E-Mail This Article to a Friend Marred attack Destroy All Humans! backfires BY MITCH KRPATA
	Destroy All Humans! Published by THQ | Developed by Pandemic Studios | For PlayStation 2 and Xbox | Rated T for Teen

Despite their advanced technology, superior intellect, and terrifying physical appearance, aliens have a lousy win-loss record against mankind. THQ aims to even the score with Destroy All Humans!, which puts you in the spacesuit of a misanthropic E.T. and unleashes you on the unsuspecting American populace. It’s a great idea for a game, but much as with developer Pandemic Studios’ previous release, Mercenaries, the brilliant concept crumbles beneath its stodgy, sometimes bewildering execution.

As an alien clone named Cryptosporidium-137, or "Crypto," you’ll use a variety of ray guns and telekinetic powers and even your flying saucer to wreak havoc on a complex, heavily populated game world — oh and along the way you’ll harvest as many delicious human brain stems as you can get your claw-like hands on. Crypto’s boss, Pox, assigns a variety of missions, some of which are aimed at destabilizing America’s delicate political and economic balance, some of which focus more on the brains. With so much to see and do, it’s the little things that turn Destroy All Humans! into an exercise in repetition and frustration.

Crypto moves pretty quickly, but it takes several minutes to traverse the bounds of each level on foot. Even his jetpack doesn’t speed things up too much. The game’s physical expanse is impressive, but it leads to a crippling gameplay flaw: there are no checkpoints during Crypto’s missions, so if you fail, no matter how far along you are, you have to start over from the beginning. That leads to endless boring downtime as you cross the same terrain and run through the same scripted scenarios just to get back to where you were. More than being just user-unfriendly, this kind of forced busy work seems passive-aggressive.

Those who play Grand Theft Auto solely to run around murdering pedestrians may enjoy the similar dynamic in Destroy All Humans! When not on a mission or one of the abundant side missions, Crypto is free to cause all the mayhem he wants. In addition to his standard ray gun, there’s an anal probe and several more-potent weapons for destroying buildings and vehicles. He can even hop into his flying saucer and incinerate buildings with his death ray. All of this brings the cops and feds to the scene, but that’s just more brains to reap.

Crypto’s telekinesis provides the most pure fun: almost any object can be levitated and made to react with any other object. You can slam cars onto cows, cows onto people, and people onto just about anything. And mucking about in this sandbox gameplay can take your mind off Pandemic’s other massive miscalculation — its attempt to give the aliens the moral high ground. The aliens’ toughest foes are black-clad "Majestic" agents who have their own devious plans for mankind. And for some reason, the aliens are positively aghast at the unethical practices of the Majestic. They’ll decry the Majestic’s mind-control conduit and then subvert it for their own ends. That provoked some cognitive dissonance I’m just not comfortable getting from a video game.

Destroy All Humans!’s biggest achievements are technical: the graphics and art direction are superb, and there are innovations here that other developers should take note of. For instance, after blowing up a building in the flying saucer, you can land and walk right up to the smoking ruins. What you can’t do are many things that might seem intuitively obvious, like piloting your craft in three dimensions or landing anywhere but in designated remote areas. It’s as though the folks at Pandemic were so enamored of their groundbreaking ideas that they overlooked the most basic principles of enjoyable gameplay. Destroy All Humans! plays like the world’s longest demo reel.

Score: 4.0 (out of 10)