Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
J. Grant Albrecht, Richard Steven Horvitz
Intro:
...noisy, silly, and occasionally a bit dated...
Twas the year 2005 when the first iteration of Destroy all Humans blasted onto Xbox and Playstation 2. Gaming was a more innocent pursuit in those days, and the world felt like a less harsh place, so the notion of playing as an intergalactic baddie disintegrating and anal probing your way through a stylised 1950s humanity felt quite subversive and daring.
Destroy all Humans was a perfect couch game, particularly after a cheeky smoke or a drink, and managed to feel anarchic without a lot of edgelord posturing and grimdark nonsense. It was a fun, silly but engaging romp in which you could topple buildings by hurling cows at them and now, in this wretched year of 2020, Destroy all Humans is back. But was this title worth another spin? Pretty much, but there are some caveats.
The game puts you in control of xenophobic, gravel-voiced intergalactic sociopath Cryptosporidium-137. Crypto’s on Earth looking for his previous clone, Cryptosporidium-136 and is more than happy to get his hands dirty trying to find him. Throughout the campaign you’ll find yourself brainwashing, stealing the identity from and straight up murdering a shitload of feeble humans, both to please your boss Orthopox (voiced by Invader Zim’s Richard Steven Horvitz) and for the lols.
If you can picture a game that combines the cheerful homicide of Mars Attacks! (1996) with the shouty banter of Invader Zim, with just a soupcon of Men in Black (1997) you’ve imagined Destroy all Humans. It’s a goofy riff on Cold War era US propaganda films and camp sci-fi, with a surprisingly hefty suite of skills, powers and upgrade trees.
Gameplay occurs in town hub areas where you can either take on missions or indulge a bunch of challenges like racing, bovine extraction and killing folks in various imaginative ways. The more side pursuits you tackle, the more powerful you can make Crypto, and the resulting carnage is often hilarious, in a goofy stoner sort of way.
Destroy all Humans looks grand, developer Black Forest Games did not pinch pennies when remaking this puppy, and a few instances of pop in and cropping aside, it could easily pass as a modern title. Slightly more dated is the script, sense of humour and gameplay, with often quite simplistic mission loops that felt a lot fresher fifteen years ago. That said, chaining electrical beam weapons against hordes of screaming humans, hurling people into the ocean with telekinesis and watching a disintegrator beam burning homo sapiens down to their wide-eyed skeletons was a hoot in 2005 and remains so now.
The sci-fi parody was always a bit of a B-grade effort, and while the remake certainly brings the aesthetics up to modern standards, the game itself remains mostly the same. Thing is, there’s a lot of fun to be had here, if you can channel that inner stoner, or appreciate the camp delights contained within. It’s noisy, silly, and occasionally a bit dated, but ultimately Destroy all Humans executes a colourful genocide with a twinkle in its eye and if that sounds like your jam, this is one close encounter not to miss.
