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Whether it’s 2005 or 2020, there’s something cathartic about running amok in an idyllic 1950s world as an angry gray alien and slurping up human brains by the gallon. This upgraded remaster of the original Destroy All Humans! recaptures that simple joy, and does a respectable job of updating the look and feel. It was never a masterpiece of open-world third-person action, but it still knows how to have some fun.
All things considered, the completely remade graphics look pretty good – you probably wouldn’t mistake it for the latest and greatest, but it certainly doesn’t look ancient. There’s plenty of detail on the perpetually sneering face of our alien protagonist, Crypto, and the world looks colorful, if a little sparse. Human characters are much more cartoonish than they were originally, which works well enough even though their animations aren’t great. The redone cutscenes are certainly a big improvement. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/destroy-all-humans-graphics-comparison-2005-vs-2020"] All of the voice acting is straight out of the 2005 version, so we get the good with the bad. The main character, Crypto, still seems miscast – he sounds like some kind of weird alien hybrid of Jack Nicholson and Duke Nukem, and his lines usually aren’t very funny. On the other hand, you hear much more chatter from your alien overlord, who’s played by Invader Zim’s Richard Horvitz, and he’s always amusingly over the top as he screams orders at you. (“As I suspected: the humans are just elaborately evolved meat!”) And the main villain, the leader of the Men in Black-style organization Majestic, sounds like a sassier Kylo Ren. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Playing%20as%20a%20rampaging%20monster%20definitely%20hasn%E2%80%99t%20gone%20out%20of%20style."]The moment-to-moment gameplay of Destroy All Humans! holds up reasonably well, which is no surprise since playing as a rampaging monster is a concept that definitely hasn’t gone out of style in the past 15 years. (Just look at this year’s Maneater, for instance.) Almost immediately you wield a wide range of alien powers, like a jetpack, the ability to throw people around with your mind, pop people’s heads so that you can steal their brains, and disguise yourself as any human you see for some very simple stealth. You start out feeling overpowered in fights with small groups of enemies and it only grows from there with new abilities and upgrades, so you have lots of options to mess around with. Of course, enemy AI is extremely basic and the hordes of easily swatted bad (good?) guys spawn in all around you, so it’s a simple but fun style of action as you bounce around zapping 1950s-era police, soldiers, and G-men, tossing grenades and rockets back at them and blasting tanks. The controls feel snappy and most of the weapons are good fun to use – it’s hard to go wrong with a chain lightning gun, a plasma blaster that reduces victims to skeletons, and a grenade launcher. The anal probe is fairly useless, though – it’s all in service of a joke that’s instantly played out. All of it’s heavy on auto-aim so you basically just have to fire in the general direction of a target, which makes the new target lock feel pretty unnecessary. Success is much more about staying on the move than it is about precision accuracy. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=destroy-all-humans-remake-screenshots&captions=true"] To keep that type of action from getting too monotonous, every so often you jump into your flying saucer and wreak havoc from above with your death ray. The controls are a little wonky in that