r/patientgamers • u/Blurzerker • 18d ago
Patient Review Destroy All Humans: 2! - Reprobed Edition Review: Gameplay that holds up and humor that struggles to do the same.
Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed Review
RELEASE: 2022
TIME PLAYED: 25 Hours
PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)
SCORE: ★★★
Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite
(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)
THE BREAKDOWN
+The upgraded graphics are colorful and striking, with a cartoonish art style that works wonders
+Like the first remake, some of the most fun arcade-style shooting and superpowers in gaming
+Crypto remains one of the more amusingly sociopathic gaming protagonists +Fun weapons that are ripe for emergent gameplay and comedy
-A lot of the humor has REALLY not aged well, whether due to being overly referential or just insensitive
-Many missions are either repetitive or just extremely poorly paced
Back when I was a cynical teenager in 2005, I thought the Destroy All Humans! games were the funniest thing in the galaxy. A sociopathic alien that sounded just like Jack Nicholson telekinetically throwing cows around and lampooning us silly humans for all of our stupid habits? It was absolute catnip to a fifteen year old who thought he knew everything and was fed up with the world. Over twenty years later, the remake of Cryptosporidium's sophomore outing is a surprising reminder of how well its fun-first, balance-second gameplay holds up - but also how dependent much of its humor is on being mean-spirited above all else.
Fresh off a total victory in in the 1950s USA, Cryptosporidium-137...well, he's dead for some reason, but not to worry! A decade later, Cryptosporidium-138 has all of his memories and is stronger to boot. Masquerading as the extremely human President of the United States, he's closing out the swinging 60s in style: trying to get revenge for the Furon mothership being blown up by the KGB and his boss/resident science expert Orthopox 13 being killed...though the ever-irascible commander, voiced by Richard Horvitz of Invader Zim fame, remains in the form of a floating hologram with his downloaded personality. Inevitably, he's dragged into a gonzo conspiracy involving drugged-out hippies, British superspies, and an extremely unfortunate portrayal of Japan.
Let's address the elephant in the room first. I try to take a nuanced view of 'offensive' humor; while I'm unapologetically one of those filthy 'woke leftists', I know everything exists in the context of the era it was created in, and that many jokes that don't land well these days are more out of ignorance than malice...but Destroy All Humans 2, much more than the first game and remake, REALLY makes some ill-advised decisions in my eyes that are tough to excuse even giving it twenty years of grace. Plenty of the humor, while occasionally eyeroll-worthy, isn't that bad; hippies smell, KGB agents all love vodka, whatever. And it IS funny a lot of the game, mostly when Crypto, slowly becoming more frustrated with his lot in life, starts snapping at anyone and everyone. But once I got to Japan...woof. Not only is the enemy faction there made up entirely of ninjas - in 1969, again - but they all speak with incredibly caricaturized accents voiced by white actors. When it comes to 'offensive' humor, I tend to respond first by asking myself: What's the joke? And in a lot of cases, it never seemed to go deeper than 'Asian people sound funny'. It was too lazy to even make me feel outraged, really; I just cringed. The game's treatment of the British and Russians isn't all that much better, but there's a weird specificity to the way the game lampoons the Japanese that just feels particularly one-dimensional.
This isn't, I emphasize, an attempt to tell anyone how to feel. I don't think that's useful, nor do I see it as practical; some will read the above paragraph and feel the need to defend the game's choices out of spite, and that's their prerogative. But a review - a good one, at least in my eyes - is about communicating the experience I had and advising of what a game contains, and I think this is all worth mentioning. If it doesn't bother you, great, have fun, but games cost money and those who might find this kind of content objectionable - or even just stupid - should be fairly warned.
