The next major stepping stone for gaming news and interviews is finally here. That’s right, it’s time for GamesCom! Linked above is the VOD for THQ Nordic’s nearly ten hour livestream, during which Black Forest Games showed off Destroy All Humans! gameplay (the same showcase at E3) but more importantly gave us many great new interesting tidbits of information! Today I’ll be breaking down and clarifying on every minute detail, including new screenshots! So, without further adieu, let’s dig into this juicy meat pie.


The Gameplay Demo



During the stream, BFG themselves went hands on with the demo, during which they outright confirmed a lot of our speculations.


BFG reference the hilariously cringey ‘appreciate the cow’ line from IGN’s E3 gameplay interview.



BFG have modernized the controls to make sure it feels as good to play it today as it did 15 years ago.

“We don’t want to make a remake of the original game, but a remake of how fans remember it.”

Crypto can use ALL his abilities at the same time.

When Crypto takes damage, the shield will indicate the direction from which the damage has been taken.

We can still button mash to make brain extract and hypno work faster.

Brain extract can be used as a ‘fire-and-forget’ weapon during combat.

Focus mode allows us to lock on to enemies, primarily so we can throw PK’d objects directly at our target but to also make jetpack combat more accessible and intuitive.

The game isn’t meant to be a difficult or ‘hardcore,’ so no Dark Souls comparisons unfortunately. DAH is intended to be a ‘stress relief’ title where one can just come home from a stressful day of school or work and just boot up the game and unwind. It’s pick-up-and-play mayhem.

Crypto’s shields will act as a life preserver if Crypto lands in water, offering a grace period to get out of danger. If the shields fail, however, Crypto will still drown.

At the moment not everything is destructable, but they’re aiming to make as much as possible destructable for the finished product. Performance is obviously a deciding factor in this regard.

The saucer take off animation has been drastically sped up to facilitate instantaneous and seamless transition from ground to saucer gameplay.

“If a player thinks they should be able to destroy it, we want to make sure they are able to destroy it. But there are unfortunately limitations.”

BFG don’t want to announce a concrete release date until they’re certain the game is truly ready. All they can say is it will definitely release in 2020.

“We want to stick to the original game which had no multiplayer, so the remake will not have multiplayer. So it’s a classic single-player story game.”

Entirely new German voice work will be done for the finished product.

The Full Interview

The team played through the original game dozens of times over just to get every possible detail they could, including hidden dialogues and conversations.

The team is in contact with the original voice actors, Pandemic devs and even the original writer Tom Abernathy.

There were limitations with the PS2 and original Xbox that don’t exist anymore, so they’re striving to do what Pandemic would have done then had they not had those limitations.

After listening to feedback from the community about the more serious mustachioed agent looking unsettling, the team changed his appearance to look less caricatured and found that it added to the humor and their dynamic.

The team watched Let’s Plays of the original game in order to learn what people had strong issues with in order to address them. Some missions in the game have been completely reworked as a result, for example Foreign Correspondent where Crypto must find Bert Wither and bring him out of hiding.

The anal probe has been heavily retooled to be something of a ‘brain snatching boomerang that shoots people up the arse,’ but isn’t avaible for the demo as the assets aren’t finished yet.

There is no dynamic day/night cycle, but the missions will have their own set time of day and it’s implied we’ll be able to choose time of day when we go back to invasion sites outside of missions.

While not all buildings will be enterable, the instances where it could be done have been slighly expanded upon to make the buildings more explorable. For example, Bert Wither’s hideout and the government lab at Area 42.

Every building also has a modeled interior now, so we can look inside.

Cheat codes are still to-be-decided in regard to the final build. There are currently development cheats but they’re undecided on how they want to approach cheat codes for the release.

The team has greatly expanded the variations of NPCs and cars.

Comparison Screenshots



Part of the Destroy All Humans! spot on the GamesCom livestream was showing off a few comparison screenshots. Let’s have a look!


The greatest thing about these screenshots is how they show us so many more small glimpses of the other invasion sites, mostly Santa Modesta in this case. Here we have Crypto in Sunny San-ta MO-DES-TA near the park with the giant tree. It’s easy to tell right away just the absolute variety the team is adding into the game if you take note of the buildings in the background. I love how much more colorful and vbrant it is, everything just pops.


For an in-game screenshot the visuals are almost unbelievable as well, it looks like a Pixar film! You can see a lot of bodies piled up under the tree, mostly cops. The way they’re just limply slumped all over the place is almost unsettling, but such great detail!



