Each of our favorite game franchises has at least one or two black sheep, a game that was so bad that even the most die hard fans criticized them into oblivion. Well, unless you’re Sonic the Hedgehog, where a good game only happens during planetary alignment under a blue moon on the equinox when the winter solstace has just started on a leap year.

Destroy All Humans! happens to have two black sheep; Big Willy Unleashed (Wii only) and Path of the Furon. Both meant to be sequels to 2 and both headed by completely different studios. So how could a series with two great entries suddenly be plagued by two horrendously bad games? Well I’ll tell you.


Shortly after the launch of Destroy All Humans! 2 Pandemic Studios was acquired from THQ by even then-infamous Electronic Arts, where all good game studios go to die. Their last game was Saboteur, shortly after release of which the studio was shut down and their staff relocated to work on other projects.

Meanwhile THQ, unimpressed with the Destroy All Humans! series’ six-digit sales figures, wanted to ride the success train that was the newly-unveiled Nintendo Wii and pushed hard to make the game more available to family audiences. Thus they allocated two different teams to two different projects, one intended to be a proper sequel to DAH!2 for next gen consoles and the other meant to bridge the story between them.


Big Willy Unleashed




I have only ever won two games in my entire life; Destroy All Humans! 2 and Big Willy Unleashed, through Pandemic’s Alien Army program. Big Willy Unleashed is the one I’m glad I didn’t have to pay money for.



Locomotive Games was THQ’s in-house studio tasked with making the game to bridge 2 and 3, primarily for the Nintendo Wii, though PS2 and PSP ports were planned. Locomotive was heavily rushed to make the game in time to coincide with the launch of the Wii, and unable to make the controls work on both PS2 and PSP as well as too underfunded to make them work, the ports needed to be cancelled.


As it were, the poor quality of both these titles can be mostly attributed to THQ having more greed than Donald Trump, and less business sense than his toupee. Big Willy Unleashed was likely the worse off for it as it only came to a console most fans of the series likely didn’t own or play on and multiple design decisions were... questionable, at best.

Story



Sort of picking up where 2 left off, Crypto and Pox are stranded on Earth with their DNA harvesting mission in dire jeapordy, the Furon Leadership having all but abandoned them for the loss of the mothership at the beginning of 2. Rather than actually do something about it though, Crypto seems to have gone native and is content just lounging around watching mindless television.


In one of the only few clever bits of the story, however, Pox has opened a fast food hotdog chain called Big Willy’s (based on the Big Boy hamburger chain) where the hotdogs are made of the ground up bodies of all the people Crypto harvested the brainstems from in the past two games in reference to Soylent Green.

And... That’s it! Really, that’s the driving plot behind the entire story, Pox opened a restaurant that is successful and he has a business rival; Colonel Kluckin, who is a blatant parody of Colonel Sanders. The entire game campaign is basically just Pox and Kluckin being cartoonish parodies of Mr. Krabs and Plankton from SpongeBob, trying to one-up each other and drive each other out of business.


There are a couple mildly interesting side arcs involving Natalya having had a Furon-Human hybrid child and a performance evaluator named Toxoplasma Gondii. Natalya only appears by voice over the phone and their child, Blasto, is basically a taller lankier Jimmy Neutron who is bitter because he grew up without a dad. (Jesus Christ they utterly destroyed these characters.)

Gondii turns out to be a fraud trying to cut into Pox and Crypto’s operation, in what is admittedly somewhat of a nice call back to one of the more memorable Bay City odd jobs in 2 where Admiral Cyclosporiasis threatens to send another more competent commander to do Pox’s job.


Beyond that the overall writing is complete and utter garbage, only serving as a vehicle for outdated or outright terrible pop culture references and penis-related puns. It went from being able to tell an interesting narrative with depth and drama while also using tongue-in-cheek humor to being juvenile fanfiction that I could only imagine a twelve-year old writing.

One side quest chain has Pox’s HoloPox Unit becoming damaged, resorting to it playing a distress message on loop. The message is clearly meant to be an homage to Star Wars with Pox’s hologram dressed up as Leia, but the line in the game says; ‘Help me Stupy 136 Cryptobi, you’re my only hope!’ First, nice job getting Crypto’s clone number as wrong as you possibly could, writers. Second, ‘Stupy 136 Cryptobi?’ THAT is the best you could come up with? I can come up with better right here off the top of my head!


‘Cryptobi-Wan Clonobi.’ There, instantly better. It sounds more like Obi-Wan’s full name and doesn’t sound like it was written by a ten-year-old fantasizing about Pox calling Crypto a ‘poopy head’ and finding it hilarious. Though that’s what the majority of the writing in this game is like, dick and fart jokes.

It’s pretty clear THQ hand a hand in this travesty though, given that the same writers were responsible for Path of the Furon which was far more respectable in writing quality. Their efforts to push out games that were more kid friendly ensured they instead pushed out a game with half-assed writing that even ten year olds wouldn’t find amusing.


Oh, and the voice actors for Pox and Crypto are terrible bootleg replacements that barely sound like Grant Albrecht and Richard Horvitz. The actor for Pox is the same guy who voices the Master in PotF.



