Destroy All Humans! is a fantastic, underrated gem of the mid-2000s, as is also true for Psychonauts. For some rea son that decade gave us some truely awesome games that just, for whatever reason, weren’t successful or severely underperformed despite critical acclaim and favorable user reviews.


Whether you’re the most hardcore diehard Destroy All Humans! fan in existence like myself, or you’re a blissfully-ignorant 1950's suburbanite completely unaware that aliens walk among us, this piece will tell you literally every single possible reason you should have to be hyped for the Destroy All Humans! 2020 remake!

I have scoured the web for every scrap of information I could dig up. From IGN, Game Informer, Venture Beat, Gameslice, GameSpot, various YouTube interviews and even sites you’ve probably never even heard of like NewGameNetwork, if there was news of it I have watched it, read it and consumed it into my very soul. I’m also in contact with the dev team from THQ Nordic’s official Destroy All Humans! discord server, where they have confirmed and shed light on many things.




Worry not though, I won’t just be listing every random old bit of information any old site has listed. Every bit of hype fuel I intend to list to you today is information straight from the Black Forest’s... Mouth? Canopy? As well as details consistently listed by multiple publications. They can’t all be wrong, right?



So without further adieu, here are all the reasons, returning fans and new fans alike, should be hyped for the Destroy All Humans! 2020 remake!


What You Need to Know if You’re New to the Series



So, I imagine many of you never knew Destroy All Humans! was even a thing before now. Perhaps it simply flew under your radar because you had your mind on other games, or perhaps you were too young for it when it first came out. Regardless, you’re likely wondering ‘why would I, a lowly novice, want to bring about the end of humanity and the inevitable reign of the Furon empire?’ Well I’ll tell you.


It’s Single Player



With the success of GTA and Red Dead Online, Fortnite and PUBG and games like Overwatch, many publishers (I’m looking at you, EA) have expressed the sentiment that single player gaming is dead as the market gives rise to all-consuming multiplayer juggernaut cash-cows. Aaaand then God of War 2018 and Spider-Man released and gave the finger to that moronic hyperbolic sentiment.


Single player games are still in high demand, and Destroy All Humans! will likely be no exception. But what sets it apart from other single player games? Destroy All Humans! isn’t a trilogy-spanning fight against impossible odds with dialogue choices, or a father-son journey through Norse mythology with tearful moments and character growth.

Rather, it’s a self-contained tongue-in-cheek parody of 1950s alien invasion movies, like Mars Attacks! Except here the alien invaders are the protagonists. W ith their race unable to reproduce due to eons of war with unregulated atomic weaponry, the Furons have resorted to cloning to ensure the survival of their race. However, their genetic data degrades with each new clone, increasingly coming out of the cloning machines with physical and/or mental defects.


Fortunately Furon sailors took shore leave on Earth after wiping out the Martians and... blew off steam with the females of humanity’s ancestors. As a result, every human has some pure, uncorrupted Furon DNA locked away in their brainstem.

Fleet Commander Orthopox-13 (voiced by Invader Zim alumnus Richard Steven Horvitz) learns of this through extensive research, and organizes the invasion of Earth to harvest human brains for the purpose of scientific research to save their species.


And that’s where the game starts off. No, really, that’s it. No grand epic tale of redemption or harsh realizations of man’s inhumanity to man. The story is merely a framing device meant entirely to get your boots on the ground and your probe into... well, you know. The writing and the humor are very funny, though.

It’s Open World



Open world sandboxes have become a landmark genre of gaming ever since GTA III first popularized them back in the early PS2 days. The difference with Destroy All Humans! though, is you get to be the bad guy. It’s like a Ratchet & Clank game with the over the top funny weaponry, where you play as a brain-eating alien from outer space in a flagrant parody of 1950s America when Roswell, New Mexico was a massive cover up and communism was the boogeyman under everyone’s bed.


There are six open world sandboxes to explore and destroy, all based on 1950s America. You’ve got a small Georgia/Tennessee farm with hillbillies, a midwestern agricultural town up in the Dakotas, Santa Monica, California, Area 51, Norfolk, Virginia and Washington D.C. Each is set during a specific time of day and has different lighting and weather.

And you can destroy everything. On foot Crypto has a lightning gun to zap people with and leave their brainstems in tact, a disintegrator ray which is exactly what it sounds like, an anal probe which is also exactly what it sounds like, an an i on grenade launcher that frags tanks and cars. In his trusty saucer he has your standard alien death ray, an abduction beam, a sonic subwoofer, and a big explody green bubble of doom called the quantum deconstructor.


Each location is also filled with replayable challenge minigames that will task you with an objective like killing a certain amount of farmers within a time limit. You’ll earn a reward of DNA upon completion, plus a bonus for killing them in extra creative ways. There are also collectibles littering each sandbox, each of which grants a DNA bonus. Collecting all of them will unlock things! You know, because this is back when games actually rewarded you for doing things in them instead of asking for your parents’ credit card?

