"Attention, Earth Creatures: this planet is now part of the Furon Empire. Your benevolent masters welcome you."
--Crypto-137, Destroy All Humans!
Frivolous by design but incredibly effective with its relentless satire of American Cold War patriotism and the misrepresentations of communism that persist to the present day, Destroy All Humans! tells of the Furon invasion of Earth. The Switch game is a remake of the 2005 original that debuted on Nintendo's hybrid console in 2021, a year after the remake came to the PS4 and Xbox One. A mixture of old and new, this remake handles some elements very well, like its scathing mockery of certain philosophies connected with American conservatism, and at the same time frolics within a very limited gameplay scope. Switch players can rightfully expect lesser graphical quality than on the other systems the remake was released for, but otherwise receive the same core updates.
Because Crypto and other Furons are said to lack genitalia and only persist as a species though cloning, I refer to Crypto-137 as it, rather than he.
Production Values
The imperialistic, fallaciously minded yet pragmatically competent alien Crypto-137 gets a lot of time onscreen with its black eyes and pointed teeth, and thankfully its animation is strong enough to not too severely under-represent the Switch's capabilities. This game boasts no first-party visuals, but the Switch tends to have middling graphics in cross-platform releases than its aesthetically strongest games showcase. A host of skins provides variety in Crypto's appearance at least. Among the game's skins is one called Dollarsmart, a clown-based appearance seemingly named after Pennywise, the eldritch extraterrestrial entity from Stephen King's It. Yet another is inspired by the protagonist Death from the game Darksiders II [1], also from THQ Nordic. These skins drastically change Crypto's appearance, which is seen up close in many cutscenes. The unfortunate thing is that Crypto looks so much more visually developed than almost anything else in the game, save perhaps its Furon commander and flying saucer in all of its destructive glory. Human character models are often very blandly presented when it comes to facial animation. The environments neither look spectacular nor like the worst seen on the platform. Aside from Crypto and a handful of other in-game models, it is the appropriately over-the-top voice acting and excellently-realized tone and themes of the game that truly rise to greatness among the production values.
Gameplay
The mechanics start out very limited, and upon replaying missions, Crypto's abilities will be upgraded to whatever point the player has reached, but he will not have access to any item first obtained in the level until he initially received it. The alien invader still quickly expands its navigational and combat options from level to level. Upon completing a mission or fulfilling secondary objectives, DNA, the currency of the game, is awarded along with any related ability or upgrade unlocks. Mind reading and brain stem retrieval--which can be carried out telekenetically on living humans until their heads come off--are early examples of actions Crypto can perform. Its starting electricity-based weapon is later joined with a handful of others, like one that burns people into skeletons that cannot have their brain stems harvested. Yes, people shocked to death can still have their DNA extracted! Killing humans and traversing the world become easier, though.
Eventually, for instance, Crypto can become powerful enough to dash and subsequently hover right over the surface of the ground indefinitely using a propulsion system other than its jetpack, or it can stay holographically cloaked for longer. Some of these abilities are best suited to mandatory usage in the campaign levels, such as impersonating the appearance of scientists and soldiers; others are almost totally unnecessary or even out of place in free roam mode. There is just not much of a need to holographically imitate a random civilian when the main benefit of playing outside the story missions is the freedom to wreak utter devastation at whim, stealth be damned, throughout each broad region of the game.
As for this somewhat open world element, you cannot immediately access each challenge within a region's free roam mode, but when they unlock, you have the opportunity to engage in what is basically repeatable, timed minigames. With one challenge type, you abduct as many cows or people as possible within a time limit by throwing them into the saucer's tractor beam. In another called Armageddon, you try to destroy as many structures and vehicles as you can to cross various economic loss thresholds for human communities, all from the heightened safety of the saucer. Alternatively, the player can simply walk around, hover with the jetpack, or pilot the saucer and kill people at will outside of all challenges.
Story
Mild spoilers are below.
An alien's flying saucer crash lands in front of a US military test, and a clone from is sent to retrieve Furon DNA from within the human genome tracing back to long ago. A series of government cover-ups and associated public hysteria break out as Crypto-137 visits different locations in America, infiltrates its army, and learns of a "White House".
Intellectual Content
Early on, Destroy All Humans! toys with the idea that the Furons are more intelligent than humans because they are more technologically advanced, despite this idea being fallacious and false by logical necessity. A similar idea is handled more seriously but still invalidly by characters in other science fiction media like Prometheus. Intelligence is nothing but rationality, and rationality is nothing but an individual being's grasp of the necessary truths of logic. There is nothing intelligent about an alien whatsoever for by happenstance being born into a more scientifically advanced species. Indeed, scientists of any hypothetical species might ignore or never think about logical axioms and other necessary truths in any capacity and instead assume the existence and centrality of the external world, for instance, while still legitimately progressing the technological state of society. They would have at best passively or actively enslaved themselves to assumptions and wholly neglected that which cannot be false. Thus, they could only be stupid. Crypto does not acknowledge any of this and assumes things like that the cows he first lands by must be the dominant life on Earth. What a non sequitur! As my wife commented on, he also seems to just assume that the cows must have multiple stomachs due to their bovoid appearance, extrapolating from what might be other life forms from his own home planet.
This notion of intelligence becomes more of a background theme as the game progressively becomes overtly satirical with handling scares over communism alongside American patriotism, something commonly held to out of sheer emotionalistic nationalism. Whether in the story cutscenes or in chance exclamations (including internal ones) during gameplay, characters blame communism for practically any destructive event tied to Crypto or even call Crypto a "midget commie" to his face. One scientist testing a mind control technology (which at most could only indirectly control the mind by manipulating correlated neural events in the brain) celebrates that the test subjects became rabidly opposed to anything "different" from them and overwhelmingly became registered Republicans! Today's Republicans do sound practically the same in a sense, confusing socialism for communism and sometimes confusing any economic, moral, or broader philosophy that is not entirely consistent with the American status quo for communism as well.
Communism is not even Stalinist despite Soviet Russian ideology and practice being the basis for hatred of communism. Soviet communism is like politically conservative Christianity, i.e., a contradiction that misrepresents a separate concept. Having a forceful ruling elite at the top of a rigid hierarchy is antithetical to actual communism, which entails a classless society with communal property ownership and distribution according to genuine need. This is in fact neither condemned by the Bible so many anti-communists treat as inherently opposed to communism and was practiced to an extent by the early church in the book of Acts, as mentioned in chapters 2 and 4. Really, many who assume the falsity of communism do so because they have already assumed the truth of American capitalism. The final boss of the game is less stupid than this (though she is misandrist), asking Crypto if it thinks America is the only country in the world. He retorts that the people whose minds he scanned seemed to think so.
Conclusion
Slaughtering irrational people as an also delusional extraterrestrial, listening to them blame communism for your rampages before they flee or die, and upgrading an expanding arsenal makes for a wonderful parody of science fiction and American norms from the 1900s onward. If only there was more diversity within the actual mechanics of the game, Destroy All Humans! could have reached other levels of greatness. As it stands, the remake is a resurrection of older, comparatively restrictive gaming conventions with a more modern visual presentation--you just won't fully benefit from this on the Switch, though you cannot have portability with the other consoles.
Content:
1. Violence: More than the scorching of humans on the ground with a flying saucer laser and other such things, the explosion of green blood when Crypto harvests the DNA from people's heads is the most violent part of the game.
2. Profanity: "Bastard" is sometimes heard.
3. Sexuality: Male and female characters, if you read their minds, occasionally make sexual comments about which member of the opposite gender they are most attracted to.
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