Gameplay



Big Willy Unleashed had some good gameplay mechanic ideas utterly destroyed by terrible motion controls. I’m convinced the motion controls for Big Willy Unleashed are the profesional training regimen for contortionists.


The big gimmick of BWU was the Big Willy mech, an alternative to the saucer with three attacks; laser eyes, acid vomit, and an area of effect ‘fart’ weapon. It really doesn’t go much deeper than that. (Brains I loathe this juvenile game.)

There are a few new on foot weapons, some really fun and creative, some redundant and some purely novel. The Zombie Gun turns humans into zombies, who can then convert other humans into zombies. Since humans have an abysmal spawn rate though, this isn’t nearly as satisfying as it can be.


Then you have the Ball Lightning gun which is basically the Zap-O-Matic but really good at crowd control. The Shrink Ray shrinks things and nothing else, you can’t interact with shrunken people or objects, so it loses its novelty fast.


Bodysnatch is still there, PK is PK but without the satisfying physics, and cortex scan isn’t in the game at all, which makes you feel disconnected from the world and has the NPCs all randomly blurt out their innermost thoughts like a fantasy RPG, all of which were ripped straight from Path of the Furon .

Two of the locations are just Union Town and Turnipseed Farm knockoffs. I remember enjoying Fantasy Atoll as it was a genuinely fun sandbox with pleasing visuals. Vietmahl I only really remember the final boss fight with Kluckin.


Presentation



The graphics are something from the N64 days. Animations are rigid and stiff, mouths don’t move. As a matter of fact if you pay attention during cutscenes and dialogue, you’ll notice that the camera always moves behind the character that is talking to avoid having to show their lack of lip movement. It’s not great.


Conclusion



Big Willy Unleashed is hands down the worst Destroy All Humans! game from an objective standpoint. It has a teeny bit of charm in certain aspects, but overall it’s a watered-down, tired, juvenile tire fire cobbled together in a limited time frame to please corporate overlords who had no idea what their audience actually wanted.


Path of the Furon




I was never more excited for a game than I was for Path of the Furon. Well, at least until the 2020 remake of Destroy All Humans!, but back in 2007 and 2008 nothing else occupied my mind. Destroy All Humans! was my love and my reason for being. My YouTube channel was built on a foundation of Path of the Furon content, trailers, E3 gameplay, developer interviews and videos I cobbled together in Windows Movie Maker using little more than video footage downloaded from IGN and Gamespot, and random audio clips from sharing sites that likely no longer exist.

Path of the Furon was the sole reason I bought an Xbox 360 because Sony rejected it for PS3 in North America and Sandblast Games’ budget didn’t have enough money for them to resumbit the game for evaluation on PS3. I was even so excited for the game I printed out the box art and hung it on my wall, where it has remained for the last decade.


In all my excitement for the game, did I overhype myself to the point where the game couldn’t meet my expectations and I ended up despising it?


No.

As a matter of fact Path of the Furon received worse criticism than Big Willy Unleashed and worse scores across the board, some as low as 3/10! Some of it even felt like deliberate sabotage, like GameSpot taking a screenshot of the area beyond the invisible wall as an example of the graphics being terrible. In a ‘ genius’ move from THQ in order to cut even more costs, Sandblast Games was shut down in the middle of development, leaving only a skeleton crew of developers to ensure the game was printed and shipped out. In many ways the reception of Path of the Furon felt like a personal attack against me, and I defended it vehemently.


There were some things I didn’t really like too much, of course, but there were a lot of things I did like as well. Every game implements good design decisions and bad ones, but with the terrible review scores and poor reception, it looked like Path of the Furon was an exceedingly unfair final nail in the coffin for Destroy All Humans! as THQ shelved the franchise for good.

Story



Big Willy Unleashed ripped off a lot from Path of the Furon, from NPC dialogue to designs. It’s most noticable in the opening of the game as both games start the exact same way; Crypto lounging in front of a TV.


Through dialogue only present in the PS3 PAL version, we learn that Natalya’s clone only had a four year lifespan. Upon her death Crypto takes off in the saucer and goes on a huge bender, ending with him drukenly crashing the saucer into the Space Dust casino in Las Paradiso. Upon being recloned, Crypto 139 takes control of the Space Dust, using it as a front to harvest DNA while making a bit of cash on the side, although the latter I don’t understand because human money should be worth as much as used toilet paper to them.

Indeed, there are some discrepancies in the story that don’t make sense or don’t really seem in character for Pox and Crypto, as in the opening Pox scolds Crypto for going native and then Crypto just immediately buys him off for cutting him in a measly five percent.


But, overall I do think the story, writing and humor are quite strong in most, definitely stronger than Big Willy Unleashed. One dialogue even has Crypto claim he stole the original prototype for the movie Jaws and replaced it with a half-func tional look-alike, which is great referential humor and a good homage to the development of Jaws.




Paralelling the big movie fads of the decade, Pox and Crypto discover a deep-running conspiracy when they are attacked by supposedly extinct Nexosporidium warriors. The story will actually keep you guessing as Pox and Crypto travel the globe to uncover who is behind the conspiracy.


