Destroy All Humans! 2 review

The laser toting, insult slinging alien Cryptosporidium 138 returns to make war - not love - in Pandemic's Destroy All Humans! 2. The game takes place during the psychedelic '60s and begins with Cryptos enjoying the spoils of victory from his successful takeover of the American government in the previous title.

Horny as ever, Cryptos is just about to break in his newly formed genitalia - thanks to the human DNA you harvested in the previous game - when a Russian missile destroys his mothership and ruins the party. You'll have to travel around the world to sock it to the Soviets while destroying a bunch of humans along the way.

Like the original, Destroy All Humans! 2 will hook you in with its sense of style and cheesy humor. It still manages to maintain that campy, B-movie quality feeling with lots of "so bad it's good" moments and excessive theremin sounds (that oscillating, "whoooOOOOoooo" that's so prevalent in flying saucer movies) that would make Ed Wood proud.

It's also less humorous than the first game - taking advantage of dimwitted Bay Area hippies, new wave English mods, and Japanese school girls sounds great, but the game's one-liner approach at humor and story suffers from being spread too thinly over too many targets. It's still funnier than 90% of the other games out there; it's just not as fresh or focused as the original DAH.

Ironically, it also feels like you're out to save all humans rather than destroy them. Sure, there are plenty of monuments to level with your UFO and innocent bystanders to waste with alien weaponry, but the majority of the story missions are escort and delivery type errands and focus on thwarting the communists' plans to subvert and cripple the world's populace.

There's also not much freedom in how you choose to complete these missions - except for which gun to use when the scripted enemy encounters occur. So it's still not quite the "GTA with aliens" sandbox that we'd like it to be.