Play AS the Alien Invader



Over the decades there have been numerous games released about alien invasions. Half Life, Halo, Resistance, Saints Row IV, Space Invaders, Metroid, Duke Nukem, the list goes on and on. But all these games have you playing as some grizzled mute space marine fighting the good fight to save humanity from the evil aliens hellbent on genociding all of human civilization!


Destroy All Humans!, on the other hand, is exactly what it says on the tin. You are the evil alien invading in a flying saucer. You get to be the bad guy, and it’s fun as hell to be the bad guy! With mind powers you can throw a car at a soldier’s face, read someone’s innermost thoughts, betraying their privacy and learning important objective details! Lift a suburbanite, carry him all the way to the top of a 12-story building and give him a nice view of his house before sending him sailing across the skyline into said house.

Then you can jump into your flying saucer, set that house on fire and watch it burn, or finish the job and blow it to smithereens. And that’s just one example of how creative you can be when destroying all of this pathetic human civilization.


Reasons Both Fans New and Old Should Be Hyped



When it comes to being a fan of the original, there are a lot of reasons to be excited. What can we expect in general? Well this Remake is just that, a Remake. Not a new game or a reboot, it is the original game built from the ground up, improved and sporting a few extra bells and whistles. Good comparisons would be the Crash and Spyro remakes of recent years. It’s the game we love, but modernized for a new audience as well with just a dash of new content, better controls and the like.


Same Story, Same Writing, Same Voice Lines



One of the best things about the original Destroy All Humans! was its exquisitely-written dialogue. As a teen many of the jokes went straight over my head, but now I get a good chuckle out of how hilarious the overly exaggerated fear of communists plays out.


The only things not changing at all with the remake are the story, dialogue and music. These things together made the original game truly iconic, unique and enjoyable in comparison to the trends that would be set within the same few years.

Improved and Extended Cutscenes Plus a New Mission



That all said, the developers are completely reinvigorating the cutscenes. In the original there were about three CGI cutscenes, the rest were stilted in-game cutscenes with rigid animations and limited lip movement. As was common for the PS2, humans’ hands were solid with all the fingers fused together.


With the remake, cutscenes will have more to them with more animations. The opening cutscene for Destination Earth as shown in E3 gameplay has so many little touches, the lights on the billboard flicker, Crypto steps in a cow pie, he points up and gesticulates, Pox’s holographic projector has more mobility and floats around more fluidly to express more emotion.


Black Forest Games are also using mocap for the cutscenes. NPCs now move and behave like real people, they have facial expressions now as well as more believable movements. Just as well, things that were difficult to animate in the game engine on PS2 now give more details and life to scenes. The cinematography is phenominal as well!

Director Onurhan Karaagacliha also expressed a desire to flesh out certain characters, such as the two majestic agents from the beginning of the game, which would certainly be a welcome addition as many characters with minor and even major supporting roles just seem to come and go in the original. No doubt a lot of story dialogue and scenes needed to be cut to save space on the disc!




In addition to the improved cutscenes, BFG are adding in a new mission to the game that was cut from the original. With access to documents and files detailing a myriad of scrapped content they were able to build the mission into the remake, and they’re even in contact with the original voice actors to record new lines as is necessary. Whether or not this means we’ll get new dialogue for Cortex Scans as well is currently unknown, but one can hope!

New and Improved Gameplay and Quality of Life Changes



While revolutionary for its time, the gameplay of the original game was mired by hardware limitations and tedium. For example, in the original when entering the saucer you would have to sit through a fifteen second animation of Crypto being sucked up into the saucer and then the saucer taking off. In the remake it is significantly faster to the point it’s almost seamless.


The original game also featured a central hub called the Mothership. From here you could select landing sites to invade, view concept art and video archives, change options and buy upgrades from Pox’s lab. There was no checkpoint system either, though, so if you died or failed a mission you were required to return to the Mothership and redo the mission in its entirety.


No longer! The remake has been confirmed to feature mission checkpoints, so no more tedious punishments for failing a mission.

Also like many games at the time, Crypto could not swim in the original game and would die instantly upon contact with water of any depth, as if it were concentrated acid. In the remake, however, Crypto’s shields will act almost as a life preserver, allowing him to coast along the surface safely a few times before they fail.


The overall gameplay loop has been drastically improved as well! In the original Crypto had mind powers he could use like a GMOD physics gun to fling enemies and civilians around. But this, along with the ability to disguise as a human, hypnotize humans and extract their brainstems, was tied to a concentration meter that would deplete depending on how much psychic energy was being exerted.


