Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed Looks Like a Hilarious Remake
In 2020 THQ Nordic released Destroy All Humans!, a remake of the 2005 PlayStation 2 classic. Everyone seemed to know that the sequel was coming, and recently I got invited to a behind-the-scenes press event where I got a chance to see Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, the exact remake you think it is, and get a few minutes of gameplay.
The presentation started off with a goofy cinematic trailer featuring a song by Rammstein playing while Crypto runs around committing general havoc. He visits several locations, including the moon, San Fransisco, and somewhere in Russia. No matter where it is, however, Crypto brings destruction, death, giant lizard monsters that are not Godzilla but maybe if you squint can kind of look like him, and quite a bit of humor. It’s a fun trailer that shows the tone of the game rather well.
After that, we got our gameplay look. THQ Nordic started by showing the original 2006 PlayStation 2 game, before updating to Reprobed to show how the graphics have changed. Much like the leap between the 2005 Destroy All Humans! and its 2020 remake, the leap is very substantial. The game is pretty, and some of the new effects at work look fantastic. A big one? We got to see Crypto able to actually destroy buildings with his flying saucer, a thankful change. What can I say, I want to see cities collapse. That’s half the fun of the destruction.
The gameplay was a solid 10 minutes long, and we learned that Reprobed will remake all five maps from the 2006 game. This would be Bay City (San Fransisco), Albion (London), Takoshima (Tokyo), Tunguska (This one is a real place in Siberia, do they know that?), and the Moon. The plot itself takes place in 1969, ten years after the original Destroy All Humans!, though we weren’t given more details than that. However it seems doubtful that the plot will change that much, and it involves the original game’s Crypto-137 dying mysteriously and his clone, Crypto-138, trying to figure out what happened. As clones do.
To do this Crypto is given some new guns to play with. During the demo, we were told about the Burrow Beast, a gun that shoots out a lure that attracts a burrowing monster to attack, and the Meteor Strike which, well… causes meteors to strike. Kind of self-explanatory. One gun we got to see a lot of in the demo? The Disclocator.
What the Disclocator did was turn anything it hits into an extremely bouncy object which would often smack against the ground violently, blowing it up or killing it. The developers admitted to us that the Disclocator was easily one of the most hated weapons in the original game and that it often caused more problems than it fixed. Originally, they had planned to just cut it entirely. However, some members of the team insisted that they needed it in the game and they worked on it, taking a page out of 2008’s Path of the Furon and making it more like that game’s Superballer. So now it gets to be in the game again.
We got a couple more looks at the game, including a look at the Free Love mechanic that lets Crypto make characters start dancing and not stop, allowing him to take over their minds. We also got to see a quick cutscene of Crypto talking to a hippie before some Russian KGB agents attempted to kill him. It all carried the same humor that could be seen both in the original 2006 release and in the more recent 2020 remake. I really appreciate THQ Nordic going the extra mile for the game.
While our look was short, and I haven’t actually had any hands-on time myself, I was really happy with the amount of effort being put into Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed. I always love seeing series get another chance at life, and Destroy All Humans! always came off as a series that deserved it. I guess the only question now is if they chose to remake the overwhelmingly hated Path of the Furon, or go for an all-new game next.
Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed is set to come out sometime in 2022 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