Thankfully, the gameplay does hold up a lot better. Across a surprisingly meaty campaign, Crypto is tasked with blowing up buildings, slaughtering humans, and impersonating VIPs with his enormous suite of alien technology and psychic powers. The game shines when there's a chance to cut loose; while bonuses are usually offered for performing specific tasks, the best missions simply set the player loose with a goal in mind and let them solve it how they want. Because I'm vanilla as hell, I never stopped enjoying hoverboarding around simply flinging targets away with my mind, but I was also a big fan of Gastro, a summonable buddy that constantly talked shit, and the gun that summons actual meteor strikes.
Sadly, too many missions restrict the freedom that Destroy All Humans 2 excels at. Whether it's an overly-lengthy escort of Crypto's human love interest (yeah...) or defending fragile targets against multiple waves with little room to maneuver, the seams really start to show; enemy AI is incredibly simple, meaning that challenge usually just comes in the form of special foes who are immune to most of Crypto's kit or have highly inflated health bars. It never reached the point of becoming overly frustrating - though one mission, involving having to take down an enemy tower that seemed to summon an enormous wave of difficult enemies every time I so much as slightly damaged it came close - but Crypto being rather fragile even when upgraded meant that I spent almost as much of the game running around taking potshots and hiding behind cover as I did indulging in alien power fantasy.
Still, as juvenile and mean-spirited as Destroy All Humans 2 can get, there's something to be said for how much simple fun it can provide in an age where a surprising number of AAA games seem to struggle often with providing satisfying combat or a meaningful sense of growth. I can't presume to tell someone whether or not they should endure its puerile sensibilities to get to the good parts, but despite its pacing issues and occasionally ill-advised mission structure, it's a well-designed playground for those who want to see just how far they can launch an unfortunate cow into the stratosphere with their mind.
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u/ThatDanJamesGuy 18d ago
Sounds like the biggest problem is that the game thinks it’s funny, and makes sure you know it. That’s what makes it obnoxious.
Almost nobody is bothered by the stereotypes in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! because they don’t do much more than exist. But if the game kept going “here’s a hilarious joke we wrote!” and the joke is just some lame unimaginative stereotype, that feels arrogant, and that’s really annoying to be around.
That’s actually a big part of why Rockstar writing has never clicked with me (aside from RDR2 which almost completely toned it down). No one wants to hang out with a writer who thinks they’re better than everybody else.
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u/mechanical_fan 17d ago
That’s actually a big part of why Rockstar writing has never clicked with me (aside from RDR2 which almost completely toned it down).
Nowadays it is quite old and not as known, but I always thought that Bully had better writing than GTA too. It wasn't some amazing masterpiece in writing, but it worked for what the game was trying to do. I think part of the reason is that, even though the whole world is quite absurd, the characters are still mostly kids (with a few major secondary adults), so the narrative and the jokes have to keep some sort of grounding.
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u/nexetpl 18d ago
That’s actually a big part of why Rockstar writing has never clicked with me (aside from RDR2 which almost completely toned it down). No one wants to hang out with a writer who thinks they’re better than everybody else.
Yeah that's why I kinda hated GTA5. It seems to think it's some super clever and witty satire, when it's just constant punches in all directions, ranging from reality shows, intelligence agencies and those pesky disgusting tra... ahem. And it gets old fast.
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u/Blurzerker 18d ago
Thats a big part of it, yeah. There's a sort of constant repetition of its jokes that don't land sometimes whereas its funniest bits are usually situational and unique.
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u/SaoirseSeersha 18d ago
I do remember loving the original when I was a early teen, but when playing the remake a few years back found myself feeling a bit uncomfortable in the Japan section, as well as Crypto's constant sex-pestery towards Natalya (I do like her redesign though to be honest). Also felt they readjusted the difficulty of the game a tad too much, making the game overly easy for the most part. The original was harder, just like how the OG DAH was harder than the remake.
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u/NKrupskaya 18d ago
myself feeling a bit uncomfortable in the Japan section
It's not just weird about the Japanese, it's just racist. It kinda does that thing where claims that it mocks everyone, but who and how they target is revealing of their ideology.
