Destroy All Humans! (2005)

Starts off great and very funny. It works really well in the first couple of levels that are small and you mostly fight hicks and walk around in a disguise in a small town, but then you move onto larger areas, ones which take a lot of time to traverse. Once you get to the Area 51 desert the novelty kind of wears off and it becomes quite unexciting. There's not as much humour and the set pieces become more "gamey". You go from harvesting cow brains and kidnapping people for experiments to defending a vehicle with a bomb on it and blowing up X generators. The core gameplay is very competent so it isn't a slog, but that initial WOW effect never returns.

The UFO adds some nice variety and Pandemic's engine allows leveling entire cities, which is very impressive.

Some NPCs are quite funny but sexual innuendo's get a little repetitive towards the end. There are some interesting references to conspiracy theories of the 20th century like Majestic 12 and all the scientists speaking with a German accent (Operation Paperclip). The setting of Pleasantville-like "Americana" mostly works and for its time was very fresh.

There's a little bit of grinding needed to get all the upgrades which you will need for the final boss fight, but it wasn't too bad. The game itself is not very lengthy but also doesn't overstay it's welcome. Going beyond the story mode is not rewarding, the side missions are repetitive and the levels themselves don't have anything interesting to explore. Which isn't a problem, the story mode was fun. Maybe back at release that was underwhelming but I bought the game on the Xbox store for a little under 2 dollars and was thoroughly entertained.