Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed (2022)

• Playtime: 2 hours

• Played: 2025

• Expectation: None. I had no idea what this was.

Intro

This is a remaster of the 2006 sequel. You walk/fly around a small city and interact with NPCs. There's also quite a lot of dialogue.

The Good

• You can pick up and throw people.
• There's a gun that makes people/cars bounce violently.

The Bad

• Awkward controls - you skip text lines with Space but skip through tutorials with Enter.
• Very little variation in NPCs. You see the exact same ones over and over again.
• Everything involving the UFO is clunky, you can't even land outside of a few designated spaces.
• Dialogue often pauses to let you select a reply, only for there to be only one option. Just... why?

The Ugly

• The story and dialogue feel like they were designed by an AI trained solely on 50+ year old men. It's so aggressively off-putting. Like a mix of 2000s parody movies and excessive use of period slang.
• Runs terribly considering how empty the tiny city actually is. Also crashed after an hour.
• There is no flow to this game. You go to an areas, do a mission and repeat. The open world only exists to pad game time, it isn't interesting or fun to interact with at all.
• Enemies spawn in way too fast and you are so feeble at the start.

Conclusion

I loved Saints Row 3 and 4 so i was hoping this would have a vaguely similar vibe. Instead it's this dull, extremely dated game with a dead city and cringeworthy story elements ("spread the Great Pickupline"). I almost quit after it crashed an hour in but i decided to give it another shot. I got a mission where you have to put minivans on rooftops. The second roof collapsed, i have absolutely no idea why. You then have to redo this entire part. No, thanks.

I sunk many weeks into this game back during the PS2 era and it quickly became one of my favourite games to chill out with. I never left the first map area and instead treated the game as a sandbox, seeing how much destruction I could cause.

Revisiting it has been a bitter sweet experience. The overwhelmingly good part about the game is that the gameplay has been refined and improved in a few ways and it feels better than ever to zap enemies and throw cars around. Unfortunately though the unbearable dialogue really does taint the game for me.

Although I remember Crypto as being a crass character, I had forgotten much of the dialogue and story beats. I understand that they've tried to keep as close to the original as possible but that does involve a large dose of objectifying women and racial stereotypes. The game does flash up a warning stating that it's a product of its time but personally I found myself cringing far too much and as a result I skip most of the dialogue now.

Personally I never played the game for story and dialogue back on the PS2, so those things aside, focusing on the gameplay has been a nice trip down memory lane. I love the vibe of the starting location, I could honestly spend the whole game there - they really nailed the 60's hippy setting and feel. The weapons all feel familiar and fun to use and I found myself frequently switching between them especially as I unlocked more upgrades.

The upgrades are really what drove me to keep playing the original game and it's the same case here too. Slowly upgrading your equipment as you complete missions and abduct citizens is really satisfying and I think they've spread it out further in the remake. I remember being able to throw cars around in the first map in the original game, but in the remake I've had to reach almost the end game to be able to use telekinesis on large objects. There's some cosmetics to unlock for both you and your ship, secondary objectives to complete for more upgrade points, side missions, collectibles around the map, and even a cool retro game that you can access on the console fitted to your arm!

It's a relatively short experience coming in at 12ish hours if you do a few side stuff. If you want to do all the collectibles and explore I can see people easily sinking in 20 hours or more.