Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed Review

About halfway into my playthrough of Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed, a ground-up remake of the 2006 game of the same name, I gave myself a little mission. I was hanging out in 1960s London investigating a KGB conspiracy, and having completed a dozen or so middling missions, I jumped in my weaponised flying saucer and decided to see if I could level the whole city. I’m also a sadistic little alien in this story but we’ll get to that. See, buildings in Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed can be gloriously toppled and will stay destroyed until the game hard loads the area again. So off I went, systematically moving between suburbs with my death ray, intent to see my new world of rubble and ash. Twenty minutes later I got bored and went to bed, but for a stretch there I felt like a kid in a sandbox again. I even jumped into the body of a citizen and made her survey my work. It was stupid. It was fun. It was what I wanted this game to be.

It was also decidedly not what much of Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed actually is. The second entry into the cartoonish alien franchise to be given the remake treatment by Black Forest Games, this at times gorgeous recreation will undoubtedly please long-time fans. That said, newcomers to the franchise like me are far less likely to find much here beyond superficial fun and an uncomfortable glimpse into gaming history.  It does a great job of repackaging the systems and tone of the original, though technical issues and dated humour riddle an otherwise impressive remake.

This was viscerally satisfying

Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed casts you as Cryptosporidium-138, a clone of your former self, Cryptosporidium-137. Crypto is a purer distillation of Furon DNA, and is posing as the president of the United States in 1969 during the flower power revolution. Crypto’s existence, along with his ally Pox’s mothership floating high above the earth, is violently exposed by the KGB who view Crypto’s experiments on the human race as a geopolitical and existential threat. Stripped of his former weapons and sent on the hunt for the Red Menace, Crypto sets out on a globe-trotting adventure to destroy, and probe, all humans.

The game is at its core a rudimentary third-person action title that gives you a small arsenal of weapons and abilities before setting you loose in a comfortably sized sandbox environment. In terms of design philosophy, little has changed from the 2006 game – you’ll be run through a handful of missions typically centred around wanton destruction, escorting characters, or basic stealth segments. These are often repetitive and a little dull as you wait for slow-moving NPCs to walk down a hallway or ponder your inevitable demise while a boss absorbs damage like an infomercial sponge. It’s all very expected from a game built in the mid-2000s, but given that the remake goes out of its way to rebuild so much of the experience, a lack of tweaks to mission design feels especially wasted.

Groovy, man

As you progress through the campaign, you’ll unlock increasingly absurd weapons to wield against foes, most of which are at least fun for a little while. Crypto also has access to Psi powers which can be used to PK Slam enemies, body snatch them for stealth, convert objects into ammunition and a whole host of other things. Everything can be upgraded over time using a few different forms of currency, the best being human brains, because of course. These are all largely satisfying tools to play with; unleashing a destructive wave of creative death against hapless humans is good, old-fashioned fun.

Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed is also a fairly gorgeous remake. The game’s art direction is brightly coloured and crisp all around, a kind of twisted take on Saturday morning cartoons. Crypto’s ‘little green men’ design translates nicely from the original here, especially contrasted against the grossly exaggerated human characters and realistic lighting effects. It all combines to form a slightly off-putting aesthetic that complements the game’s attempts at sociopolitical parody. The game’s soundtrack, while a little overused, is also chock full of swelling, adventurous tones that sound just enough like a classic John Williams score as to be charming for the most part.

The game’s upgrade paths are pretty fun

Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed faithfully recreates the original game’s attempts at humour and ‘commentary’ with about as much success as you’d imagine a 2006 title’s writing playing in 2022. It’s not prudishness that stopped me from enjoying the game’s constant barrage of gags, it’s just not all that funny. As a riff on alien media, you can expect the usual deluge of anal probing jokes that are still largely rooted in homophobia no matter the context, but Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed attempts to flex its writing into several other, far worse topics. The game’s ‘politics’ are much of a nothing, a slate of hacky 1960s cultural humour that plays the greatest hits from commies to flower power to women’s liberation. Elsewhere Crypto rabidly pursues a Russian agent with a chest that would make a drag queen blush. It’s handwaved away as silly, and it supremely is, but again, its worst sin is being dreadfully unamusing.

Most egregious is the time spent in the game’s fictional Tokyo which is filled with NPCs wandering the streets speaking in broken English and making endless references to a specifically Western understanding of Japanese culture. It’s all just so painfully Edgy, a style of humour that has been rightfully dismissed over the ensuing years since the original release. It feels not only out of place here but, like the mission design, a wholly unforced error. Your personal tolerance for low-bar anal jokes or weak parodies of American exceptionalism aside, the uncomfortable depictions of Japanese people should have been fixed for this release. The purity of your original game means nothing to me if all your preserving is a pile of racist garbage.

The game’s writing ranges from silly to exhausting

Technically speaking the game sometimes struggles to keep pace with its great art direction and fun sandbox. Screen tearing is rampant, getting worse as the game rolls on to the point of distraction. It also straight-up crashed several times during my playthrough without warning or apparent cause. Fortunately, the game has a generous checkpoint system, but it was still a present issue. Finally, a small but consistently annoying bug, when Crypto fires off weapons the controller will sometimes hold the vibration permanently until a hard reload.

Final Thoughts 

The success of Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed as both a remake and preservation of the original work’s tonal intent is to be admired in some ways. This is a visually appealing, relatively streamlined version of a game pushing twenty that reads as a love letter to fans of the original. It maintains the core thrust of the experience nicely – a sandbox full of colourful chaos and extremely silly concepts. However, in doing so it captures why games like this have aged out of the market. An overly long run of uninteresting missions and painful attempts at comedy make this one strictly for fans of the genre. A decent remake of a game I’d rather never think about again.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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