Pros:
- Visual facelift is pretty fantastic.
- Voice work is as solid as ever.
- If you enjoyed the original game's story, it's largely preserved with some subtle changes here and there.
- The gameplay sticks largely to what 2020's "Destroy All Humans!" remake did. Which means...
Cons:
- ...this almost feels like a direct copy-and-paste of the previous remake. While playing, I hardly recognized that I was playing a sequel because it felt so similar. Was the original game like that?
- By way of feeling like a copy-and-paste, the game fails to fix many of the issues that I had with the previous game (maybe outside of the exclusion of stealth missions).
- Once again, the story and dialogue are as stuck in the past as you'd expect, so unless you have a huge amount of nostalgia for the game's story, it might be hard to get into it and find it as funny today.
- I know this can be lumped into the second con, but the boss fights felt even less interesting this time around.
- A shockingly buggy experience, more so than I would've reasonably expected.
Consensus: If somehow I went into this game without seeing the title card beforehand, and you just told me "it's another 'Destroy All Humans!' game," I think I'd probably get through the entire game before coming to the realization that it was a sequel. I'd be calling it a port, a remaster, a re-release, an expansion and probably several other things before landing on the word "sequel." The "Destroy All Humans!" remake was pretty fresh in my mind when playing this (given that I had played it earlier this year), which made "Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed" feel more like a copy-and-paste than a true sequel. It seems like the game was designed specifically for players who enjoyed the original back in 2006, which is fine, and I'm sure those players will probably get a kick out of this. However, unless you have a strong sense of nostalgia for this game, it's hard for me to recommend this to you. There's not enough excitement here to make the return trip as solid as the first one. At this point, after just two titles, I already feel worn out by these new "Destroy All Humans!" titles, and while I suppose moving to a proper new entry seems like a logical pivot, I can't say I'd be all too excited about it.
Final rating: 5 out of 10 "Hmm..."