Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed is a third-person shooter developed by Black Forest Games, a remake of the 2006 original by Pandemic Studios. You play as Crypto, the president of the USA and alien invader whose partying is interrupted when the KGB destroys his mothership, triggering a quest for revenge that uncovers a conspiracy going all the way to the Kremlin.
The game plays out more or less like a third-person shooter with less emphasis on the shooting. You have an auto lock-on button for targets that are close enough, and you also have a wide array of weapons and psychic powers to attack them with. The fun is mostly in dodging enemy attacks and causing chaos using your advanced weaponry. Even though you don’t really have to aim, it’s fun to psychokinetically throw one cop at another or send a tank bouncing down the street.
On top of this, there’s a basic disguise system. You can inhabit the bodies of the humans roaming the five mini open worlds, and certain bodies like soldiers or KGB agents will allow you access to restricted zones, as well as let you avoid being shot on sight for being a small gray alien.
The game’s rocket boots and jetpack-based movement feels freeing, allowing you to jump from rooftop to rooftop, hop over fences, and run away from the cops with ease, even if you occasionally bump into some terrain you shouldn’t.
There’s also an entire separate system for your flying saucer, which you use to shoot tanks, abduct civilians, and get around the world faster than on foot. It’s a rigid and dated flying system, but it’s easy enough to use and adds a bit of variety.
Destroy All Humans 2 is more engaging than the sum of these parts might suggest. The first couple of missions aren’t anything special, but once you get access to more weapons and psychic abilities, the game becomes a silly mix of simple stealth, wanton destruction — both mandatory and for fun — and objective-based gameplay.
Almost every mission has optional objectives that prompt you to use your arsenal in ways you might otherwise not bother with, which helps you avoid falling into a gameplay rut. There are an awful lot of escort missions in the game, but thankfully on standard difficulty they’re hard to lose.
Destroy All Humans 2’s writing isn’t funny, but it’s also not egregiously unfunny. I occasionally cringed, but otherwise the story was fine, communicating Crypto’s misanthropic attitude and the game’s juvenile sense of humor adequately. The ending is notably bad, but hey, you’re probably not here for the story anyway.
The tutorials are also bad. All of them involve just reading text, and some of the text doesn’t adequately explain what to do anyway. I worked out a few things by just pressing buttons and trying random things, and I actually thought I’d encountered a bug because a tutorial prompt confused me so much.
I also ran into a few actual bugs and rough edges, like a mission that broke when I died, enemies that fell through the floor, and at least one crash. But these should be easy to patch out, and the game was mostly stable.
Destroy All Humans 2 isn’t going to be for everyone. The story isn’t worthwhile, and it’s terrible if evaluated just as a shooter. But if you like the sound of destroying humans in a series of mini open worlds, with well polished gameplay and full story co-op, you’ll have a great time.
Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed releases August 30 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and X for $39.99.
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