Of all the games I expected to be remade in this era, I wouldn’t have suspected a series that parodies Cold War alien films and offers jokes and stereotypes that probably offend basically everyone in the modern era. But here we are; back to a game I played quite a lot as a kid with one of my brothers in co-op.
Destroy all Humans! 2 – Reprobed is the remake of the sequel to Destroy All Humans!, itself remade in 2020. It is touted as a "near-perfect clone" of the original and while there are some changes, I’d say most of them are for the benefit of the game. If you feel like you need to play the first game to enjoy the sequel, you don’t, as I’ve never played it and still understood mostly what was going on.
The story picks up right where the first game left off, with alien protagonist Crypto living it up as the President of the United States. The Soviets, seeing Crypto as a threat, decide to nuke the Furon Mothership from orbit and kill Orthopox 13, Crypto’s commander and joke punching bag. Now Crypto and Orthopox (who lives on as a small robot containing his consciousness) have plans for revenge, and soon join forces with a rogue KGB agent, Natalya, to stop them from destroying the world.
The humour has not aged well. There are a few lines that gave me a chuckle here and there; Natalya’s complete disinterest and outright hostility towards Crypto’s romantic advances is probably some of the most enjoyable dialogue. But much of the "humour" comes down to the level of making juvenile references to, ahem, the "male reproductive organ". I really enjoyed this as a kid but 15 years later, I’m not the biggest fan.
The most notable change to the game is the graphical update. In many remakes, it just looks like they changed a lighting engine and called it a day, but here everything in the world has been fully remade from scratch. The game looks gorgeous. It’s dripping with more of the ’60s aesthetic than before, and the weapons have great-looking effects when you’re melting your way through half a dozen hippies. I really like the fact you can see Crypto’s pulsing brain from outside now, through thinner see-through portions of his head.
The gameplay, however, has not experienced the same level of evolution. It is generally the same as it was, with a few changes. There’s a new dash feature, welcome as the open worlds were a pain to navigate on foot all the time, and different upgrade paths and controls for weapons. The combat is generally a third-person affair, with Crypto using a lot of different weapons and telekinetic abilities to enact his titular goal. A change I really like is the addition of bonus objectives to the missions, which are often humorous or challenging.
There’s multiplayer, but only split-screen. Why can’t we play multiplayer online? I know it was a split-screen only thing in the early 2000s, but we’ve had almost 20 years of progress since then.
Through the changes, some of the old flaws come back to bite. The variety of the missions isn’t the best. At the umpteenth "take control of a specific human to run through a few dialogue options" or "read minds to figure out where to go, and then read more minds to go to another place", it really starts feeling same-y.
Even the side missions fall into a few simple categories, and I was pushing myself to complete them not out of interest, but because I would get upgrades from them.
So we have a mixed bag already, but none of that matters if you keep glitching out and the game runs like trash. There were several game-breaking bugs, often full crashes or moments when I had to restart entire missions because the next bit wouldn’t trigger properly. In any of kind of fight with a lot of particle effects or enemies (and often, both at the same time), the game would struggle to run well.
Destroy All Humans! 2 Reprobed is in a bit of a strange place for me. It’s a mostly faithful recreation of the original game with modern touch-ups to the gameplay, with the differences about enough to drag this game to the early 2010s. What a shame we’re now in 2022. It still feels like a relic from the past with the simple and outdated combat and humour, garbage performance (actually, that sadly is a pretty modern thing) and repetitive mission design.
It’s not terrible; just a reminder that the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia obscure the truth. Fans of Cryptosporidium’s other remaster will enjoy this, but it’s safe to say you’re not missing too much here.
