Destroy All Humans!

Short answer: not great, even worse if you played the original. Buy very cheap or skip and play the original for a slightly less frustrating experience. [b]NOT AN OPEN-WORLD GAME ANYMORE, IT'S A LINEAR MISSION-BASED EXPERIENCE.[/b] Free-roam is an afterthought, most new changes break the game. Boring details: Got the game for cheap in some bundle a while back and didn't really think about it since I had already beaten the game on PS2 over a weekend rental decades ago. I remembered the game being fun in a silly sort of way but overall generally bland and shallow, even for the time. Classic GTA clone, as was the style at the time. I recently got the urge to play it again and remembered that I owned a copy on Steam. While downloading I looked at the store page and realized it was a remaster/remake rather than a PC port. All the reviews claimed Quality of Life changes and improved graphics. I expected a much better experience than my old, middling opinion of the original. I expected a fun little sandbox to kill some human scum and make fun of the 1950s. Almost immediately something felt wrong: the character models were grotesque and didn't even bother to synch the lips with the voices very well. The voice acting didn't seem to fit with the animations either and it all just felt weird. I shrugged, blamed it on being a port of an ancient game, and got into the first mission. Controls felt fine and the gameplay was familiar but every cutscene felt out of place and badly choreographed. Tutorial popups appeared unprompted and required multiple inputs to close. I finished the mission and was sent back to the mothership after seeing the results screen to be greeted by the upgrade store with only one upgrade available. Pox goes on a long story about why we're collecting DNA despite not being told to collect any yet outside of a few tooltips. It all feels rushed, like I'm missing something. I back out of the shop and open the mission map, select the next mission, get partway through before the game instructs me to assume a human disguise to infiltrate some town hall meeting prompted by my actions in the previous mission. I'm told that being detected will fail the mission. I take 4 steps towards the nearest human and I'm immediately detected sent back to the beginning of the stealth section. Okay... that's really weird, I don't remember the game being that picky about being detected. I again blamed the age of the game and figured I was just more forgiving back then. I proceed to get caught multiple times trying to get close enough to clone a police officer, finally succeed, then head further in. I'm greeted by a big red square on the map and warned about 'restricted areas' and how I need to copy the correct human in order to get past. I figure I'm okay with the officer I copied but I get caught as soon as I cross the line. Pox talks about watching the humans that are allowed in and out and to copy those ones but after circling the whole area I don't see a single soul walk in or out of the area. Upon reaching the back I'm told that the mayor is just over yonder and that I should copy him, but he is well past the line and I can't cross without finding the correct person to copy. Eventually I start copying similar character models to the ones that are hanging out in front of city hall just on the inside of the zone, to no avail. I manage to copy a different police officer on the inside of the zone without getting caught, somehow, and this turns out to be the correct form to take as I'm no longer being detected. Why THIS officer is fine but the one on the outside of the zone is not: I don't know. Anyways, I complete the mission, not without some more janky issues, then get back to the ship. At this point I'm wondering when I'll be allowed to roam around, maybe collect some of those new hidden packages they added, grind some DNA for upgrades. I figure this is still all 'tutorial' and I'll get the prompt after another mission or two. I complete the next mission, get sent back, the next one after that, get sent back again, and again, and again. After mission 7 I'm convinced something is missing. I go to my local used game shop and get a copy of the original (6 bucks, very cheap) and boot it up. Almost immediately I find out why it all feels so weird. In the original: after you complete the first mission you remain in the area and are told you need to collect a certain amount of DNA to unlock the next mission. You are given a new weapon (the iconic Anal Probe) and are told to mess around and do stuff to earn more DNA. Once you earn enough (took maybe 5 minutes to do a side-mission and kill a handful of humans with the Anal Probe) you get the ability to return to the mothership at any time to buy upgrades and start a new mission/change areas. In the remake, they just boot you back to the ship, no warning, no context, you don't even get the Anal Probe for another half-dozen missions. You *can* go back to previously completed mission areas and select 'Free Roam' to mess around and do side-missions, collect DNA for upgrades, etc. but the game never really encourages you to do so and most of the upgrades are all locked behind missions anyways (the upgrades aren't that great either). This must be what they meant by 'Quality of Life changes' that I kept seeing advertised. I admit it does eliminate the 'busy work' that 'gatekeeps' progression behind an 'arbitrary' requirement to 'waste time' between missions. Here's the thing: all that 'busy work' was [i]the[/i] point of the game. This is a GTA3+ clone. It's an open-world exploration and sandbox game. The missions exist to give flavor to the world and introduce new toys to sow mayhem and destruction. The missions are bland and pointless because they aren't the main focus, they're tutorials, lore, and jokes. Once you get bored of playing with what you currently have available you do the next mission to unlock more stuff, more areas, more toys. By taking out the mandatory side-quests they removed the driving force from the game. It's possible to beat the entire game before ever touching free-roam, which by that point why would you want to go back, especially with a sequel available which is supposedly more of the same but better? Furthermore, if you want upgrades you'll need to go back anyways, which actually makes free-roam even [i]more[/i] of a hassle since you are forced back to the ship and have to load the area again instead of being given the opportunity to explore after completing the mission. All this, on top of the questionable graphical 'improvements' which you'll either love or hate (guess which one I picked). The original wasn't groundbreaking by any means, but it was well-designed. The remake is half-realistic, half cartoon, all the models look like puppets from Spitting Image (look it up, you'll see what I mean) except for Crypto and Pox. Humans look more detailed, but act with less emotion. The lip synching isn't super detailed in the original but it makes the remake look like an anime dub. Supposedly they used motion capture for the new animations but kept the old voice lines, which seems to have only deepened the uncanny valley this game seems to have faceplanted in. Finally the missions, I only got past a third of the game but almost every single mission had some kind of jank, something that felt broken or not working properly. Not that the original was flawless (R1 to fire weapons? Gross.) but all the current jank comes from the changed missions and never existed before. I don't have much nostalgia for the PS2 version, it was a weekend rental and I never rented it a second time, but it feels much more cohesive than this version. This is a game from a different era wearing modern clothes. Clothes that don't fit properly and came with mandatory plastic surgery. Unlicensed plastic surgery that gave you an infection. Final Verdict: Meh bordering on Insulting.