In an era of remasters and remakes, it is great to see a team bringing back a game that was forgotten by many, but beloved by even more. Black Forest Games and Pandemic Studios have been working with THQ Nordic to bring us a completely remade version of the cult classic Destroy All Humans! and to show off what we can expect to see when it releases at the end of July, they gave us a free demo that shows off the beginning of the game.
Gameplay
Giving a good round amount of experience on the different actions we will be able to do again, this demo has you fight both on the ground and in your saucer. Starting off with the cows, you get to see some of the comedy style included in the story and your first use to mental probe to hear what your victims are thinking. Then you end it off with telekinesis to pick up and throw the cows around.
Once the cows are dead it will move on to the first human interaction and that is with the farmer. Here you will get to use your zapper for the first time and then once he is dead you extract the brain. This is the first time you see that extracting the brain will give you back any lost health. After this, a short cutscene plays where the wife sees you and notifies everybody else, turning it into a big fight with all the farmhands.
After zapping everyone down and get your health back by extracting some brains, the cops show up and start going toward your saucer. A quick kill of these two and then you enter the saucer to fight off the military that has shown up afterword spreads of your presence on the farmland. Now begins the sky battle!
From here you see similar action styles that are using your death beam to kill humans and destroy the vehicles, but you can also refill the saucers health meter by sucking out the electric energy from human vehicles. After playing with these for a bit and destroying everyone, you will get a mission completion screen where you see that there are also special objectives each mission has to award you some extra points.
While this is the end of the gameplay demo, you can also see how the mission select screen will appear after this - only to be directed to purchase the game if you try to select a different mission - and the upgrade options menu. Using the points you earn during missions, you can upgrade either your saucer or your weapons, making it easier and more powerful to use your favorite toys for future missions.
Expectations
As a fan of the classic title, I am looking forward to being able to free roam the 1950’s era city and cause mayhem once again! But I also hope to see the comedy style continue throughout the game as it already seems very similar to how the original game presented its comedy.
I do like how the mission board works and expect that there will be a way to go through missions more smoothly than having to loadout every time something is completed. If not, I can see constantly pulling back to the menu just to pick the next mission to focus on to be annoying, but not a big deal if they still allow the free roam at any time - especially if they include side missions and/or objectives.
Conclusion
So far, the Destroy All Humans! Remake demo shows a promising recollection of the original title. I don’t see any problems with the initial setup in comparison to the original story and gameplay. This demo has me excited to jump back into my space boots and get back to zapping and probing like I used to do years ago!
