(Originally published to Glitchwave on 11/14/2022)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Destroy All Humans! 2
Developer: Pandemic
Publisher: THQ
Genre(s): Third-Person Shooter, Open-World
Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: October 17, 2006
A decade might be a lengthy period, but Destroy All Humans 2 is still a direct sequel that continues the story after the first game's events. Crypto’s unimpeachable reign as “president” of the USA has been swimmingly for the past ten years. Everything has been smooth sailing for the malevolent, pint-sized extraterrestrial until the KGB intercepts the location of the Furon mothership hovering over Earth’s gravitational pull and blows it to smithereens with a launch of heat-seeking ballistic missiles. Pox is pulverized on impact but manages to store his essence in a mobile holographic device as a convenient means of communication. Crypto’s mission of recovering the flotsam of the Furon mothership isn’t only a task spurred by necessity; it’s also fueled by vengeance to make the Ruskies pay for hitting the Furons closer than any other earthling ever has.
The areas in the first Destroy All Humans were confined to American soil. While the restrictions made sense in its attempt to concisely illustrate the culture of America during the 1950s, the narrative direction limited the span of areas the game could cover. We cannot forget that Crypto’s imperialistic endeavor in the first game was to conquer Earth, and simply seizing power over America is small potatoes for the Furon empire. Ten years later, Crypto’s mission of world domination is still a work in progress. Fortunately, the United States is a small fraction of the globe left unsubdued. One of the biggest appeals of Destroy All Humans 2 is expanding the settings of areas past the entrapments of America’s territories as the player gets to take Crypto on a world tour. The game starts on American ground in Bay City but soon after spending some time in Crypto’s kingdom, he will fly his saucer over the Atlantic to the cloudy streets of Albion in Britain, the Asian metropolis of Takoshima, the remote tundra of Tunguska, all the way to landing on Earth’s moon. An alien’s operation to overtake the Earth isn’t thorough enough without claiming our orbiting celestial body that shimmers in the night sky. Each of these areas directly correlates with real-world places that hold historical significance with the 1960s. Bay City is intended as a broad metropolis that could be any city along California’s central western bay, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s mirroring San Francisco, the de facto capital of the American hippy movement in the latter half of the 1960s. Albion, also known as London with the moniker of England’s original name, depicts the stylish Mod culture that ran rampant across the country's youths throughout the decade. Tunguska is a contrasting taste of the Soviet Union, and let’s just say that the moon setting coincides with the game’s time of July 1969 for a reason. The only area whose connections to 1960s counterculture and the historical relevance is unclear lies with the Tokyo-inspired Takoshima area, but who needs an excuse to be able to wreak havoc all over this picturesque island metropolis?
As one can imagine, broadening the range of Earth settings in Destroy All Humans 2 satisfyingly expands the bounded scope presented in the first game. While I much prefer laying waste to a wider selection of cultures, there is more substance to each of these areas besides being spaced out more widely on the globe. Each area in the first game acted as a compact sandbox for Crypto as he hops around, causing chaos. Santa Modesta was the only level in the first game that effectively exuded that sense of freedom due to its wide area and a reasonable level of backlash against Crypto. The wrath of the humans progressively became more immense as each subsequent area increased the rate of fire, which unfortunately created an imbalance of the earlier levels feeling too relaxed while the later levels could potentially trounce Crypto in seconds. Crypto’s continued presence across every area in the second game will progressively increase five alert levels instead of four. The forces that come with accumulating these levels are less defined. Nevertheless, they attack Crypto with the same amount of fervor. In the first game, Crypto simply walking among the humans was enough to garner the attention of the Majestic, the loftiest alert-level faction, in only a few minutes. The sequel’s highest alert levels will only commence if Crypto really flexes his might and does some serious damage. Police squadrons and military forces are also relatively the same in size and presence in every area, which greatly aids a sense of equal opportunity for freedom matched with its consequences across each area.
As for the areas themselves, the developers wisely chose to compound what Santa Modesta presented and used it as a template for every area in the sequel. Specifically, Santa Modesta offered a breadth that fostered more exploration than the other small compact areas in the first game. Capitol City might also be an exception, but it hardly feels fair when giant tesla coils immediately eviscerate Crypto’s saucer, and the entire Majestic agency is waiting for him with their guns locked and loaded at every landing site. Each area in Destroy All Humans takes inspiration from Santa Modesta’s example by offering vast playgrounds with a consistent geographical theme while presenting districts throughout the area to diversify the layout. Since most of these areas are thematically based on some of the most populated cities in the world, mapping out an assorted urban plain most likely wasn’t difficult. Bay City features the most notable San Francisco staples like the outdoor hippy mecca of Golden Gate Park, the steep streets of Haight-Ashbury, and the American base of the KGB situated in the middle of the map is vaguely similar to Alcatrazz Island. Takoshima presents the most congested city setting in the game, with backroad streets littered with beautiful cherry blossom trees that connect the concrete jungle to a maze-like Zen Temple. Off the main road, islets feature feuding ninja communes, a castle on a hill, and an active volcano. While the remote setting of the frigid Soviet industrial town Tunguska recalls that Destroy All Humans areas are better when they are sprawling, it still manages to exude the same design philosophy as the others. Solaris, the name of the Russian research settlement on the moon, is the only area not formatted like the others, mostly due to the barren nature of the setting. However, it can be excused here because the moon is the perfect last area, for no other place on Earth could serve as the pinnacle of the planet’s expedition. With the addition of a much-coveted map highlighting every district, the areas in Destroy All Humans 2 finally emulate the quasi-open world format of the first game consistently and adequately.
