts to its expanded and cartoony civilians, this was the same problem THQ Nordic had with their SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom remake as the audio was rather poor and repetitive there as well. Though, I will say the lady screaming “Oh Yeah! Make it rough!” when I grabbed her with my telekinesis powers and then threw her a country mile made me chuckle far more than I would have thought.
Destroy All Humans! is one of the better remakes in recent memory despite the problems with its mission structure, writing, and voice work that should have seen the same care and attention to what they were able to do with the visuals and the feel of traversal and combat. It’s a game that does what it can to modernize how it plays, but the structure around it still feels far too dated. While there are those who will be excited much of the game is literally untouched, I just have higher expectations for remakes of games over a decade old. There is certainly a vastly enjoyable game here with what Black Forest Games was able to do, offering up a gorgeous remake of a classic, and if this is to test waters for a whole new entry in the series, well, consider me very interested.
A review code of Destroy All Humans! was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.