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Platform: Xbox, PlayStation 2

Genre: Action

Number of Players: 1 - 2

Within the rather limited genres of video games, there are an equally limited number of story types. You can get war themed first person shooters and sci-fi themed third person action games, or a combination of either. You can get survival horror or platformer. You can get the GTA “sandbox” style game. But very rarely do you get something that incorporates these things while at the same time giving you something a little different and unique. Like humor. Humor in games has not had a grand run of success.

This changed last year when Pandemic Studios created a game called Destroy All Humans! It was a sort of 3rd person action adventure sandbox game that was a send-up of the classic 1950’s b-movie sci-fi flick. There really had not been anything quite like it before, and it was good. It was a great deal of fun and I spent hours with the game, giggling like a school girl as I read peoples minds, then used my TK powers to pick them up, slam them against the ground or a nearby building a few times, then send them flying through the air to a wet messy death. I grinned in glee as I took to my Saucer and merrily leveled any structure with an architecture that did not meet with my approval. Destroy All Humans! was hours of good times and good humor, and now we have a sequel, Destroy All Humans! 2, to continue the destructive good times.

DAH! 2 takes place at the end of the ‘60s, and at the beginning of the game, we find our anti-hero, Cryptosporidium, as President of the United States, getting down gleefully with his newfound power and genitals. But alas, the good times come to an end when those pesky Russians discover the truth, and send a nuke up into the sky, destroying the Mothership and Orthopox along with it. Pox managed to download his mind into a hologram before his body was iced, and now it is up to Crypto and the disembodied Pox to scour the Earth for artifacts and uncover what the devil those pesky Commies are up to now. A side story revolving around the god Arkvoodle requires that you go from place to place recruiting warships and setting up Arkvoodle cults in the various towns. Arkvoodle happens to be the god of the Sacred Crotch, in case you were wondering. Those interested in starting a local chapter of the cult of Arkvoodle may send their request to mike.lewis38@verizon.net...

DAH! 2 adds a few new weapons and abilities to the mix this time around, such as the Meteor Shower for raining down rocky destruction from above, and the Body Snatch ability replaces the Holobob for disguising yourself when you want to be discreet. Other than the few changes in these areas, the game looks and plays pretty much the same as the first one, though there is a little more variety added in the way of side missions and things to find. The main story mode of the game should only take you around 10 hours or so to breeze through, but it’s this variety of side missions and “odd jobs” (which usually involve ruining some hapless fool’s life by revealing a dirty secret or putting them in a compromising position) that will at least double the amount of time you can spend with the game. Then there is the simple but fun random destruction. Just get in your Saucer, take to the air, and level everything in site. Don’t worry if that building you just destroyed might later be needed in a mission- if it is, it will magically reappear all shiny and new for you to exploit as needed. And if you have a mind to, use your Saucer’s Abduction beam to whisk pedestrians into the air, and suck them up into your ship where you can add their DNA to your own to upgrade your abilities. Or use it to pick up and hurl vehicles about as you see fit. AS for the missions, they run the gamut from destroying things, to protecting things, to escorting people from one point to another, and the like. Pretty standard video game faire, and while most of the game is pretty easy to play, there are some missions in which the difficulty ramps up to an almost stupid level. Thankfully, you can always go back to these missions if you fail, and usually upgrading your or your ships abilities or weapons will nock the difficulty of these missions to something a little more manageable. Still, the wild swings from far too easy to far too hard can be annoying at times.

The series’ trademark humor returns, although I will admit that while some it is laugh out loud funny, a lot of it sort of misses the mark, probably because the story in this outing is kind of convoluted and tries to lampoon too many things at once, whereas the first game was more single-minded in focus. Even still, there is plenty to chuckle at, and there is no end to the one liners Crypto spews forth, and sometimes the random thoughts pulled from the heads of humans are hilarious.

The look of the game has not really changed a whole lot from the first outing. Crypto seems to be a lot sharper, but otherwise, the graphics remain the same. While that is just fine in most respects, there are a few areas where the lack of graphical power is very noticeable. People have no fingers, and there are very few actual character models for the amount of people in the game. Expect to see a whole lot of identical looking people roaming the streets of the various cities you will travel to. The audio is pretty good, and while the music is sort of generic and uninspired, the voice acting for the characters is top notch. Crypto is voiced in a very Jack Nicholson way, much like the one alien in the movie Spaced Invaders, and the other characters are perfect for what they represent. It would be nice if every game had voice acting as good as DAH! 2.

In the end, there is very little to complain about with Destroy All Humans! 2, and very much to applaud. While it is, by and large, more of the same as the first game, there is nothing wrong with that at all, as that game was a blast, and so is the sequel. And now that last generation games are priced nicely at $40, there is no reason not to give DAH! 2 a try.
 

-Ed-