These areas also feel more lived in because they all offer more content. The main missions in the first game seemed implemented by the developers due to obligation more than anything. Most missions in the first Destroy All Humans end as quickly as they started, with only one or two objectives before the player could hightail off to murder people at their own leisure. Destroy All Humans 2’s story is far more intricate than the one from the previous game, so the developers accommodated the campaign with weightier missions. Every area has at least five main missions, and each of these offers a hearty range of objectives to keep the player occupied. One may assume that longer missions would bloat the experience, but elongating the tasks is exactly what the missions needed to uphold the story without seeming like an afterthought. A better sense of organization aids these missions because returning to the mothership to unlock the next mission in the first game and hopping around the map tended to be a jarring upset in pacing. Since the mothership has been wiped out of the stratosphere, Crypto begins a mission by conversing with Pox or another NPC somewhere on the field, and it feels much more like how missions are started in typical open-world games. All the missions in Destroy All Humans 2 are all killer with no filler and surpass any of the missions from the first game. The climactic point of Takoshima, where Crypto and Natalya scale Mount Seiyuki and take down a Kaiju rampaging through the city streets, is so bloody epic that the game runs the risk of peaking halfway into the campaign. Besides the main missions, the player can also complete odd jobs that range in objectives or Arkvoodle missions where Crypto manufactures an international cult using that lascivious idol who grants him places to land his saucer as its omnipotent figure. The missions across the game still have a difficulty curve wonkier than a slinky, but perhaps that’s just a trope of the open-world genre.
Action seems to take precedence over any other gameplay elements in Destroy All Humans 2. The James Bond-esque intro sequence in the main menu makes it easy to see which fictional 1960s icon the game draws its inspiration from. The bevy of stealth missions that the first game offered is blown to the wayside in favor of more overt destruction. Given that the game's name is “Destroy” All Humans and not “Evade” All Humans, the player can be eternally grateful. The game endows Crypto’s arsenal with new toys to foster a more bombastic direction. Every weapon from the previous game is back in its full glory, with an upgraded Anal Probe now serving as a useful weapon instead of an extraction tool. Destroy All Humans 2 doubles the total of Crypto's weapons on foot for what already proved to be an extensive bunch. The Dislocator launches discs that send people and vehicles on a nauseatingly bumpy ride, the mothership’s janitor, Gastro, blasts at foes from a hovering hologram, and the Meteor Strike summons a barrage of meteors that can level skyscrapers. Not since the peacemaker nuke from Jak 3 has a gun inspired so much awe with its destructive potential. The Burrow Beast is an optional weapon unlocked by completing the Arkvoodle missions. Unlocking a monster that gulps up people from under the ground would’ve been more exciting if the player didn’t have to beat the game first. Each saucer weapon from the first game also reappears, with only one lackluster Anti-Gravity Field added to the roster. The weapon selection in the first game was practical, but it’s hard to return to what is now a piddly number of options with so many tools of chaos at the player’s disposal here.
Even without weapons, Crypto can create enough of a commotion with just his mind. The essentials of Crypto’s psychic powers also carry over to this game, but they’ve been tweaked instead of being directly built upon like the weapons. Crypto’s abilities are no longer inhibited by a psychic gauge, so now he can continuously whisk anything off the ground and suspend them in the air. However, this does not mean that Crypto’s brain is an inexhaustible source of unlimited potential. Upgrades are much more commonplace in the sequel, with the plentiful Furotech Cells funding the expansion purchased at Pox’s mobile marketplace. Crypto’s psychic powers, however, are upgraded via the “gene blend” system, where he slurps up people across many nationalities and vocations using his saucer’s Abducto Beam and splices their genetic material. Although the process may seem like a fetch quest grind, Crypto’s perverse scientific experiment pays off because the ability to transmogrify any vehicle for ammunition is a godsend. Instead of using the transparent holobob, Crypto rather “body snatches” an unsuspecting victim off the street and can literally walk miles in their footsteps before their life meter depletes completely due to Crypto’s presence in their bodies. It’s disturbingly parasitic. To avoid causing attention while body snatching, Crypto can use a timely named distraction technique called “Free Love,” where every human in the vicinity will dance around nonchalantly to a groovy guitar lick. I appreciate all the new abilities, but psychokinesis was more fun in the first game. I don’t know what’s changed over a decade, but everybody in the 1960s is so resistant to being flung into walls by psychic powers that the impact barely leaves a scratch. One could argue that this was part of an improvement to fix something broken from the first game, but Destroy All Humans 2 is already rife with graphical glitches and framerate issues as is.
