Games

Destroy All Humans

Format: PS2, Xbox
Price: £39.99
Publisher: THQ

The idea is an brilliantly appealing one: turn the alien invasion scenario on its head, and cast the player as a marauding extra-terrestrial, wreaking havoc in 50s America. Then consider that this devilishly enticing concept is coming from Pandemic, the developer behind the free-roaming "playground of destruction" that was Mercenaries, and you've got good reason to be excited about Destroy All Humans.

So why does the game fall so frustratingly short of its potential?

Lets start at the beginning. The Furons, a curmudgeonly race of bulbous-headed aliens, are in trouble. They've got no genitals and can only survive through cloning. Unfortunately, their DNA supplies are deteriorating so they've got no choice but to head for a planet previously seeded by some rather, ahem, enthusiastic Furon explorers many years ago to gather up fresh genetic material.

Yep, it's Earth.

You play as Crypto, sent to track down his clone predecessor, who has been captured by the US military while harvesting human DNA. To carry out this mission, you're equipped with a flying saucer, an array of sci-fi weaponry and, of course, an anal probe. Your boss, Pox, dishes out instructions and insults in equal measure, and even has the gall to dip into your DNA supply in return for weapon and saucer upgrades.

With complete freedom to explore each of your mission areas, and numerous ways to terrorise and freak out the local populace, it's easy to see why some people branded this game Grand Theft Alien before it came out.

Trouble is, Destroy All Humans makes similar promises to Mercenaries, but suffers from even greater flaws. Despite the illusion of freedom, the only freedom you really have is in choosing ways to waste time. The actual missions (of which there are twenty) are easily polished off in less than a weekend, so it falls to the peripheral amusements to keep the longevity going.

Pretty much everything revolves around collecting DNA, but the ways in which this is done all frustrate rather than excite. You can zap people with your gun and then extract their brain, but this takes time and yields small amounts of precious genetic goo. You can find DNA probes scattered around each mission area, but with no map and sprawling levels, this is time consuming and far from fun. Or you can undertake various mini-game challenges in each area, though these are always variations on checkpoint races or against-the-clock destruction missions.

DNA is needed to upgrade yourself and your saucer, but eventually you just find an easy challenge and do it over and over to boost your DNA reserves and when you're deliberately avoiding a significant chunk of gameplay, something has gone wrong.

The sad thing is, there are some superb ideas in here. The Holobob function allows you to target a human and copy their appearance for infiltration and stealth. However, as soon as you're disguised, you start to lose mental concentration - and this must be topped up by targetting and brain-scanning other people every few seconds. While disguised you can't attack, or even pick up DNA, and using any of your other mental powers simply drains concentration faster. So, much like the DNA collection, it becomes a chore rather than something fun.

Ditto for the ability to hop into your saucer and blast buildings. The saucer has no freedom of movement up or down, it can only hover on a level plane and fire straight ahead, and as any buildings you destroy are rebuilt when you re-enter the level, it's yet another feature that is fun in concept, but pointless in execution. Even the option to levitate people, cows and vehicles with your mind is an idea looking for a gameplay outlet. It's never required in the game, so it becomes another quirky distraction that is soon ignored.

Graphically, the game is less than impressive. Objects and people pop in and out of existence (an empty street can be fully populated by turning around) while any damage done to the scenery or vehicles is quickly erased. Things are improved on the audio side though - the corny sci-fi soundtrack is great, and there's some superb voice acting to deliver the inner thoughts of everything from suburban housewives to zombie cows.

Now, this all sounds relentlessly negative, and that's not really fair. Destroy All Humans is an amusing game, loaded with great dialogue and humour, and within the narrow confines of what it allows you to do, you'll have a perfectly pleasant playing experience.

But it's not what it could be, and it doesn't even compare to Mercenaries in terms of firepower, scale or freedom of choice. There's the promise of a truly fantastic game lurking with Destroy All Humans' skeleton, and that just makes the shortcomings all the more irritating. Rent it for a weekend and you'll have more than enough time to extract all the fun you'll need from it.