[There are a number of comparisons to Mercenaries in this review; bear with me. Mercenaries was made by Pandemic, as was DAH; Mercenaries is a GTA-ish sandbox game, which DAH is as well; they appear to be using the same graphics engine and both feature an explosive physics system; they both feature somewhat similar missions; they both were released within 6 months of each other. Aside from the radical differences in storyline, they might as well be blood-related.] I'd been eagerly anticipating this game for a long time; as an avid fan of Mercenaries, Pandemic Studio's other GTA-type sandbox game, I couldn't wait to play around with a flying saucer and destroy the 1950's countryside. To that end, the game does work - you do get to destroy everything you see, in a variety of spectacular ways. However, there's a sense of "something missing" here, and while this game spent a long time in development one can't help but feel that it could've used a few more months in the oven. What the game gets right is its sense of style and humor. The paranoid America of the 1950s is sent up to near-perfection. The art direction and the music perfectly capture the B-movie sensibility that it's going for, and the voice acting is remarkably strong - as it should be, since it's working with a very well-written script. I'm assuming that DAH is running off of a modified version of the Mercenaries engine, as they do share a lot of graphical elements; what's surprising, then, is that the game looks somewhat worse than Mercenaries, which preceded it by a good 6 months. There's especially a great deal of pop-up which can make traveling by saucer somewhat disorienting. As for the gameplay: in Mercenaries, you had 4 different places you could take missions from, and you could pick and choose what you wanted to do at any given point in time. In DAH, however, as you're only taking missions from one party, the setup is a bit different: you start each mission by departing from the mothership, you land in a specific town, and then you complete your mission - and only THEN you get to freely explore the countryside (until you reach an arbitrary and invisible barrier), collecting various collectibles, engaging in non-mandatory side missions, and generally wreaking havoc with your mind, your weapons or your flying saucer. This creates a lot of stopping and starting, obviously, and once you've completed your main objective there's really very little else to do. Blowing up buildings and throwing cars around can be fun, but once you've done it for a while there's no incentive to keep doing it. The side missions feel tacked-on; there are point-to-point races, or you have to kill a certain number of people in a certain amount of time, or whatever, and the only benefit is a wee bit of DNA, which you then use to upgrade your weapons or your saucer. And that's generally it. There's certainly fun to be had here, but I'm a bit disappointed in the overall execution; this is certainly not as engrossing as Mercenaries, and even on its own merits it feels somewhat half-baked. It's certainly worth a rental, but I'm not sure it's worth full price.
Ah America circa 1957, land of mom's apple pie, commies under the bed, and government sponsered propaganda on everything from your taste in fashin to what to do when a Nuke explodes right over your head. There was even a... Read Full Review
By asassinmario | Review Date: Oct 12, 2006 | XBOX
I love it. Sucking out brains killing our kind it is really fun!!!!! I love being an alien!!!!!!!!! It is a really great game to play. You play as a species called furons. One furon crash lands at a distant planet far fr... Read Full Review
