Retro Review: Destroy All Humans!

For those of you poor gamers that weren’t around during the creative IP renaissance, I feel bad for you. There was a time during the PS1 and PS2 era where developers made games that were inventive, new and fraking hilarious! That all ended when Activision pumped out Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare when suddenly we faced the glut of “man shooters” that filled the shelves.

Destroy All Humans! was one of those unique IP’s that not only surprised you with originality, it was ACTUALLY a super fun game! Back then the shelves were lined with new IP’s, you saw some sequels but they were to what once was a unique game.

Dr. Muto, Skygunner, and any Atlus published game were on those shelves and man was I lucky to be alive back then. This title was released June 21 2005 for the original Xbox and the PlayStation 2 developed by Pandemic and published by THQ.

The game’s premise is somewhat simple, but that’s where we find greatness sometimes. The year is 1959, you play as Cryptosporidium 137 or Crypto for short who is tasked with looking for his comrade Cryptosporidium 136 who crash landed on Earth in 1947.

Your ship, named Pox, has a mind of its own and wants you to collect brain stems which contain Furon DNA from some Ancient Aliens shit to save the Furon species. Unfortunately this mission isn’t as easy as it seems, you are constantly being hounded by an agency named Majestic.

If you’re wondering what Majestic is, it’s a spoof of The Men in Black. This game is fill of parody which is great, if you know a lot about The Cold War and the late 1950’s you will be laughing heartily.

The controls are pretty good with this title once you get use to them of course. Just remember there’s a lot your little alien can do with a limited controller layout. A is jump, if you want to use your jetpack, which you’ll want to do hold A after jumping and you’ll float around. Right Trigger is fire weapon, and if you can’t find the right weapon for the job you can cycle through your arsenal by pressing X.

Your Left Trigger does A LOT to get you through the game, holding it down activates your Probe; pressing and holding A with the LT does a cortex scan. Pressing B and tapping it like this removes brain stems for Pox which help you upgrade. Then the fun one, pressing and tapping X hypnotizes your foe; insert evil laugh here. Holding LT and pressing Y puts you into Psychokinesis mode should you be holding a person or object double tapping Y will throw them.

Pressing X while in this mode moves them toward you and pressing B moves them away from you. So as you can see, not too difficult but can get overwhelming at times since we’re use to everything being mapped on its own button.

The voice acting, music and overall look of this game is simply amazing. Pandemic totally nailed the feel of the 1950’s with the cars, the clothes the NPC’s and all that jazz. As a huge fan of the era I loved destroying this small town as Crypto.

What really made me remember this title and enjoy this title was the fact that the voice over actor for Crypto, J. Grant Albrecht, does an amazing impersonation of Jack Nicholson. Yes, you’re running around as a little grey alien that sounds almost exactly like Oscar winner Jack Nicholson.

The one thing that made my time with this game unenjoyable are the sudden difficulty spikes and the timed missions. I remember when I was first playing this title on the PS2 I got stuck for a substantial amount of time on an early timed mission that was ridiculously difficult.

This game is great, it is a nice reminder of how creative and unique the PS2, Xbox and GameCube eras were. And thankfully it isn’t too difficult for you to track down a copy, you can buy it on the Xbox store and it will play on your Xbox One, you can find a copy in the wild for the Xbox and play it on your Xbox One or you can buy it as a PlayStation Classic on your PS4.

However, if you have the patience of a monk you can wait for the ground up remake coming in 2020; personally I can’t and had to play this game again. It’s hilarious, inventive, unique, all the words you don’t use to describe a majority of games coming out now.

This game is a great look into the past when developers cared more about putting out a good product rather than a blockbuster money maker. Even though this game didn’t put up the numbers that our current day “Man Shooters” do, it still garnered three more sequels and now a remake, so I think Destroy All Humans! is a game everyone should look into!