In the remake concentration has been removed entirely and the holobob disguise is now reliant upon a timer. Crypto’s PK and hypno/extract powers can now also be used in tandem as well as along with the jetpack, which wasn’t possibile in the original.


There are some other awesome gameplay features that weren’t possible in the original as well! For example, Crypto can now use his Zap-O-Matic to light bales of hay aflame, and then he can PK these flaming bales of hay and throw them at people or cars.


BFG have also added in a few new abilities for greater mobility. Namely a dash akin to what you might see in games like Agents of Mayhem, as well as a glide mechanic for the jetpack that allows Crypto to essentially ‘skate’ along the ground to get around faster.


More Dense Open Worlds and Greater NPC Variety



The sandboxes of the original game were pretty barren with a lot of empty space, only made interesting by their layout or the occasional landmark. The buildings in the original were practically copy pasted with only slightly different textures to distinguish them. There were challenges as side objectives as well, but only really every amounted to checkpoint races or ‘kill this many farmers in 2 minutes.’


In the remake, though, these challanges have been improved to be more challenging and interesting. Farmland Fiasco tasked you with killing an amount of farmers in a time limit, but the remake has a tiered reward system where you’ll earn bonus points and better rewards by doing bonus objectives like using PK to kill the farmers or drowning them in the lake.


The remake will keep the sandboxes roughly the same size, but will make them more dense and fill them with more things to do and explore. For example a previously barren coastal area of Santa Modesta will have a lot more going on there.


In addition buildings will have more varied models as well as more attention to detail. This can be seen in the daytime screenshot of Rockwell on the official website.


An alien invader whose sole purpose is to destroy all humans is nothing without the humans he must destroy. This is where the NPCs come in.

In the original game, the NPCs were many, but there were only about ten-to-twelve character models in the entire game, and they did nothing but walk around aimlessly until they despawned from the draw distance. In a game about destroying all humans, it’s imperative the humans we’re destroying actually feel like humans. In the original they felt more like targets in a shooting gallery, which technically wasn’t inaccurate for what the game was.


With the remake we’ll see a much-needed remedy to that conundrum. While we haven’t actually seen much gameplay showing off all the various improved character models, the screenshots show us a few ways in which the NPCs will be more diverse. For example, we have black cops now, and one cop in a screenshot of Santa Modesta appears to not only be overweight, but hispanic, which makes geological sense given California’s progressive history and proximity to the Mexico border.


In addition to NPC model variety though, there’s also the issue of AI. In this day and age we have RPGs with radiant AI, GTA games where the NPCs will drive to a restaurant for lunch and open world sandboxes like this where NPCs will act out basic daily routines. The Destroy All Humans! 2020 remake must be no different if it wishes to be immersive. Thankfully that Rockwell daytime screenshot has a few hidden details tucked away that suggests the game’s NPCs will, in fact, do something more than wander aimlessly like hapless lemmings.

In the closeup below, you’ll notice a variety of NPCs gathered at food stalls and store fronts, suggesting that they’ll actually have things they need to do which will make them feel more human, thus increasing the immersion.


There’s another closeup of the same screenshot, however, that adds even more evidence to the theory NPCs in the remake will have more complex AI. Here we see what is clearly a cowboy having gone behind a building to relieve his bladder!


It’ll Last You Significantly Longer



Back in the mid 2000s, most games weren’t very big without shaving down a lot of corners and applying some form of illusionary trickery, like the distant terrain of the original Spyro the Dragon. Destroy All Humans! was no exception.


The game had very little replay value unless you were like me and could make your own fun. If you were lucky, it may have lasted you around ten-to-fifteen hours tops, and most of that time was likely spent hunting collectibles and grinding side challenges for DNA to progress the story.

If you bee-line the story though, it probably took you about six hours at most. Which in all fairness was the average length of many games of the time with a few exceptions. The hardware just couldn’t allow for more due to storage limitations.


In the Remake’s case, on the other hand, Director Karaagacliha guesstimates it will last us roughly 30-40 hours with all the changes and the new content, though he says to not quote him on those numbers just yet. Karaagacliha also said they wish to enhance the game’s replayabily by expanding upon the sandboxes, making them more dense as stated before, as well as also giving the side content much more depth, as stated before. Even all the minute details of the cutscenes will add up to make the game longer than before!

Miscellaneous-Yet-Awesome Tidbits



Destruction will persist even in the cutscenes.

THQ Nordic is looking into doing a Collector’s Edition. Details will likely be announced sometime soon.

The game has procedural cow dung

Transmogrify and Drain from DAH!2 will be in the remake.

The remake was announced early in development to allow feedback from fans like us to influence the development. All feedback will be taken into consideration amongst the team.


Did I miss anything, or do you have any questions? Let me know in the comments below! I’ll forward any questions to the devs and update the article/reply back with the answers!

Thanks for reading, fellow Furons! Happy probing!

