Having been a long time fan of the original game and it’s better sequel, I took a while to get around to buying and playing the PS4 remake of this. I always enjoyed Cryptos’ dialogue and witty comebacks, and the glee of using the Anal Probe to shoot peoples brains out of their arses. As a youth what more could I want in a game.
An odd point for a 10 year old me was that I actually completed both games many times, as more often than not now I find replaying a lot of these games I straight up didn’t or it just turned out I was pure shit at them. So from the get go with this is, it’s been tarted up pretty good. Graphically overhauled in every way and it’s managed to keep the same style of the originals without comprising to much. Even if the characters look a cursed blend of the visitors in planet coaster and a rubber mask. The games plot is simple as anything, Crypto under the command of Pox is sent to infiltrate America all the way up-to the President to gain command of the planet in the name of the Furons, for human DNA. This however is hindered by a secret group called majestic.
As a result of being hunted and not always the hunter, this game relies heavily on a disguise feature called Holobob. You take disguise of whoever you holobob for a brief amount of time. This can be extended by reading the other NPCs thoughts. I’d highly recommend that as some of the quotes that these people come out with a great. As neat a feature as this it also is one of the most infuriating aspects. As if you need to do another action like pop someone’s head, telekinesis a cow, or too disguise of someone else, you are almost immediately spotted and that then sends the police, army and majestic after you. This can be a tad bit tedious on certain missions, and secondary objectives.
You have a small arsenal at your disposal, the Zap-O-Matic, Anal Probe, Disintegrator ray and the Ion detonator. Now I always remember in the original the Zap-O-Matic fully upgraded being the top gun. But here I’d argue the disintegrator ray is. I could be misremembering but to be honest the whole lot of weapons are kinda shit. Ammo isn’t great either you have to rely mid shoot out to transmog a bench, or wooden crate for a random chance of ammo. This doesn’t help as you don’t sponge damage all that easily even with fully upgraded shields.
Now the most fun part of the game, will forever be the saucer parts, flying round a lasering the ever loving shit out of buildings until they crumble. This obviously looks better than ever and honestly deserves to be a fully fleshed out game in it’s own right. I’d buy and play the shit out if it. The downside these bits seem few and far between. Meaning for the most part of the game, you don’t need to buy the saucer upgrades as they seem a waste of DNA points. Now if like me you did that, the end robo-prez boss is a right cunt as a result. Honestly the difficulty spike in the last two boss fights is absurd. Other than the dog turd mission where you have to defend a truck carrying a nuke, every other mission is more then easy enough. So what you then have to do is re-do the missions to get any secondary objectives for more DNA, find hidden probes which don’t really give a lot. Or you can do the challenges, with each area having 4 to choose from; Races, Armageddon, Rampage and abduction. All of which aren’t particularity difficult but again rely on you having the right upgrades so if you don’t have many. You are once again shit out of luck. Now you’ll want to do all of these things if you want to platinum the game any ways. If however you just want to enjoy the game this can be a bit of a tedious point to hit, all the unnecessary replaying everything.
The game itself is a super short affair only taking a couple hours to rinse through all 23 missions. This includes a mission not in the original game as it was cut from development. Each mission have secondary objectives that make for at least some replay value. Even with this most missions won’t take longer then 10 or 15 minutes to blast through.
One strange design choice they made in this remake, was keeping the original audio track. Now don’t get me wrong there is nothing inherently wrong with it. However you can tell it shows it’s age a bit in the not so crispness of it. I mean they did a bang up job of it first time round, but putting the effort in to make up-to date with the current hardware I can’t help but think it’d make sense to have re-recorded the voice acting.
Overall this is enjoyable as the original, even if it has lost something in the make over. What that is I’m not entirely sure, but when playing it there just seems to be a little something off. This doesn’t deviate from the fun though. It’s sprinkled with quality of life upgrades, like being able to skate briefly from dashing, the transmog from 2, upgraded shooting, and better flying physics. I am most definitely going to be buying Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed when it’s out in a couple of months. As this reminded me of how much I enjoyed playing these titles as a wee me, and it’s well worth your time as a new player or a returning player to see how far games have come in the past 15 years.
Overall I’d certify this game a good, 8/10 highly tasty.
Released, July 28th 2020
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