There's something to be said for irreverent humor in games, but there's less to be said for irreverence just for the sake of irreverence. Destroy All Humans!, last year's action adventure game from developer Pandemic Studios, which stars a snarky, snarling alien invader that was hell-bent on reaping precious DNA from helpless humans, was funny in the right ways. The game's antihero, Crypto Sporidium 137, was the perfect blend of unreasonably angry and ridiculously overconfident, making for some hilarious exchanges between Crypto and the various denizens of Earth. On top of that, the game created an ... Expand full review
It's hard to call Destroy All Humans! 2's storyline particularly good. It's kind of a mess, though it's the kind of mess that seems very much on purpose. The whole game is so self-referential and geared toward comedy that trying to make any sense out of it would be a fool's errand. And for what it's worth, much of the game's attempts at comedy are pretty good. Crypto's as psychotic as ever, and with his Jack Nicholson vocal inflection and murderous tendencies, it's hard not to love him. If there's any real flaw with the game's humor, it's that none of the surrounding characters are interesting. Like in the original game, you can choose from any number of different dialogue options while talking to various other characters--but unlike in the first game, the secondary dialogue options aren't as funny this time around. Crypto and Pox have a wide variety of hilarious conversations, but the stuff between Crypto and just about anybody else tends to fall a touch flat.
Another problem is that there's not much focus on what the game wants to parody. While the first game spent the vast majority of its time parodying cheesy science fiction from the '50s, Destroy All Humans! 2 can't quite figure out exactly where it wants to go. The hippy humor isn't clever or unique, banking more on your personal desire to murder hippies than properly sending up the hippy culture. Likewise, when you travel to 1969-era England and Japan, there are some amusing gags that involve British pop culture and ninjas, respectively, but there are also a lot of jokes that don't go anywhere or make any sense. The best parts of the game occur when it goes outside the confines of the era and starts rattling off random film references, as well as pseudo in-jokes about the game itself. But like the rest of the humor, some of these are absolutely hilarious and others just come off a bit labored.
For the most part, Destroy All Humans! 2 plays a whole lot like its predecessor. There are five different areas to explore, though you begin the game with only the San Francisco-inspired Bay City available to you. Mission icons display on a minimap, and you--as Crypto--can wander about each world as you please, free to take on whichever missions are available. One of the biggest issues with Destroy All Humans! was that its missions weren't that interesting as the game progressed. Story missions involved too much mindless shooting, with limited weaponry and a few too many annoying stealth missions. Pandemic has somewhat remedied this by adding in more weapons to play with and downplaying the stealth to a mostly optional endeavor.
