Destroy All Humans! is a third person shooter where you play as an alien of the Furon species, named Cryptosporidium. He’s referred to as Crypto-137 because the Furon species clones themselves since they don’t have genitals anymore due to long since passed war damage. Crypto is sent to Earth because a long time ago the Furon’s, back when they had dangly bits, got freaky with some humans leaving pure Furon DNA within human’s brain stems. The Furon empire needs their old genetics because their cloning tech has eventually run afoul, defects and degrades are showing in new clones, so they need the pure genetics to allow the newer clones to be less defective. Oh and he’s also there to rescue Crypto-136 who hovered his space ship literally just yards directly above a nuclear missile that was being tested, cause these creatures are ummm… smart, yeah smart…
There are twenty-three missions in the game. Some missions are fairly short but most of them are a decent length with a couple fairly long ones. There are a lot of checkpoints throughout each mission so that’s a plus. There are some forced stealth missions that you fail if you get seen, but again, checkpoints are aplenty in this. The only time you don’t have checkpoints is often during boss fights which are usually multi-stage, and that really sucks ass, otherwise it’s not bad. Missions can be replayed via the ‘holodeck’ after you’ve finished the level normally. The reason you’d want to do that is that there are optional objectives in the game. Completing them gets you more Furon DNA which is collected to be traded for upgrades for either you or your saucer. I beat the game and completed all the optional objectives, mostly for an achievement, but I still hadn’t collected enough DNA to unlock every upgrade. I had most of them, but not all of them.
You and your saucer both have three weapons, one that auto-generates ammo and two that need to have ammo created for them. Your weapons are an electric gun which recharges and can be upgraded to hit multiple targets, a super fast rifle that sets things on fire which can be upgraded to be a full auto shotgun of flames, and some sort of black hole-esque bomb shooter, which fires a large ball that can be detonated by pressing the fire button again which does a lot of damage, it can be upgraded to suck things into it and create ammo out of some of the stuff that’s pulled into it. The ship has a death ray which recharges and it’s just a beam that sets things on fire, a sonic boom which is just a pulse you send out to destroy things that, when upgraded it cars destroyed by it creating smaller sonic booms to add to the destruction, and an ion cannon that fires a big ball of energy out that hits the ground then quickly expands destroying pretty much everything inside it. You can create ammo by transmogrifying objects in the game, be it cars, chairs, trashcans, etc. The only things that can’t be transmogrified are people, turrets, missiles, and mines. I went through the game usingly pretty much just the auto-recharging weapons because I didn’t want to bother with making ammo. I had other shit to do, brains weren’t going to suck themselves out of people’s heads, jeez that sounds dirty, but still… Weapons are unique to a degree, and they aren’t the only upgrades, there’s also improving your and the saucer’s shields, a missile deflector for the ship, and a dash ability for yourself that gives you a hoverboard which is kinda cool.
The missions aren’t too hard, most of them are just collection quests, get parts, get enough DNA, abduct someone, protect this, that, and the other, pretend to be someone and blend in reading thoughts, kill all the assholes around, and destroy the entire area. You basically just wreak fucking havoc, it’s pretty fun. There are optional objectives as well, which are usually just, get a few kills with this item, or destroy X amount of whatever, things like that, often they’re easy. I only had a couple that I thought were a bitch to do and those were in big long missions that required a lot of fighting in a row or protecting something easily destroyed; they just get hard to do when you have to focus on other shit at the same time.
The story is mostly told between communications during the missions, between Crypto and the leader of the mothership, Orthopox (Pox). Pox is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, the man who voiced Zim in Invader Zim, another alien bent on taking over the human world, and is a bit of an incompetent. The moment I heard Pox’s voice I knew I was going to like this cause I immediately “YAY’d” for Zim being in the game. If you don’t know what Invader Zim is, quit reading this, go find Invader Zim on whatever streaming service, watch it, then you can come back and thank me, and you know what, if you didn’t like it, fuck you. The characters don’t really know what’s going on in the human world, at first they even think cows might be the dominant species on the planet, but they quickly figure… some of it out anyways, gotta start somewhere I guess. Eventually, it leads them up to them killing the head of the army and even the president, all while trying to foil and take down a shadow organization within the government called Majestic, which is ironically trying to mind control citizens and also destroy the Furons. So… Majestic are kinda the bad guys too, it’s weird. You aren’t the good guy in this, I mean the first mission is reading the minds of cows, the second part of that mission is killing said cows, and the third is pop the farmer’s head like a zit to get his brain, after that there are a bunch more parts to the mission but that’s just the first three parts. That should be enough to tell you the game is kinda batshit crazy and you are playing as the asshole, I love it. We don’t get enough chances to play the bad guy in games, in my opinion. It’s great to be the hero and all, but sometimes I just want to fuck over the bad guys and then fuck over all the rest of the people too while they think I’m the hero, sometimes you just wanna watch the world burn. This is that kind of video game, I can respect that.
The game is set in the 1950s, so human tech kinda sucks, meaning your alien tech just fucks everything up, it’s fantastic. It also leads to some amusing dialogue and outfit choices you see in the game. Some of the inner dialogue people has is fucking hilarious, from most of the cops being dirty, to them wanting to be Dirty Harry, to the women being happy they’re relationships are finally sexless, it’s just fucking funny if you like that kinda humor, not everyone does.
The only real issue I have with the game is the last mission, it’s two boss fights, the first one has multiple parts and has checkpoints, the second one is stupidly hard and has none. That hard fight isn’t like oh it’s super hard, but every time you die is after like five-ish minutes or something. No, it’s more like “Hey, you’ve been working on this for around forty fucking minutes, now die, aaaaaaaaaaaand enjoy starting from the top asshole”. I sat in that fight for a few HOURS, and no fucking checkpoints in it, Jesus Christ, fuck that. That was the most miserable I’d been in the entire goddamn game. That fight alone almost ruined the game for me. If they just gave a couple checkpoints during the fight, as there are a couple areas that would make sense to get a checkpoint, then it would be fine. It just sucks putting so much time into something to die and have to redo it all. The rest of the game is so good with checkpoints then this one fight and they’re like, “No, no checkpoints for YOU!” and I just don’t get that.
Overall, the end boss fight sucked ass, but the entire rest of the game was fucking fantastic and hilarious. If you like dumb humor and being the bad guy, you’ll probably like this, especially if you like third person shooters. The challenges are pretty hard though, so look out.
Destroy All Humans! was developed by THQ Nordic.
Point of Sale: X1, PS4, Steam.
$40 all around
A review copy of the game was provided by the devs.
darkmikasonfire gives Destroy All Humans! the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.
Indie Gamer Team 