Along the way, they meet a Furon with hair who was also a victim of conspiracy who crashlanded on Earth near China and then improved his PK abilities through zen meditation. This Furon, calling himself the Master, becomes a tutor to Crypto until he is killed by a former student of his who is seemingly part of the conspiracy. I actually liked this dynamic, as well as Pox being jealous of Crypto taking on a new mentor, though I imagine my opinion is the minority.


There are a few story moments I found to be incredibly stupid and unnecessary too, though. For example toward the end of the game Pox finally gets a new clone body after being dead for twenty years, except the idiot who runs the machine accidentally used the body mold for a bloody chimpanzee and Pox comes out with the body of a chimp! Why do they even have a body mold for chimps?!

Gameplay



There’s a lot to both like and dislike about the gameplay, at least in the 360 version. It’s ironic the PS3 version of the game was rejected but the 360 version wasn’t, given that the PS3 version was actually more complete and stable.


Despite several new abilities like the PK magnet, PK was wholly unsatisfying due to an utter lack of ragdoll physics. I did really like the new Temporal Fist ability letting Crypto stop time, manipulate objects and then restart time. The player could use this to stop time and redirect tank shells back at them, it was amazing!


There are a lot of awesome new weapons as well, like the Black Hole Gun which is self-explanatory, and the Venus Human Trap which is a man-eating alien plant. The Dislocator made a return and was still insanely fun, especially since it could be used to car surf. The Superballer was like the dislocator except it was bouncing balls with rainbow trails, very 70s indeed.


With the old saucer destroyed, Pox built a completely new one which had awesome effects like the weapons popping out of the hull. They also introduced new areal combat with attack helicopters and even included a couple new weapons for this in the Plasma Cannon and Seeker Drones. There’s even a new weapon called the Tornadotron, which is exactly what it sounds like. The saucer’s Death Ray was even capable of leaving persistent damage on buildings, which allowed the play to use it to draw on buildings or even write their name.


Bodysnatch made its return, although like the first game Crypto could use Cortex Scan to restore the time he could remain in disguise.


I also really enjoyed the inclusion of costumes for Crypto and paint jobs for the saucer.



Presentation



Let’s not beat around the bush. The graphics aren’t the worst, but they’re not the best either. NPCs look rigid and textureless, vehicles look like basic shapes with wheels. The particle effects are mostly okay but still leave a lot to be desired.


There are some design choices I really liked, though, for example Pox’s new HoloPox Unit having arms that he could use to gesticulate with. Crypto no longer died instantly in water but was instead teleported to the nearest landmass.



With the 360 version some audio simply refused to play which necessitated subtitles (and even then some dialogue wouldn’t even appear at all, like the dialogue about Natalya), the framerate would dip down into the single digits at times, the game was notorious for crashing and it was riddled with bugs.


I really liked the sandboxes in PotF, they had a lot of character and verticality to them with skyscrapers and unique buildings and landmarks. There was Las Paradiso (Las Vegas), Sunnywood (Hollywood), Shen Long (Hong Kong), Belleville (Paris) and we finally got to see at least a glimpse of Furon space with the Fourth Ring of Fuon, the fourth ring around the Furon homeworld that acted as a luxury resort for Furon’s rich and famous. There were a few really enjoyable minigames here, from what I remember, and the overall designs were great.

Conclusion



Big Willy Unleashed is not only a terrible game outright, but a terrible Destroy All Humans! game. The story is crap, the writing is crap, the jokes are crap, the Big Willy mech is juvenile in concept and design with weapons that are vomit and flatulence, unclever referential humor and mindless dick puns. The gameplay is watered down, core abilities are missing, the weapons while creative on paper were lackluster in their implementation and the controls were painfully rigid and unresponsive.


I do not understand how anyone can say that Path of the Furon is the worst of these two. It does indeed have its warts and there are some very questionable design choices, but the game did genuinely have some great ideas and a lot of the story was well-written and quite engaging. It was clearly unfinished, but given more time in the oven I think it could have been the best game in the series and the definitive Destroy All Humans! experience.

Are these games indicative of the quality we should expect from the Remake?



Absolutely not. The development studios responsible for these games are long dead and their employees have moved on to other jobs and projects. The original THQ is no longer with us either, and I trust THQ Nordic to not make the same idiotic money-over-matter mistakes of their predecessors.


But... Black Forest Games made that one Bubsy game though...



And? Bethesda Game Studios made Battlespire and Redguard, but we still got Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.


Developers will always take risks, and those risks won’t always pay off, but that doesn’t mean that everything they ever do will be awful. If it did there are a lot of games out there we wouldn’t have today, like Assassin’s Creed.

Destroy All Humans! 2020 is a remake, and those are very difficult to get wrong, especially when you have all the original assets and code base. Judging by what little we’ve seen of the pre-alpha so far, BFG are well on their way to doing Destroy All Humans! right, and I haven’t been this excited since 2008.


Interested in what I hope to see for the remake? Check out my wishlist! Need gams to tide you over until the remake comes out? I’ve got you covered there too!

Thanks for reading, fellow Furons, and happy probing!

