Destroy All Humans! Remake – Review (PC)

It’s starting to feel like a broken record as we continue to talk about remakes and rereleases this year. But here we are, a little over half way through 2020, and we have yet another remake throwing their hat in the ring. When the original Destroy All Humans! was released Pandemic was riding the Star Wars Battlefront high and seemed to be able to do no wrong. It’s always nice to see a studio have the opportunity to explore their own property after doing so well with an already established one, so the hype for this game was pretty high when it released in 2005. What we were given was a pretty decent offering, but it didn’t quite live up to Battlefront. Now, some fifteen years later, THQ has resurrected the series and given the original game the remake treatment. We had a chance to dive in and see if it was worth it or not.

The first thing people want to compare to the original game with a release like this are the graphics. While the new version obviously looks better, it still has the look of a dated game. Some interesting choices here involve changing the time of day in some instances, which really worked in the game’s favor. Some night scenes in the original version made it hard to see, especially on the TVs of 2005. Changing those moments to the daytime and enhancing the graphics make a world of difference. Sure, maybe aliens are scarier at night, but horror was never really a selling point for the Destroy All Humans! brand. If anything, it made trying to annihilate the human race seem… fun. So ,while not as good as a lot of the new games that we’ve seen released lately on modern consoles, the game definitely looks much better than it did in the 2005 original.  

The story has stayed the same and is pretty much a beat by beat clone of the original game with a few surprises thrown in for fans of the original.  So much so that they even apologize for it before the game even boots up. Part of what they are apologizing for are the horrendous jokes that clearly haven’t aged well. Dick and fart jokes take up most of the script here and you’ll be rolling your eyes at them before you get too deep into the game. Playing this game at 20 years of age a far different experiences than playing it at 36. While there still may be an age and market for these types of jokes, video game writing has grown up tremendously in the last 15 years… for the most part.

The Furon race is on the edge of, not extinction, but almost a weird form of inbreeding that is destroying their entire race. Lacking any form of genitals, the Furon’s reproduce by cloning themselves over and over again to keep the population from going extinct. However, this has been going on for so long that they are starting to see their clones becoming less intelligent with every generation. Years ago, they implanted their DNA into the human race and, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of earth, every human has a strand of Furon DNA running through their body. So, their leader sends his mightiest and hopefully least stupid warrior to the earth in search of this DNA in order to restore their kind and clone better versions in the future.

Gameplay was probably ahead of its time when the game released and is pretty similar here, meaning it feels a little dated too. The mission variety is a saving grace. Some missions have you fighting on foot with an arsenal of alien weaponry at your disposal. Others involve hopping in your ship and taking out tanks and legions of soldiers as they attack, while some levels have you doing stealth missions and killing people will end the mission and force you to start over. During these missions you’ll have a lot of fun things to do including scanning the human’s brain and basically taking over their body so that you can blend in. Be careful though, this is only a temporary fix and if you aren’t careful, you’ll be spotted and have to start over again.

The controls can be a lot to remember but work pretty fluidly once you master all the different things that you can do. You’ll find yourself from time to time obliterating a human when you’re supposed to simply read their mind, but for the most part the controls have aged well.

Recommendation: Destroy all Humans! Remake is going to be a pleasant time for fans of the series wanting to revisit one of their favorite games. It feels dated and, though it looks better than the original, it still lacks a lot of the polish that we come to expect from most of our modern games this generation. If you’re looking for something to play that reminds you of a simpler time or simply ran out of things to play this year due to the extra amount of time that you’ve been home this year, then this game might just be for you. But it comes with some outdated humor and gameplay mechanics that, at times, can be hard to overlook. Look for Destroy all Humans! wherever you buy games on PS4, Xbox One, Google Stadia, and PC on July 28th.

*Destroy all Humans! was given to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*

Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.