First Impression RETRO: Destroy All Humans, Path of the Furon

In Story

This time with Achievements!

Bringing back some good ol' Xbox fun, DaH returns with Cryptosporidium and his holographic, quasi-robotic boss Pox. You get your fill of anal-probing, zapping, body-snatching, and using your saucer's Death Ray to completely terrorize the population of the 1970s.I believe this would be the third installment in the Destroy All Humas line-up.

The Story

Small recap: Destroy All Humans took place in the 1950s, Destroy All Humans 2 took place in the 1960s. Obviuosly, The third installment should take place in the 1970s.

Open with our wise-cracking, Jack Nicholson sound-alike Crypto and his Invader Zim sound-alike, Pox. You start in Las Paradiso, a place full of mobsters and casinos and corruption. Your job is to do what Pox tells you, and do it with style. The main plot of DaH is to cause mayhem. You kill people and collect their brain stems (DNA is your currency.) Along the way, you will be introduced to new abilities and some rather tricky boss fights.

Throughout your campaign, you will travel from Las Paradiso to Sunnywood to Shen Long and even furthur. Though the story really falls way short of being a life-changing game, it's enough to statisfy the reasoning to go and fuck up the landscape.

Gameplay

This game seems to have suffered being rendered by blind poeple who have never heard of the Xbox 360. The graphics are less than sub-par for a gaming platform that boasts an HDMI port. I've already experianced 2 game freezes that required a complete restart of my console.

Besides the graphics, you might be surprised at the joy of running around in a sandbox world, jumping from rooftop to rooftop like a web-less, jetpacking Spider-Man. The ability to screw with people by zapping hordes at a time, collecting their brain stems, then body snatching to loose the police, SWAT or military personel can give you an ego trip. You have an open menu that allows you to see weapons you haven't unlocked yet. They are acquired through the story. You spend your hard stolen DNA to upgrade items.

A new feature makes an appearance. A little way into the story, you get the ability to stop time. This comes in handy for picking a up a person and carrying them into a dark ally for a quick body-snatch. You can also stop time, pick people up and leave them suspended in the air until time restores. This causes them to drop to the ground and pop some juicy DNA.

If running around isn't your cup of tea, you can jump into your saucer and lay into the populace via your Death Ray (or other weapon that unlocks later.) You can abduct people and pick up vehicles while you wage war against the military. Find the sacred idols of Arkvoodle to unlock more landing zones.

You'll find an Achievement tied to collectables (what a freakin' surprise.) But it seems the developers wanted to ease the pain by making the collectable items fairly easy to spot when zipping around in your saucer. There are side missions (which are marked on your map) and challenges (which aren't marked.) You have a stat page in the pause menu that tells you exactly what you've done, so it helps take guesswork out of the equation.

The voice acting and one-liners are superb. The game's render team got oddly off track and many cutscenes take a good 3 seconds or more to start up, whcih leaves you looking at the interacting characters having an akward moment of silence. Beyond that, there are times when the audio will cut off abruptly at the end of the cutsecene, chopping of half of the last word. A bit more spit-and-polish would have done this game wonders, considering the cheesy dialog is definately a major selling point on all DaH games.

The controls are simplified. The lack of auto-targeting makes a body-snatch while pursuing someone a real chore. The lack of fancy button presses is a relief.

In Closing

DaH Path of the Furon does really well in continuing the exploits of Crypto and Pox. It lacks any and all graphical abilites of even launch 360 games, and that's even more redunant in the fact that the game isn't super-stable. It can lag occasionally and when it freeze, you worry about the last gamesave. The epic dialog and cheesy humor are key to wanting to play this game. It's kind of slow, kind of boring, and kind of repetitious. But none of those are too horrible to bust through for the 1000 Gamerscore.

6 out of 10

Keep your eyes open for Jack Trippleson

"I hate that guy! His voice grates on my nerves!" -Crypto