REVIEW: ‘Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed’ Isn’t So Far Out, Man (XSX)

Destroy All Humans! is such an odd franchise. It puts you in the shoes of the aliens invading Earth. When most games and movies around its original 2005 launch were about human perseverance, Destroy All Humans! took a different approach. Putting you in the shoes of Cryptosporidium, representative of the Furon empire to conquer Earth, you help him do just that. For a PS2-era game, it was extremely fun! In 2022, developer Black Forest Games and publisher THQ Nordic are ready to conquer the Earth again in Crypto’s second outing. But is Destroy All Humans! 2 just as fun as one might remember?

Yes and no. One thing about playing these games as a 12-year-old is that dumb humor hit hard. The first thing I saw when booting up Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed was a developer warning saying that none of the dialogue has changed. For some backstory, Destroy All Humans! 2 took Crypto on an international tour. Not just to conquer the US, but to save the world from the Soviets and an ancient Furon threat. This included visiting areas like Japan, the UK, Russia, 60s San Francisco, and beyond. Unfortunately, the dialogue in particular and voice acting direction did not age well.

The gameplay was one of the highlights. Similar to 2020’s Destroy All Humans!, the game feels fun with modern controls. They feel more streamlined and play more smoothly. But the controls do get complex with the number of weapons you slowly get and some new abilities that weren’t in the original. Specifically, with the PK Slam, I was shocked to see that it wasn’t even mentioned in the menus like every other tutorial. I had to reset a mission because I wanted to get an optional challenge that required PK Slam, and I couldn’t find how exactly to use it in the controls or the menus.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed runs great on the Xbox Series X! I played for about eight hours on my Series X with no issues. It wasn’t until I traveled and took my Series S with me I found a whole slew of new issues. Every 20 minutes, the game’s framerate would just drop to an abhorrent level. Then, two to three minutes later, the game would hard crash. Any workaround I could think of didn’t fix this issue. Power cycling the Series S? No dice. Re-installing the game? It still happened. For how frequently it happened, it made the game almost unplayable. Why would I continue playing when at any minute, during a mission or getting collectibles, all my progress would reset?

This was really disappointing. Until I played Reprobed on the Series S, I was pretty high on the game. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it definitely was nostalgic. That all came to a screeching halt when this bug started kicking in. This can absolutely be fixed, and hopefully it is by the time the game launches.

But these issues don’t change one thing. This remake can be astonishingly beautiful. While most NPCs look like plastic dolls, Crypto’s design is particularly well done. The vents on his head breathe, and you can see the amount of detail on his suit that really couldn’t be noticed before. The suit looks like actual clothing instead of something pasted to his skin.

Even the environments are beautifully made. Specifically, the moon, the fifth map of the game, is breathtaking. Flying around the five areas in Crypto’s saucer is fun because there feels like a lot more differentiation and detail when compared to the PS2 version and the 2020 remake; it does feel like the devs put more time in their environments than anything else.

Until today, I thought that all remakes should just be the same game updated to look and run better. But now I don’t know if that’s the case anymore. After several amazing remakes and reboots that basically redefined their original game series, I wish some of that TLC was inserted into Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed. At least some care could make games like this one feel less like a nostalgic cash grab. Games like this one are fun. But they feel very shallow, especially when you’re told up front that there won’t be any changes to dialogue. Dialogue that was clearly made in a different time.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed shows this cult classic did not age well. Beyond dialogue, updates to gameplay and graphics feel hollow when game-breaking bugs are still prevalent. Black Forest Games can make fun remakes. It would just be nice to see them push their talents to update older games and make them feel like these classics can stand the test of time and should be brought to the modern age. That isn’t to say you won’t find fun here. But that fun may just be restricted to a 10-12 hour jaunt through memory lane.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed is available on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.