Boy oh boy, have I been looking forward to this. Longtime readers of ours will likely know that I loved Destroy All Humans!. 2020’s remake of the first game in the franchise was my Game of the Year that year by a fairly wide margin. Although Alexx ultimately had the opportunity to review the PS4 port of that remake in my stead, that didn’t stop me from playing through the entirety of it on our YouTube channel. Despite some unfortunate technical setbacks in those videos on my end, I still had an absolute blast with the first game.

Now, to my tremendous excitement, I’ve been given the chance to review its newly-remade sequel. Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, as it’s officially known, takes place ten years after the conclusion of the first game in the series. That puts it in the year 1969, during the height of the Cold War and a fair few notable social movements in the U.S.

A clone of the first game’s main character, a Furon invader by the name of Cryptosporidium-138 (aka “Crypto”), has fooled and/or brainwashed the American public into accepting him as their President since the end of the original Destroy All Humans!. Now, as he continues to fill that role, he’ll have to contend with the ever-present threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union potentially destroying humanity before he gets the chance to do it so in a manner that benefits the Furon race.

As it happens, unbeknownst to Crypto and his direct superior Orthopox-13 (“Pox”), the Soviet Union knows all about the details of the Furon invasion of Earth. They’re already keenly aware that the Furons have infiltrated the highest levels of American government. The USSR’s leadership decides to launch a “first strike,” of sorts, by destroying the Furon mothership that’s orbiting the planet, thus technically killing Pox in the process. He’s only able to supervise Crypto’s mission because he downloaded his mind into a hologram unit he sent to Earth just before the mothership exploded.

As you might expect, this causes Crypto and Pox to suddenly develop a vested interest in winning the Cold War and defeating the Soviet Union so that they can continue their ultimate, titular mission. They certainly don’t do so out of a newfound sense of American patriotism, but I guess the desire to exact revenge is as effective a motivator as any. Now that I think I’ve set the scene for us well enough, let’s get probing! I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted to say that.

I should clarify that for brevity’s sake, I’ll assume throughout this review that you’ve played the PC port of the original Destroy All Humans! or are otherwise familiar with its gameplay. I’ve said before in various articles that the only gripe I had with the PC version of the first game’s remake was that controlling Crypto’s flying saucer with a mouse took a bit of getting used to. That’s still the case this time around, as certain controls have been added or altered while flying the saucer.

For instance, you now have to hold both the Ctrl key and the right mouse button to use the saucer’s tractor beam and pick things up from the ground. I could be wrong about this, but I’m reasonably certain you only had to hold right-click for that function in the remake of the original title. That’s why the new controls threw me off somewhat. It also seems to me that the saucer can reach higher altitudes than it could in the first entry’s PC port, though that’s something else about which I’m not entirely sure. It’s been a while since I last played the original game, so it could be that I’ve lost my saucer-controlling skills.

Another thing that has caught me off-guard to a certain degree may be a bug with the game, but I suspect there’s a small possibility it could be a problem with my audio setup. There have been a fair few occasions during my time with the game thus far where dialogue lines have seemed out of sync with character animations. When this happens, the final line of dialogue each time a character speaks tends to abruptly cut off about half a second before it should end naturally.

Again, I don’t know if this is a bug in the game itself, or perhaps an instance of the game just disliking my Bluetooth headphones. Nevertheless, I’m leaning toward the former. What I’m reasonably sure does constitute a bug, though, concerns the couple of times I’ve had mission objectives fail to appear where the game says they should be.

For instance, during one of the first few missions in Albion’s Hyde Park, the game told me I was standing right on top of a mission objective only for either nothing to be there or the objective to have somehow tunneled underground so that its marker on the HUD wouldn’t disappear. Each time this happened, it was fixed by simply reloading from my last checkpoint. Even though these issues tend to have simple fixes, I must say their presence troubles me to some degree. I hope these are the only bugs players encounter, and even so, I hope more permanent fixes for them are patched in soon.

Moving on from bugs, I want to talk about something that could prove to be a point of contention among certain portions of Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed’s potential audience. That something is the game’s sense of humor. I think most reasonable people would classify the game’s humor as at least a bit immature, or perhaps even childish at some points. I know I certainly would. The thing is, I really enjoy this game’s humor precisely because of how immature it is. That just makes me enjoy the game as a whole all the more.

I mean, I have several screenshots of dialogue from Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed that I’m almost unshakably convinced I can’t include in this article because they’d never get past our editors. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. The game features an entire line of side quests centered around Crypto being the “chosen one” prophesied to bring about the second coming of the Furon god known as Arkvoodle, “Lord of the Sacred Crotch.” I think I’ll just let you imagine exactly how much innuendo-based humor the game features surrounding that secondary mission line.

Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, though I say that knowing I’m accounting for any issues you may encounter with it in terms of bugs. If you enjoy its sense of humor as I do, I think you’ll really like the game. That’s especially true if you’ve played the remake of its predecessor on PC. The story is gripping, and aside from a few minor changes, this one plays almost identically to the first game. If you liked the original Destroy All Humans! remake and want some more of that with a different story and setting, look no further.

A PC review key for Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed was provided by THQ Nordic for this review.

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Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed

$39.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Faithful Recreation of the PS2 Title
• Potentially Enjoyable Sense of Humor

Cons

• Noticeable Bugs with Audio and Certain Gameplay Elements
• Sense of Humor May Turn Off Some Players