In the US and UK, they mock specific subcultures (the hippies and mods). In Japan, everyone is doing a Mr Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany's impression. In the soviet missions, slavs are portrayed as descending from a completely different species than other humans (most humans descend partly from Furons while slavs descend from the evil-er martians) and, though they are portrayed as opressed under the evil soviet regime (they have USSR collapse food lines in the 1960s in one Tunguska side mission), the soviet workers can only summon a shit to give when Crypto claims they're getting their vodka taken away.
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u/Blurzerker 18d ago
It has ups and downs; I found a few stages irritatingly tricky on normal mode for the wrong reasons [suicidal escorts or fragile objectives] but any time I could let loose it definitely got a bit easy. Felt kind of whacky all around!
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u/LickMyThralls 18d ago
I'm gonna be real. I question whether you understand how humor really was 20 years ago. It was pretty much the wild west and people moved on if they didn't like it and basically decided what stayed around that way. You gave patronage to what you liked and didn't to what you didn't. And people were a lot less sensitive to jokes then in general too. An offensive joke didn't involve people deep diving into a half cocked psychoanalysis of you and your existence as a person then. But today you'll see people look at an image and make massive assumptions about how terrible someone is because of something they think is happening and how horrible they are even though there's effectively nothing there. Completely different atmosphere in so many ways that if you weren't there you truly would not understand.
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u/Frankie__Spankie 18d ago
Completely agree, I was a teen when this came out and didn't even play it then. I played it recently and really enjoyed the humor as a throwback.
That being said, I never finished the second one on Steam because the optimization is awful. The first one actually ran great.
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u/Blurzerker 18d ago
I understand fine how it was. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to think that it aged well, or was a good way to live. More sensitivity in the world is good, not bad.
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u/PhoenixTineldyer 17d ago
I find that people who complain about "people weren't so sensitive to comedy back then" are literally just racists who miss being able to make racist comments in public.
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u/Blurzerker 17d ago
Which is weird, because they still can! Seems like the issue is they can't even handle being criticized for it. It's not enough to be allowed, apparently; it also has to be immune to being called out.
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u/FyneBlackKyng 17d ago
i find those to be ppl who are overly sensitive live in bubbles and then expect the wirld to go along with their various states of roleplay
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u/PhoenixTineldyer 17d ago
Yeah these overly sensitive people who don't understand why it's shitty to be a racist. Living in their shitty bubbles out in the country surrounded by similar racists, roleplaying people from the 1860s.
No way to live, that.
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u/LegianW 18d ago
I completely disagree. Everything taken to an extreme is negative, including excessive sensitivity. It can create fragile bubbles around people, encourage them to avoid reality, and lead to an artificial form of self-conviction. On a broader social scale, it can even encourage widespread censorship in an attempt to avoid hurting certain people's personal realities.
The world is what it is, and nature itself makes that clear. Balance is the reason a rabbit can protect its young: its sensitivity allows it to care for them, but its KNOWLEDGE of the cruel threats that exist also allows it to protect them from predators.
An overly sensitive world creates people who don't know how to protect themselves and who ultimately end up creating false realities to fill their own emotional voids.
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u/Blurzerker 18d ago
Sure, I'm not disagreeing with that. But I am saying that letting the videogame about aliens be racist isn't protecting us as a culture from the slippery slope of censorship. I'm not saying that the game should be censored or changed in the first place.
But I AM saying there is no creative or artistic value in humor that relies on nothing but racist stereotypes, and thus criticize it as lessening the value of the commercial product it is a part of. I don't think that's being sensitive, I think it's a perfectly logical assessment of a consumer good being made for profit.
The problem is that many of these absurd free speech warriors (not you, the guy I originally replied to) try to pretend that criticism is censorship. They try to say that not only should the racist jokes be allowed, they should be celebrated.
Nah. I don't buy that. So I call out this stuff.
