Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon Review

It's always best to approach the game you're reviewing without prejudice, but it's not always easy. Sometimes alarm bells start to ring. Like when the game is the latest instalment in a mediocre franchise that's nearly four years old. DING. Or when the original developer abandoned the series and has had nothing to do with this instalment. DING DING.

Or when the studio which took on development duties was shut down a month before the game's launch. DING DING DING. Or when the publisher informs you that due to a mysterious set of circumstances, review copies will only be available from the day of release. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING.

But even if all of the above apply, as in the case of Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon, it's important to keep an open mind. Better to conduct a thorough playtest and judge game on its own merits. Who knows, perhaps it will confound your preconceived notions and turn out to be an an unexpected delight?

Or perhaps it will turn out to be a rotten, shuddering, shambolic fiasco of a game with less to recommend it than a weekend spent watching the Ocean Finance channel (Sky 888) while eating glue. Can you guess which category Path of the Furon fits into, readers?

The game sees our old friend Crypto the alien returning to Earth once again to complete a series of incomparably tedious tasks for reasons it's impossible to understand or care about. The storyline is absolute gibberish, with themes ranging from the Mafia to Buddhist meditation to anti-smoking laws. It's set in the seventies, as you can tell by the unending stream of entirely unamusing historical parody. Look, here's a pair of singers who look like Sonny and Cher - but their names are Sammy and Faire! Where do they get their ideas from. Probably Poundland.

This is absolutely not from the version of the game we played, guaranteed.

Crypto sounds just like Jack Nicholson, or rather a Welsh person doing an impression of someone from Melbourne doing an impression of Jack Nicholson. At one point, Crypto invades the body of a movie star called Jack Trippleson. He makes some jokes about how he hates Jack Trippleson's voice and draws your attention to his "banana hammock". Well done everyone.

You get five small and appallingly rendered areas to explore as you complete dull story missions, ignore the even duller side-quests and pick up weapons which aren't as good as the default one. The range of mission objectives includes Blow That Thing Up, Move That Thing Over There, Shoot Those Baddies and Shoot Those Baddies Before They Shoot This Thing Here. And nothing else.

Sometimes you have to complete a different combination of those objectives in a different order, or the baddies might have blue jackets on, but otherwise there's no variety. There's no challenge either, as Crypto and his stupid sidekick Pox constantly yammer step-by-step instructions at you throughout the game.

Again, we don't recall seeing anything of this visual quality in the 360 version.

Even the Blow That Thing Up missions are no fun at all. At the end of the first area, for example, you're told to get in your flying saucer and destroy all the skyscrapers. You do this by firing your laser beam at them, which smears the buildings with weird-looking stripes of brown that are presumably meant to be scorch marks. Eventually some flames emerge, but instead of exploding the buildings they just sort of melt into the ground. Something went wrong with the soundtrack synching at this point, so the buildings I destroyed crumbled and burned in total silence.

Piloting the saucer is no fun at all, by the way. You'd think aliens with technology advanced enough to create such a sophisticated flying machine would have worked out a way to set it down anywhere, but no. You're limited to the four or five specially designated landing pads dotted around each area. Which you have to unlock by completing unutterably mind-numbing side-quests.

There are some new weapons to play with, such as the seed-firing gun which lets you plant giant man-eating Venus fly traps. Except you can only plant one at a time. And only in specially designated areas. Many of the old weapons are back; turns out the Anal Probe is still not funny, even if you give it homing missile capabilities. You get new powers, such as the ability to stop time and read minds. None of them are particularly inventive or fun to use. One of the new powers lets you force enemies to do disco dancing while a glitterball spins above their head. Yes, just like in Ratchet & Clank PS3. Only less original or good.

The presentation is appalling. Environments are small, sparse and populated by about three character models each. There's endless pop-up and clipping. Characters continually get stuck on scenery and in animation loops. The colour palette is hideous, the textures are terrible and the lighting is just bizarre. Cut-scenes are worth watching only for some of the most hilarious lip-synching you've ever seen.

It's similarly rubbish during the conversations you're forced to have in-game. When talking to NPCs, they'll ask you a question or spout a meaningless unfunny statement and you get a choice of responses. Your answer doesn't affect how the story plays out or anything (what do you think this is, a 2005 Xbox 1 game?). All it means is that when the same list of responses is then offered to you again, the answer you just picked won't be there. You have to keep grinding through the responses, and hearing the same answers from the NPC, until you pick the response which kicks the conversation on to the next tedious cycle.

The multiplayer options are barely worth mentioning, not least because they barely exist. There's no online functionality and no co-op mode. There are three offline two-player mini-games. They're all ****.

Maybe aliens beamed down and stole our memories. Or... Not.

So it turns out those alarm bells were right to ring. Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon is rubbish. Even THQ must know this, and that would explain why the game only carries an RRP of USD 39.99 in the US. But here in the UK they've got the audacity to slap a sticker saying GBP 39.99 on this raddled old excuse for a full-price game. Someone ought to phone Watchdog.

Almost a year ago, I was forced (i.e. paid) to review Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed for the Wii. "Even fans of the original Destroy All Humans games won't find anything to enjoy in this, the series' first Wii instalment in the series. And, if there's any justice, the last," I wrote (concluding the review with the brilliantly insightful reflection, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no.").