Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed Review

After realizing it’s been 16 years since I played a Destroy All Humans! game, the song “It’s Been Awhile” from Staind popped in my head. As a high schooler, I loved the series. It was mindless fun that poked fun at pretty much everything. After beating Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed, I can say that I still really enjoy the genre and miss games like this. It’s nice to relive things I loved so long ago, especially with a fresh coat of paint.

Much like most remakes that touch up the graphics, Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed does a nice job of bringing this old game to modern standards. The beauty of remakes like this is that I feel like these are the graphics I remember as a kid. I know that the 2006 game obviously doesn’t hold up well, but for that time it did and I feel like the new graphics are what I saw back then. Crypto and his surroundings have never looked better. I would say the leap you’ll see in this game is similar to the Tony Hawk remake we saw last year. It’s not going to blow your socks off, but you can appreciate the upgrade and be thankful that the game is modernized.

For a remake, I was surprised at the performance issues I encountered. It was actually kind of bizarre. My framerate stutters typically happened after a big battle in a story mission. After the mission was over and I went to free roam, I’d start skating and it would drop to like 10 frames per second. It ended up crashing my game multiple times. With my 15 or so hours in, this situation probably happened 4 or 5 times. I feel like it’s kind of unacceptable for a remake to have to have these issues. However, I’m sure these issues can be remedied with a patch soon after launch.

As far as the game goes, it remained true to form. The lines of dialogue were left untouched and that could be good or bad depending on your “maturity” level. For me, I still found the dialogue humorous. I feel like there were jokes that flew over my head as a kid, and it was nice to finally get the joke. They do hammer a bit much on the sexual humor, but you can skip the dialogue if it isn’t for you. It’s not all sexual either, you have things where they break the 4^th wall, make fun of hippies dodging the army, and even talking about the relevance of ninjas.

Destroy All Humans 2! is a separated open world. Instead of one big map, the game is separated into 5 different areas throughout the world. The maps are bigger than I remember to be honest, and full of life with this new remake. Each area is fun to explore and felt more natural than changing “biomes”. I loved seeing their small renditions of London, Japan, Russia, and California. I wish more games would adopt this approach.

One thing I used to love about Destroy All Humans 2!, was the weapons arsenal. Back then, I thought it was very creative to have all of the different types of guns along with getting to use the saucer. It’s not as creative now, but they are still fun to use. I personally loved the Comet Strike and the Zap-0-Matic. The other guns have their moments and there are various ways to upgrade them to make them more effective. The weapons do seem to struggle to hold up towards the end of the game with their power. Even on a normal difficulty, taking down the enemy can be a little difficult at times.

One last thing I wanted to touch on, was the mission structure. For todays standards, it does get a bit repetitive tailing people, but it did a decent job at varying the types of missions you play. It also helps if you do the optional objectives that make you play a different way than you typically would. For a game made in 2006, I think the game holds up well with its mission structure and I really enjoyed the length of the missions. Outside of a few main missions, most missions can be completed in 5 minutes or less.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed. I’m glad they brought it back for me to relive some of my childhood. It’s a AA game in every sense, and I don’t think the 40 dollar price tag is too much to ask for. If you’ve played the old one, you’ll appreciate the graphical upgrades, but there are some technical issues that you’ll probably experience. There’s also moments in the missions where you have to kill a certain amount of enemies and not all of them spawn or register.  So there are some frustrations with the remake, but there’s more good here than bad. With all that being said, I would love to see a third iteration on the series, so I hope this game sells well enough to warrant a sequel or reboot.