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After years of saving humanity from aliens in countless games, we finally have a chance to play the role of the aliens in Pandemic Studios and THQ?s Destroy all Humans!. Whether in a UFO or on the ground, your job is to disintegrate and/or probe any humans that get in your way. Unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty shallow and the game is rather short, but the presentation is amazing and the humor found throughout the game make this one worth playing in spite of its shortcomings.


Story and Setting

In Destroy All Humans!, you play as an alien of the Furon race named Crypto Sporidium 137. The Furon survive almost exclusively through cloning technology, but after hundreds of years of using and re-using the same DNA stock the quality of the clones is starting to suffer. The Furon were smart, though, and long ago they implanted traces of the original DNA into the brain stems of human beings on Earth. Your mission, as Crypto 137, is to explore the planet Earth in search of your predecessor (Crypto 136, obviously) who crash landed as well as harvest human brain stems so the Furon genetic code can be restored to its pure form. Along the way you will discover government conspiracies and a secret government agency called Majestic that is dead set on capturing Furon technology and using it for themselves.

The game takes place in 1950?s America and everything plays out just like the corny sci-fi B-movies of the era. The game?s take on 50?s culture is incredibly well done and all of the tongue-in-cheek humor and references to the era really draw you in.

Gameplay

It is just too bad the gameplay doesn?t really hold up against the great presentation and setting. There are two distinct sections of gameplay ? those where you are on foot and those where you are in your UFO ? but neither of them provide very much depth and the game starts to feel repetitive very quickly. On foot the game controls like any other third-person shooter. You run and jump and you have a jet pack that allows you to get on top of buildings and stuff and you also have psychic powers as well as weapons. The weapons include disintegrator guns and anal probes and the goal is to kill humans and steal their brain stems. Similar to Grand Theft Auto, there is a tiered alert system where if you cause too much havoc increasingly powerful opposition will arrive to take you out. You can use your psychic powers to disguise yourself as a human, read peoples? minds, hypnotize, extract brains, as well as telekinesis. All of these powers sound impressive, but once you fling a few cows with telekinesis and read the thoughts of a half-dozen people, the novelty starts to wear off and the only thing left is the shooting aspect which gets old fast since it isn?t anything you haven?t already seen before.

Inside your ship, things aren?t that much better. You have a death ray and eventually get sonic blasts and quantum explosions, but once you blow up a couple of buildings you have pretty much seen everything that you can do. You can pick up people and objects with an abduction beam, but all you can do is fling them around and that isn?t fun for very long.

A major issue with the gameplay is that the levels are pretty small and it is very easy to go to far and get a scolding from your alien supervisor. Invisible walls are super-lame and they give the game a claustrophobic feel that really hinders the experience.

Overall, there just isn?t enough to the gameplay to keep you interested. Upgrades are spaced out enough that you have something new to play with all the time, but once the shine of your new toy wears off the gameplay is back to the same pattern. Some things such as reading minds and hypnotizing people are genuinely fun, but there just isn?t enough of it. DAH only takes about 8 hours to beat, which is disappointing, but there are a lot of side missions and hidden items to find and the rewards are actually pretty good. Since the gameplay is so bland, however, you?ll likely beat it once and never go back.

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