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It seems like ages ago when I flew out to San Francisco to see THQ’s latest line of video games and got my first look at Pandemic’s creature feature Destroy All Humans!. I was impressed by the innovative concept of running around as an alien and disintegrating sappy fifties era conservatives. The use of the Havoc engine allowed you to pick things up including your enemies and move them around or hurtle them through the air. You could even jump in your flying saucer and lay waste to the city until eventually the government sends the entire army after you. The original game featured a wise cracking, Jack Nicholson sounding alien named Cryptosporidium. The dialog was mildly humorous, but it was the chuckle kind of humor, not the knee slapping, gut busting, laugh out loud kind of humor. Still the game had merit and enough grip to hold on to me to the end of the game. In spite of that, nothing about the game (unless maybe the sales) was sequel worthy.
Nothing about the game was genre defining or ground breaking. You could even make a point that the innovative telekinesis engine was ripped off from another game. For my life, I cannot begin to imagine what thought processes went into the development of Destroy All Humans 2. This game is, to me, nothing more than a sad attempt to cash in on the nominal successes of the first game. The sequel is in my estimation nothing more than a content swap. It appears to use the exact same game engine with a few new weapons and a slightly different approach to upgrades. In Destroy All Humans 2, instead of fighting against a bunch of fifties conservatives, you get to take on a bunch of peace loving, dope smoking hippies from the sixties. Where in the first game, everyone thought you were a Russian communist, in this game you are apparently defending the United States from actual Russian communists that are in league with the far out hippies. It all seems very boring from a story standpoint. What little story there might be is skipped because of an annoying new conversation tree that you use to navigate the dialogues. Your dialog choices are something to the effect of: a) Make an annoying sarcastic comment, b) Ask how to do the next part of the mission, c) Leave and figure out what you’re doing on the way. I started out like I always do with a conversation tree. I try out all the options because I’m deathly afraid of missing something key. In this game, it took me three tries to realize that the story was boring me to tears and that I didn’t need any information at all. The game made a little bit less sense, but at least it was moving along. Not that it was going anywhere at all. I ran around, disintegrated some hippies, body snatched some squares and very rapidly lost any interest in playing the game. I upgraded a few abilities, blew up half a dozen buildings and even abducted some humans so I could splice their genes with the new gene splicing upgrade ability. Nothing about any of it intrigued me. I finally reached a point of complete utter boredom where I had to call it. There are just too many other games I’d rather be playing and I could afford the game no more of my time. The point that you should take away from all this is that if a game is so bad that it’s not worth your time to play, it’s most definitely not worth your money.
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