Destroy all Humans: Path of the Furon – Review

Alien invasion is not a new concept to games, with the usual approach pitting the feeble humans against the resource hungry, laser gun wielding extraterrestrials. Well, what if you don’t want to save humanity? What if  for once you want to be the one with the disintegrator gun in your hands? Well, that is the premise of “Destroy all Humans” from developer Pandemic Studios.

Once again you play a 4ft, black eyed, grey skinned alien named Crypto who has come to earth to harvest human brains for their DNA, which will ensure his race’s survival who’s sole means of procreation is cloning. Only, after spending sometime on earth and, no doubt with the use of his Furion psychokinesis, he has read and manipulated human minds right to top and has established himself as a casino owning mobster.

The game is set in the 1970’s and after the smart Alec, Jack Nicholson wanna-be sounding Crypo is nearly off’d by a group of rival mobsters in what is supposed to be Las Vegas, he realises that something or other besides the mob wants him out. Crypto sets off on a trip across five open-world cities to solve the case.

While you are free to run around there is not a whole lot you can do besides randomly zap humans with the “Zap-O-Matic” – which reminds me of the ghostbusters’ partical beam – the “Disintegrator” or the rather lame-O “Anal probe”, all of which are probably better left alone. I found that sticking to the default weapon, the “Zap-O-Matic” provided the best results unless, as with many occasions, the game forced me to use one of the other less “exciting” weapons. You can body snatch and take control of people’s bodies – which can only really be used to evade the police – or use telekinesis to grab and throw the humans like badly rendered rag dolls, both of which get boring and repetitive rather quickly.

The game involves you accepting missions from your holographic sidekick and they start simply: shoot someone, defend something, use telekinesis to carry something somewhere and as the game progress these missions get harder and longer, so essentially you are doing the same thing as in the beginning but for longer and with more annoyances.

One can see that the humour from earlier iterations of the game has been brought forward but now Crypo’s tongue and cheek dialogue gets old very quickly. He speaks so much that I actually found myself watching cut scenes over and over without seeing much action in way of game play. Eventually I just hit the X button (PS3) to skip it all which often left the scene to continue but without sound. Believe me when I say I’d rather have it that way than listen to more of Crypto’s annoying, un-synched garble.

Playing the game on a current-gen console is nothing less than offensive. On the cover the game touts the use of the Unreal Engine as well as a nicely rendered picture of Crypto which by my guess was most definitely not a shot out of the in-game graphics. By no means does this game look like it belongs on a PS3 or Xbox 360 and would probably more at home if it traveled back in time to be reincarnated as an early PS2 game.

Giving this game away as a gift to a gamer is much the same as giving the gift of a knife to a person of Japanese origin – deeply offensive. If you have by some slippery chance of fate ended up with this game in your collection please remember, it will work well as a table coaster or a fetch toy for your dog.

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