The satirical scope may not be as pronounced here, unlike the first game, but at least the sequel is as side-splittingly hilarious. I lamented that more missions in the first game didn’t feature conversations where the player could cycle through dialogue options, but in the sequel, the player can make Crypto spout countless lines of caustic comments while talking to NPCs. I never get tired of hearing him talk. I’d implore the player to try a drinking game whenever the game makes any timely pop culture references or intentional anachronisms, but I do not want to be responsible for any alcohol-related deaths. Some of the humor is racy (especially in Takoshima) and based in stereotypes, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t guffaw whenever Crypto made immature prank calls, a Japanese cop spoke unfitting jive, or when Crypto enacted his plan to sic the Russian cosmonauts on the Furon’s Blisk rivals by telling them that they plan to take away their vodka. Crypto gleefully rides away with the bedlam that this causes with the hippy-dippy song “She Changes Like the Weather,” playing like the stinker he is. It’s comedic gold. However, none of these humorous moments are enough to establish a concise ethos, but there is still something substantial here.
The prime point that Destroy All Humans 2 seems to convey with its satire is that even in what was perceived as a new age of enlightenment, mankind and the society they created hadn’t changed all that much. No amount of LSD can cure human vices or their stubborn obliviousness. Reusing some of the same jokes while reading people’s minds might have signaled a lack of new humorous material, but it could illustrate that nothing has changed. Crypto consistently comments that his cult is the “opiate of the masses,” a phrase that correlates drugs with religion. Dirty, hubristic iconoclasts that defined the counterculture of this era throw down their values in exchange for the most appealing thing Crypto can offer, which of course, is a bunch of empty promises. The first game expressed that people were stupidly impressionable, and the sequel comments that things like drug-induced “enlightenment” and “free love” are just as big of a farce as the patriotism that fueled the 1950s. Crypto’s status as an alien gives him a position of an outsider looking in, an unbiased being without the follies that beset mankind.
That is, Crypto was the perfect specimen for critiquing human nature in the first game. Crypto was an exceptional alien soldier with a sense of snarkiness behind his venomous contempt for the human race. In the sequel, he’s practically gone native. Too much time masquerading among the humans has caused Crypto to adopt a sense of appreciation for their ways of life and has softened him up quite a bit. One could argue that this is due to the sequel’s Crypto being a clone of the one from the first game after that one unexpectedly died, but Planet Furon just doesn’t possess the same frills of sex, drugs, and rock and roll as Earth does. That, and his newly acquired sexual appendage, almost makes him one of us, and Pox detests it more than anyone. Crypto’s character is explored thoroughly here as more than an intergalactic harbinger of death and persecution. His arc is detailed through his relationship with Natalya, a rogue KGB spy and Crypto’s love interest, who aids him throughout the game. Despite approaching Natalya in a sleazy manner that makes Andy Dick look gentlemanly by comparison, the two have an odd chemistry with one another that works. Eventually, she starts to warm up to Crypto’s advances and likes him. When Natalya gets killed by Blisk/Russian leader Milinkov at the game's climax, the player almost feels as devastated as Crypto. Maybe I can sympathize with Crypto trying to bat out of his league here, but maybe Crypto’s newfound admiration (in many forms) is a testament that Furons and humans aren’t so different. Through fraternizing with humans and understanding them, it could lead to a peaceful society between the two (although it's not likely). Crypto ends up saving the human race from the Blisk at the end of the game, and if that's not ironic, I don’t know what is. After all, Arkvoodle, the benevolent creator of the Furons, is just as self-righteous and hedonistic as any hippie.
It is now apparent to me that Destroy All Humans 2 is vastly superior to its predecessor. The game is a sequel that knew the previous title had much to improve upon and thus made an effort to do so and succeeded. Destroy All Humans 2 adds so much to the first game’s template and augments everything from the weapons, areas, missions, etc. I thought that continuing the premise of an alien imperialist taking over Earth in the 1960s was inappropriate, but delving into the material has proven to me that it can still work. The augmentation has even uplifted the B-movie fabric of the premise and presentation to a depth unseen in the first game. The most unfortunate aspect is that despite all of the improvements, the myriad of technical issues in Destroy All Humans 2 that were already present in the first game deter its overall quality. I wish I could overlook this with its positive attributes, but it’s too significant of a detractor. Nevertheless, at least Destroy All Humans 2 maintains the same maniacal thrills that the first game had.
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