We also get our first real close-up of the in-game disintegrator ray and it looks amazing. I live the shining chrome-like metal with the glowing bits that really make you feel like this thing would just burn you if you so much as touched it in the wrong place.




Another Santa Modesta screenshot with Crypto in the Mall plaza. More great examples of building variety (I really do hope we can make them catch fire like in the original game) and if you look closely you can just make out some of the shop interior details. The large white building looks like it might be a furniture or television shop.


We also get our first in-game close-up of the good old Ion Denotator, which looks breathtakingly terrifying. The mix of chrome and bright deep red just makes it look so undeniably threatening, and maybe just a little bit radio active. The new jetpack design looks great here too , more condensed and less cumbersome.


Our first tease of Union Town looks gorgeous. We see Crypto using brain extract on yet another cop, in what looks to be a train yard. I don’t recall a train yard in the original so this might be an example of ways the team has filled in some of that empty space in most of the maps. We also see a great new texture there in the form of old historical New England cobble paving which I really like the look of.



Last but not least, it’s clearly a clear sunny midday in the screenshot, lending futher credence to us being able to choose time of day when free roaming invasion sites. Or perhaps each invasion site will be day by default in free roam to allow for the maxium amount of humans and cars to be going about their day.


Here we see the Donut Shop across from the SMCBS radio station with Crypto causing a bit of mayhem. It looks like he’s just blown up a car, or maybe transmogrified it for ammo. We can see a dismbodied car door in the background, which I don’t think actually happened in the original.


Something I’d love to see come to this game from Path of the Furon are the DAH!Ms, or Destroy All Humans! Moments, which were special secret/hidden achievements the player unlocked by doing certain things. For example, PK throwing a human through the center of the donut shop sign.


I really love this Santa Modesta screenshot. For one, just look at the scale compared to the original game. The life guard shack there is clearly to scale, and you can see beach towels, umbrellas and pool toys in the background.



It would be great if there were beach goers lounging on beach towels in the background. It’d be great to see beach goers in a Californian beach town as it really fits with the 50s aesthetic.


The man Crypto is using PK on seems to be in a trench coat, like what you might expect from a 50s noir film.


Crypto using the Ion Detonator on a cop and cop car. The detonator explosion looks psychadelic and trippy, I love the usage of color there. Though it’s unfortunate the cop seems to be intact instead of being ionized. The effects these weapons had on enemies really helped set the alien invasion movie vibe of the game and I hope there are plans to add those effects during development.


Clearly they’ve altered these pathetic gasbags and turned them into RADIOACTIVE EXPLODING ZOMBIE COWS! Which is clearly what we’re seeing here from Mission 2, Citizen Crypto. Another daytime screenshot which makes me wonder if Citizen Crypto will take place during the day now, or if the zombie cows can be found in free roam. I’d bet on the former, but I hope for both. It did never really make sense why the Mayor would call a town meeting at like three in the morning.


Santa Modesta again, this time showcasing more details such as the outdoor shopping displays, building variety and NPCs window shopping. One of which appears to be a farmer? I wouldn’t mind seeing farmers on the other maps in places to be honest, though I feel like he might just be a placeholder model.



Also, look very closely at the surfboard. It says ‘Can you appreciate the cow?’ in reference to the cringey stupid question one of IGN’s journalists asked from the stream chat during an E3 gameplay interview.




And last but not least Santa Modesta yet again, this time showing the island with the lighthouse where we go to find Bert Wither. The boating shacks with the jetty look great, and the cave where Bert is hiding out looks to be more than just a cave now. Likely an old military bunker?


Sadly that’s all the new details and media we have this time guys, but stay vigilant! I’ve no doubt we might see or learn more about the game at other conventions, possibly The Game Awards. Maybe we’ll see more of the game through dev diaries. We’ll just have to see, but regardless I’d expect to experience a news/media drought for at least a couple months.

That said, THQ Nordic’s GamesCom timetable shows that DAH will be shown again at 8:30 am EST on Saturday, so if we get anything else you can expect me to cover it and give my thoughts. For now I’m off to play Kingdom Come Deliverance and binge Netflix to help ease the excruciating wait.


To keep up-to-date with DAH news and my other articles in general, or if you’d like to watch me stream sometime, follow me on Twitter @SWJS2, on YouTube at starwarsjoshsmith, at SWJS on Mixer, and SWJS#3513 on Discord.

Happy probing!