Destroy All Humans! Video Game Review

Pandemic Studios, despite receiving nothing but love from most, has thoroughly disappointed me with its roster of games. Not that the studio’s games have been terrible mind you, it’s just I don’t think many have lived up to the ungodly hype they generated prior to release. Except for the original Full Spectrum Warrior, every other game in recent memory has let me down by indescribable proportions. The Star Wars: Battlefront games have been admirable attempts to clone the beloved Battlefield series, but in the end the gameplay in both just felt sluggish and dull. Mercenaries too fell short of my expectations, leaving Destroy All Humans as my last bastion of hope, but sadly Destroy All Humans has become another victim of its own hype, once again failing to deliver on yet another brilliant premise that showed limitless potential from the outset of its conception.

Please don’t get me wrong, though. Destroy All Humans isn’t a terrible game at all, in fact it is enjoyable more often than not, however, it fails to bring any scrap of innovation or lasting appeal to the gaming landscape as it was expected to do. Take for instance the storyline: it starts out on the right track, but quickly falls off the map in no time flat. You are Cryptosporidium 137 (Crypto), a being of the self-cloning alien race known as the Furons and one of the most unlikable lead characters I’ve seen in a long time with his Jack Nicholson knock-off voice (more on this rubbish later) and completely obnoxious attitude and sense of humor. Anyways, back to the story. Crypto has been sent to by his leader Pox to harvest the DNA from the humans of planet Earth whose brainstems actually contain strands of Furon DNA inside. As the game’s title aptly implies, the basic objective is to destroy the human race. Eventually, a secret agency of men in black known as the Majestic gets involved, and of course the army is the standard opposition from the get go, but there’s never anything of grave interest to follow here and the majority of the time you’ll be best served skipping through the cut-scenes.