Sci-Fi B-Movie fun, now made interactive!
The weapons at your disposal include a ray gun that can shoot lightning, disintegrating laser bolts, and what can best be described as grenades of raw power. It also has an Anal Probe setting that extracts brain stems. I didn't bother to investigate how that science works, as the connection between anus and brain seems too painful.
You're arsenal is not limited to your technology. You're also gifted with telekinetic and telepathic powers. In addition to providing you with an alternate way to extract the brains from the humans, these powers will let you perform mind control activities, create holographic-like disguises so you can walk among the humans undetected, and lift, move, and throw boxes, animals, people, and eventually cars, tanks, and other large objects. This comes in as a handy offensive weapon. It gets to be quite satisfying to run into a couple of men-in-black, throw one of them over the house, then pick up the second and begin smashing them into the ground.
The last method of bringing bedlam involves your saucer ship. Some objectives will have you flying around destroying the buildings in the towns and cities your missions take you to. Like you, it is equipped with a few different weapon types, of varying destructive force.
After completing any given mission, you're free to go back to the area to take on some of the bonus missions, or just create some random violence either on foot, or hovering above in your deadly space craft.
This will sometimes be required, as the brain stems I mentioned earlier act as a sort of currency to purchasing weapon, mind, and ship upgrades. At some times you'll also need to collect a minimum number of brain stems to proceed to the next mission. This slows the action down a little bit, but it pays off as it ensures you can afford at least a couple upgrades before moving on.
In the middle of all these elements, there's a fair amount of humour thrown into the script, and the one liners you'll get from Earth's citizens as you read their minds. This humour is constant throughout the game, but also a little repetitive, not unlike the mission objectives. There's not a lot of variety in the mission goals, and many of the bonus missions in the various areas are near if not entirely identical. They try to mix things up with stealth like levels where you have to avoid detection, but these slow the game down more than anything else.
The occasional feeling of déjà vu you'll get in the middle of the action isn't always a result of the limited approached you have to completing objectives. It can also be attributed to the lack of checkpoints in each level. If you need to complete 4 objectives in a mission, and you've done three and a half, then die, I hope you enjoyed what you just went through, because you're about to do it all over again from the beginning. At least the game does save some of the progress you might have made, such as the brain stems you've collected, and any of the hidden pods that are placed throughout the different areas. Collect all the pods from each section, and you'll unlock some bonus features.
There's not a lot of depth to Destroy All Humans, but it does provide enough to give you what is overall a fun time blowing things up. You may not feel compelled to unlock all the bonuses, or acquire all of the upgrades, but if you let yourself get through the first few levels there's a good chance you'll at least want to play it through to the end.