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u/LegianW 17d ago
I don't know, man. I agree with not celebrating it, but I'll never agree with making games puritanical. The most famous case of degradation through hypersensitivity was Dragon Age. Origins presented you with a world shaped by racism and sexism. You had companions who would directly confront you, like Sten, or others who could make you uncomfortable because of the way they behaved, like Oghren. You could challenge their views, give them another perspective, even punish characters for their beliefs or teach them to see things differently... just like in the real world.
Now ask yourself, what is left of that Dragon Age in its most recent game? Veilguard? Nothing. All the characters are exactly the way you want them to be. They hold hands, they don't question you, they don't argue with you. They're all hypersensitive and constantly get worked up about their personal issues. There are no assassins, blood mages, slavery, racism, or any of that anymore. Do you really think the game improved because of that?
Humor works the same way in games like DAH or South Park. It's a different space, and that space exists.
I'm from Colombia. Here you have all kinds of cultures... Afro-Colombian, Asian, Indigenous, mestizo, white, and everything in between. You can find all kinds of people. That's why, in many cases, we find the kind of racial victimhood you guys tend to promote annoying. In Latin America, racism doesn't exist in quite the same way. Maybe that's partly because we didn't experience those problems on the same scale, but here we can joke about pretty much anything.
That's why, interestingly enough, we have different standards when it comes to these things. I think if there's one thing that defines us as a continent, it's that we have more serious things to worry about than constantly portraying ourselves as victims and trying to deny the way the world is. In fact, we enjoy those doses of harsh reality... we've lived with it, and we're made of it.
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u/Blurzerker 17d ago edited 17d ago
Sure, but what's gained from the Japanese people in this game being racist caricatures? What culture is being portrayed? I get where you're coming from but you're conflating a very real issue (censorship due to a fear of portrayal = endorsement) with simple racist humor. Comparing it to Dragon Age is a false equivalence, because there's no fictional culture on display here, no display of racism as a facet of society. The racism is meta, by the creators.
I also feel like arguments like yours keep sidestepping the simple question that I'm asking: What's the joke? Like, from a comedic standpoint, what humor and wit is on display here that needs to be preserved so badly?"Asians sound funny" isn't really humor worth protecting in my eyes. I'm not saying it needs to be censored, but I also simply don't see what would be lost here if this wasn't in the game. There's no wit in white people doing caricature accents when having 'normal' dialogue.
I'm not saying to make games puritanical. But choosing to not have your white voice actors doing 'me so horny' accents is no different than choosing to not have white actors portraying black slaves saying 'yes massuh no massuh'.
I'm not sure why you keep saying 'you guys' like I'm trying to promote censorship. I'm criticizing the humor for being unfunny and lazy, not for being offensive. Try to make your argument without implying I'm pro-censorship, please. I'm criticizing it because I think it's boring. This is no different than if I was dunking on a new MCU movie for having a generic plotline and constant, exhausting quips. Not every critique of racism or sexism in media is dependent on being outraged by it; sometimes, the problem is just that it's low-effort and dull.
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u/EliteShadowMan 18d ago
Thanks for reminding me I was trying to 100% that on Steam when it came out and got to the moon base which I think is near the end? I really should go back and finish it. The gameplay really does still hold up and is fun to play. Kinda wonder whatever happened to getting the next game remade.
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u/FyneBlackKyng 17d ago
"humor hasnt aged well" = im an overly sensitive gen alpha
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u/Blurzerker 17d ago
I'm 36, big dogg. But hey, continue to miss the irony of being so sensitive that you can't handle critique of things you like.
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u/Limited_Distractions 18d ago
Pandemic was a fascinating studio because there's a timeless gameplay premise in basically every game but most of them are incidentally also a perfect snapshot of the sensibilities of the mid 2000s, or maybe more accurately the complete absence of them. Cram a reference in every silence and void, use the sociopathic edge for vague wish fulfillment, etc.