Destroy All Humans! was originally a Ps2 game, but since I don't know if I'll ever get around to playing that version, I just got the steam 'remake'. So this is a remake from the ground up, using (who would of guessed) Unreal engine 4.
The premise is pretty simple, you and your alien buddies come to earth and want to take it over for resources. The game has a couple dozen missions where first you're shown a Upgrade screen, and a overworld map, and you can freely choose which mission you want to do. This part is kind of confusing though, because its like the overworld map shows you 'unlocked locations' and you can return to previous locations you've completed a main mission on, and once you return to these locations theres these copy paste side activities you can do, why? I'm not sure. I think it just gives you more money to buy things from the upgrade store. I never really bothered returning to these completed locations to do the side activities but I guess its a cool addition. So what the game really consists of is choosing 'New Mission!' from the overworld screen, and doing those.
The game is full of its own personality in terms of cutscenes, dialogue, humor, and writing. There game has its own unique artstyle which is kind of a mix between cartoony and...something else, I'm not sure how to describe it. Everything is just exaggerated. The main character even has that kind of macho badass vibe like Duke Nukem or something, he talks in that kind of deep tone and has all sorts of funny comebacks and quips. The games sense of humor is notable and somewhat misanthropic or something, where the humans are portrayed as tribalistic, dumb, clueless fearmongering monkeys. They'll constantly talk about the fear of Communists, how even the alien invasion is because of communism, they keep calling the aliens 'little green people' when infact, the aliens are grey. I guess hinting at the difference in how the species eyes work? Theres even some sections where you have to choose dialogue like for instance one part where you disguise yourself as a politician and you have to say the 'right' choices that people would want to hear, and it's always the dumbest and lowest common demoninator options. So yeah the game is pretty funny at times.
The missions have a few basic varities. The good thing, is they're all pretty short so it's a good game for quick drop in and out sessions, or passing the controller back and forth. But usually the missions want you to either go destroy some things, go Stealth by means of disgusing yourself as a human and enter some place undetected, go pickup some things, go turn some switches, go kill x people or enter your saucer and destroy everything. There are a few outliers besides this basic foruma such as Escort missions, or following some vechile to some location, but this is the bulk of what you'll be doing. The way the objectives work though, is on the HUD it will tell you what to do, but it will also say Optional objective and these will constantly shift and change as the level goes on which I found really cool and interesting. So for instance if your objective is to just kill people, it will also say Optional objective: Drown people. So it will keep giving you new ways to optionally do things, I think the only real reason to do these optional objectives is to get more money for the upgrades shop, but I did find it fun doing these sometimes. I didn't always do them, more often than not I just ignored them, but it was cool to have the option to complete the objectives in unique ways.
Unfortunately the game does have a handful of flaws and annoyances that on the whole made the experience less than it could have been. For example, a game called 'Destroy All Humans!' i wasnt expecting almost half of it to be about stealth and sneaking past people. Like what is this, Splinter Cell? almost every other mission would be some thing where you have to awkwardly fumble with these stealth mechanics swapping in and out of human bodies to progress to these restricted zones, and if you get caught its an instant fail. Suffice to say I didn't really like these segments, maybe once or twice is fine, but it felt like almost half the game. The actual combat parts are lackluster too for multiple reasons. There is only 4 weapons, and it felt like 3 of them sucked. Theres the default zapping gun thing, theres the Anal Probe which I couldnt even figure out what the point of it was it just felt weak, theres the Disintegration Ray which is like a typical sci-fi laser blaster projectile shooter which felt like the most 'gun' of them all, then theres a grenade launcher thing. Well I ended up just using the Disintegration Ray and fully upgrading it for the whole game because the other weapons felt so weak and annoying to use. The thing is, your guns have limited ammo, but getting ammo in this game is kinda the dumbest thing ever. To get ammo you have to run around looking for random objects to transform into ammo packs. So you just run around looking for Garbage cans, fences, pylons, random shit, then you press the transform into ammo button, then you have to wait for like a 10 second animation to play then you get like 20% of your ammo. It just sucks and is awkward and the animation is way too long. It makes most of the guns suck because for example the grenade launcher gun only starts with 5 bullets max, then you run out, then you have to transform random shit into ammo and wait 10 seconds, then you get only 1 bullet back.
So yeah I mostly just used the Disintegration Ray, that atleast starts with 60 bullets and can upgrade to 120+ and it kills enemies just as fast as the rest.
