Destroy All Humans!

Destroy All Humans from THQ is a GTA-style game that puts you in control of a member of an alien race as he tries to harvest human brains on Earth in order to keep his species reproducing. The game is set to be an open-ended romp through a huge environment where you can either stick to the main quest or deviate however you want. However, before you call this one “Grand Theft Alien”, consider all that Destroy All Humans has to offer. The gameplay is quite deep even in incomplete stages, presenting a great mix of on-foot and flying saucer missions. With a quirky concept and some engaging gameplay, Destroy All Humans should appeal to the sci-fi geek in all of us.

In Destroy All Humans, you play as Crypto (short for Cryptosporidium 137), an alien sent down from another world in order to get a hold of copious amounts of human DNA. The reason that Crypto is searching out human DNA is because way back when, a human and an alien of Crypto’s species “mixed” genes requiring the alien race to seek out their own DNA through that of the human race in order to keep their species going. Doing so requires the employment of such techniques as brain sucking and anal probing.

The game does a great job of capturing the essence of 1950’s sci-fi films, and truly showcases the real sense of paranoia that surrounded the era, both on and off film. The opening cutscene looks like it was pulled straight from Plan 9 from Outer Space, complete with an ominous warning from a narrator setting up the scene.

In the preview build, I got a good look at the diversity of the gameplay. In the on-foot portions, you have quite a few moves to use against both humans and barnyard creatures. You can either shoot them with a charged anal probe that will enter their bodies through a certain, uh, orifice and extract their brains, or you can simply kill them and then remove the brain from the dead body. Killing enemies is done several different ways as well, as you can shoot them with your death ray, or you can use telekinesis to throw them around like rag dolls, slamming them into the ground or other objects like trees and barns, or even crashing them into other hostiles, killing them both.

You also have a few non-lethal means of dealing with foes. You can exercise brain control to make humans do your bidding, or you can don disguises to give you the appearance of any human that you see. You can also read the minds of many creatures (human and animal alike), to see what they have to say or think, in this case.

Aside from the on-foot stuff, you can do a fair amount of things in Crypto’s flying saucer. You can either stick to fighting against Army tanks and units, or you can destroy objects like trees and houses. This is really fun as you can choose to stick to the good path and take out only what you have to or you can lay siege to the planet, turning it into a smoldering wasteland.

If you’d like a break from the main quest, Destroy All Humans allows you to take on a variety of side quests and missions. You can collect probes throughout the world, which operate similar to the package system in the GTA games. You can also do things like jetpack races, or missions similar to the “rampage” missions in GTA, where you must kill a certain amount of enemies within a time limit.

Graphically, Destroy All Humans is shaping up to be a great looking game. The character models, especially Crypto, are excellent looking and very detailed, as are the huge environments. The game also makes great use of bloom lighting effects, giving the overall aesthetic a very polished appearance.

The only problems that I saw in the preview build were the controls, which did feel a little unresponsive at points, and the AI, which didn’t really act as you’d think humans about to be killed by an alien would act. However, these are minor gripes in an otherwise solid game that should be a lot of fun when Destroy All Humans ships next month.