Player One: Staff Member #716
Expectations are weird. Prior to actually playing Destroy All Humans!, I was under the impression that the game was going to play like a straight-up parody of a Fifties alien invasion B-movie. I definitely thought the game would be funny, but I was prepared for the perfectly-emulated campy humor of movies like Mars Attacks!, Invasion!, or The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra. As soon as I booted up the game and the main character began talking like a bad impression of Brad Dourif\'s bad impression of Jack Nicholson, I feared for the worst. The Fifties-era backdrop was just for show, I realized. This was going to be a game with strictly modern references for its strictly modern audience.
I\'ve never been more glad to be more wrong. Destroy All Humans! is able to perfectly recreate the world of Fifties America as I\'d hoped, but with the knowing wink and nod that the past half-century of history has afforded the game developers. The Fifties were the beginning of the age of paranoia; America knew that it was supposed to be suspicious of something, whether it could actually identify the threat or not. And it\'s obvious that the developers had fun with this concept. The game\'s running gag of police and bystanders mistaking your obviously extraterrestrial protagonist for a communist just doesn\'t seem to get old.
The mind-reading game mechanic only adds to this. Your alien\'s psychic abilities are fueled by absorbing the thoughts of nearby humans, so in order to maintain a holographic disguise or have enough mental capacity to levitate a car, the player must be constantly invading the minds of the hapless civilians. Some of the thoughts you can uncover are truly hilarious jabs at Donna Reed housewives, the Internet, Mr. Ed, the U.S. military, Joe McCarthy, and Monica Lewinsky.
So while I initially feared the more contemporary view of the Fifties-era setting, my biggest anxiety turned out to be one of the game\'s strengths. Destroy All Humans! gives the player an alien (but decidedly 21st-Century) take on the absurdity of post-World War II America, all while keeping its tongue planted firmly in cheek. Whether you\'re giving a cryptic speech as a mayoral impostor or fighting a giant army robot who just called you Sarah Connor by mistake, the game makes sure to never adhere too strictly to just one brand of humor.
Player Two: Borko-Totz
At last, I have control of... well, your keyboard! This is Borko-Totz, from the planet Borkasto! Mwa-ha-ha!!!
Das Bork is my cousin and, well, he is just a little retarded. Please tell him I said that. He sent me this game from Earth through the trans-molecular hyper-thingy of bipolar-disorder transponder! Not only did he send me the game to review, he also sent some Hinderhat sausages! Yes, all aliens are German and love sausages. I guess he figured, since I’m a German alien, that I’d like to play this game called Destroy All Humans!
I enjoyed destroying all humans in Destroy All Humans!, but there are some stereotypes about aliens I’d like to clear up. We don’t look like the gray-skinned, wide-eyed, hideous creatures you think we are. Our heads look more like chicken heads with no beaks, and our bodies are kind of like a mansquito... much better looking than you humanoids. We’ve got something like the Sistine Chapel, but with beautiful nudes of our lovely bodies.
But, man, this game is fun! So many weapons of destruction keep me playing in order to unlock bigger and better weapons of destruction. It makes me want to go back in time to the Fifties and wreak some havoc on Earth once more. We aliens only like to visit Earth in the Fifties, only because everyone thinks we are commies. But I guess modern Earthlings will think we\'re terrorists now.