Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed review

Even those with no connection to the Age of Aquarius will have a good time breaking stuff as a bad-ass, perpetually horny extra-terrestrial.

One of the defining genres of the early 2000s was the open-world action game. From Radical Entertainment’s Prototype duology, Sucker Punch’s Infamous series, and even Edge of Reality’s The Incredible Hulk, the era armed players with awesome abilities and sanctioned wanton destruction. Likely, Pandemic Studios was one of the best architects of the open-world action game. Titles like 2005’s Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and 2009’s The Saboteur demonstrated just how fun physics-based disobedience could be. For the first two Destroy All Humans games (additional entries were mediocre efforts crafted by other developers), the Los Angeles-based team added comical irreverence alongside the mayhem.

Two years ago, Black Forest Games’ delivered a respectable update of the original Destroy All Humans. Largely, the studio left the game’s fundamentals and humor intact, while contributing minor improvements to extraterrestrial protagonist Crypto 137’s arsenal of abilities. Unsurprisingly, the release of Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed adopts a similar approach, with a remake that delivers the obligatory visual upgrades while leaving the game’s faults untouched.

Fry, Bounce, or Toss Foes

First the good news: Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed provides a gratifying set of tools for your vandalistic desires. Yes, your Zap-o-Matic gun is back. And it’s as fun as ever to see lightning arc across multiple enemies as they quiver about, revealing a cartoonish x-ray skeleton. The Dislocator sends a helpless victim bouncing around like a rubber ball. It’s especially comical when used against groups and adjacent adversaries scream in surprise as they’re subsequently knocked over. Naturally, you can upgrade your arsenal at the Pox Mart, spending Furotech cells collected around each of the game’s five locals to improve power, ammo capacity, or even the effectiveness of Crypto’s shielding or dashing abilities.

As fun as using the Disintegrator Ray to turn opponents into fiery ash is, it’s still Crypto’s psychokinetic powers that are the real highlight on the ground. Destroy All Humans! 2 cranks up the ridiculousness, so it’s possible to pick up a human and fling them across the map. One early scene tasks Crypto with crossing a bridge fortified with military personnel and vehicles. Propelling soldiers into the troop transports results in the kind of fiery pandemonium that shows Destroy All Humans at its best.

Expectedly, your saucer is back, allowing you to take to the skies and dispense widespread wrath. Although aiming the craft’s laser beam can incinerate a structure, it’s far quicker to use your tractor beam to pull a vehicle upward, before propelling it downward with devastating power. Like Grand Theft Auto, there’s an awareness meter that sends out intensifying types of opposition as you wreck things. When you are inside your saucer, you can either sear through a procession of tanks with your laser or apply cloaking when the heat shows up.

Hippies Don’t Talk to Suits

Like the original game, Destroy All Humans! 2 isn’t as fun when you’re not wrecking shit. Intermittently, you’ll steal the form of a human to evade detection, shambling around maps like a drunk. But you’re not able to use the weapons of the soldiers or police that you possess, diminishing the potential for fun. But the body thievery gag becomes dull before long and you’ll be eager to get back to obliterating things.

Similarly, the humor can be tedious. The Japanese and English caricatures feel lazy and the allusions to ‘60s zeitgeist probably won’t connect with most players. The original game was released 36 years after the end of the Free Love era. Now, we’re more than a half-century removed from hippies and the Cold War. Likely, many of the references aren’t going to land. Occasionally, Crypto’s unrequited advances toward a sexy KGB operative named Natalya Ivanova are mildly amusing, but some of his pick-up lines make Borderlands seem witty in comparison.

Conclusion

When it comes to performance, Reprobed usually runs well and offers a bit of scalability. Dial the visual setting back to their low and you’ll be able to achieve a fairly solid 30 frames-per-second on the Steam Deck. On beefier systems, the game will engage your GPU fans, but on an RTX 3070 Super, the game was able to output 1080p/60FPS visuals even when streets were filled with chaos. Unfortunately, the game’s split-screen mode would have pushed the game past its limits. Woefully, there’s no online cooperative mode.

Destroy All Humans! 2 works best when the action is telling the jokes, whether it’s applying an anal probe to unsuspecting NPCs or flinging a meddlesome cop across the San Francisco Bay. While the bedlam might not be laugh-out-loud funny, it’s amusing enough to show the competency of an open-world, weapon-filed sandbox. For a third outing, it would be great to see Crypto brought into a modern area. There’s a long list of celebrity influencer-types that I’d pay to yeet.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed was played on PC
with review code provided by the publisher.