To make matters kinda worse, you barely even have to engage in combat in the first place. The game just feels like a clusterfuck where every combat encounter is just waves of hundreds of guys randomly thrown around the map, and you can just fly past everyone. Because your character has this super overpowered jetpack ability that lets you just constantly fly past every single enemy and go straight for the objective. Why would I sit there killing enemies if I dont have to if theres no point? So for most of the game I didn't even engage in combat I just used the jetpack and flew right past everyone..kinda disappointing. Don't get me wrong, the controls and the flow of the movement feels good, but when its not backed with much meaningful combat segments theres just not much here. The few forced combat segments there were was fun enough, but the disappointing weapon arsenal made it kinda redundant and boring. There's a few parts where its like wave survival where you have to protect this object from enemies destroying it, or you have to prevent the Senators from entering the white house or something, these parts were the most real challenging events in the game that had meaningful combat behind them. But they didnt last long. The game has lockon amiming so you kinda just hold the Left trigger and move the joysticks to let it auto lockon to the enemies constantly then when you run out of ammo you do that whole ordeal of running around turning trashcans into ammo. Rinse repeat. The game has typical Halo style regen health so whenever you get low you just fly away and hide behind something for 10 seconds until youre good again. So Thats the all there is really to the combat.
Besides these moments, you have a significant amount of 'vehicle' segments where you have to get back in your flying saucer and destroy buildings. I really didn't like these parts because the mechanics are so convuluted and clusterfuck, the controls are weird and kind of suck, it just felt like an annoying mess. Like for instance for most of the game I had no idea how to even get health back in the saucer, turns out you need to do a similar thing as regaining ammo you need to fly around and spam the Y button on random vehicles or moving objects to get health, it feels stupid. The saucer also has 4 weapons, but it encounters the same ammo problem where you run out of ammo really quickly and for the life of me I couldnt figure out how to fucking get ammo back in the saucer. So I just ended up using the regenerating Death Ray laser gun for the whole game in the Saucer segments. So what happens here is you have to fly around and destroy the marked objects on the map, while being shot at constantly with homing missles. You can press a button to put up a shield for a second to try to block the homing missles but the timing is really specific and the shield doesnt last long so it just turns into a mess of spamming buttons. I did not really enjoy these saucer segments they were more of an annoyance than anything else because of the mess of controls, mechanical bloat and confusion, bad mechanics, annoying spam etc..
Between every mission you can choose upgrades to buy. I mostly just upgraded my shields as soon as possible so I'd die less. Its notable that the game has no difficulty selections, just one difficulty. So I'd fully upgrade my Shields for both the alien and the saucer, then I'd fully upgrade that one weapon that seemed any good, then I'd just upgrade the Saucers Laser death ray because thats the only weapon that doesnt run out of ammo for the saucer segments. Theres a few other upgrades that are notable such as this Dash ability that lets you knock down enemies if you dash near them, or a 'Skate' ability which kinda gives you some invisible skateboard if you hold B which was kinda fun to traverse with. You can choose to upgrade your stealth abilities but fuck that. But overall the upgrade system isn't much to write about, it wasn't that exciting for me.
The game has a few boss fights but really all it amounts to is strafing in a circle, holding down the shoot button, running around and doing the stupid ammo pickup thing, repeat.
The game however is pretty short, I beat it in 6 hours, the last boss was a gauntlet of intense bullshit. A saucer segment with this giant mech boss you have to shoot in the middle, luckily I realized how to regen health at this point so it was just a thing of constantly flying around spamming the Y button trying to regen health from random objects, while trying to laser down the bosses health. I beat it without failing that much thankfully. Then its phase 2 with this on foot ending boss girl in this big construction site arena where she's constantly doing flips and jumps. If you get too far away from her she shoots you through the walls or some shit, Couldnt really understand what was going on. She starts to regenerate health if you hurt her too much so you have to destroy the health station things. But overall I beat it in only a few attempts, though it was pretty hard and frustrating (mostly due to the ammo pickup bullshit).
So yeah thats the game. I wonder if the PS2 original was better, if this remake fucked things up. It kinda feels bad playing the remake first but fuck it, I was tired of seeing it in my steam library being uncompleted. The game has fun movement, thats the best thing about it. Using the jetpack, flying around, the humor and the artstyle are all good things about it. The missions could of been better, being able to fly past most enemies kinda sucks. Oh and the overall UI/Hud is sorta a mess, theres way too much shit all over the screen, theres like multiple subtitle boxes at the same time frequently, theres all sorts of icons all over the screen and it didnt take me until almost the end of the game to start to make sense of any of it. The game could of benefitted from a more dumbed down minimalistic presentation. A game called 'Destroy All Humans!' I wasn't expecting so much mechanical bloat, confusion, stealth segments, and really not that much destroying of humans but rather flying past them or sneaking around them.
-Lot of stealth
-The combat parts you can just fly past most of the guys
-Only 4 guns and only 1 of them feels good
-Saucer sections suck too many confusing controls
-Overall just too many controls and mechanics clusterfuck UI is kinda bad too
6/10
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