In last year's Destroy All Humans! Pandemic Studios put players into a satirical and sardonic look at 1950s America during the height of the Cold War. It was one of my favorite games of 2005, and when I found out there was a sequel in the works for this year, I nearly shot my disintegrator ray right in my pants.

I picked up the game the day it came out, but didn't have much time to play it until last week, when I decided to make the supreme sacrifice that SG readers have come to expect from me, and spent four straight days doing nothing but, well, Destroying All Humans, to find out if the game is worth a pile of your "earth money."

Warning: There will be spoilers in here, but none of them should rise to the level of "Darth Vader is Luke's Father" or "Trinity and Neo Get Killed" or "Snape Kills Dumbledore."

...What?

Moving on.

Destroy All Humans! 2: Make War, Not Love
Rated T for Teen
PS2, Xbox
Destroy All Humans! 2 picks up a decade after Destroy All Humans! ended. Cryptosporidium-137 is gone, but his clone, Cryptosporidium-138 is alive and well, masquerading as the president of the United States, and wreaking havoc from within (Hrm. Maybe Dick Cheney is an alien. I'll have to look into that. It would explain a few things.) Everything is going beautifully, until the KGB shoots Cryto's mothership out of the sky and kills his commander, Orthopox-13 (who then spends the rest of the game as a floating holographic head.) The destruction of the mother ship, and Crypto's search for revenge is what we writers call the "inciting incident" or the "hook" to get the story moving, and get moving it does.

You'll begin in Bay City, which is suspiciously similar to San Francisco and swarming with those damn Hippies, before moving on to Albion, which is suspiciously similar to London, and also swarming with Hippies. From there, the story takes you to Takoshima (want to guess what that's suspiciously similar to and swarming with?) and points...beyond, as new and unexpected enemies arrive and give Crypto plenty of opportunities to make war, not love.

What's New
Just like its predecessor, DAH!2 is a sandbox game, and the designers have created even bigger environments and added even more side missions for players to explore, including a really funny continuing story where Crypto gets humans to join the Cult of Arkvoodle, the ancient Furon Lord of the Sacred Crotch (seriously.)

There are new weapons for Crypto to carry around (my personal favorite is called the Gastro Gun, mostly for its humor, rather than its ability to destroy all humans) as well as new weapons for his saucer (my personal favorite being the Anti-gravity Field, entirely for its ability to destroy all humans.) You have new mental abilities to play around with, but to unlock and upgrade them, you'll have to abduct various humans and mash them together in the saucer's gene blender (this is a lot more fun than it sounds.) Finally, the holobob from DAH! has been replaced with the Bodysnatch ability, where you'll physically take over an unsuspecting human to activate various side missions, and avoid raising the always-annoying alert level.

Though the missions aren't particularly complex or overly-challenging for experienced gamers, players who complained about how quick and easy it was to finish Destroy All Humans! should be pleased with the length of the sequel. All the side missions, the size of the play areas, and the addition of multi-player games (like tennis, using PK to launch humans over a fence at each other) give you plenty of stuff to do. They've also added the ability to call your saucer to the various landing zones, so you don't have to waste a lot of time running from one side of the map to another and back.

Destroy All Humans! 2 never takes itself seriously, contains all the satirical humor that made its predecessor so much fun to play, and takes it even further this time around. The relationship between Crypto and Pox is hilarious, and the thoughts and dialogue of the NPCs does for the free love of 1969 what Destroy All Humans! did for the repression and Cold War hysteria of 1959.

Crypto is a more fully-developed character in the sequel, (just how much depends on dialogue choices the player makes during conversations with supporting characters, and I encourage you to explore them all) so he's more than a just a cool-looking model with a Jack Nicholson-eqsue voice that seemed a little arbitrary last time. He frequently breaks the fourth wall to make comments on elements of the game, too. At one point, he complains to Pox, "The game's called Destroy All Humans, not Keep Kids Off Drugs!", he rants about all the crates that are scattered all over one of the levels, and during one particularly long-winded exchange with a character says, "You know the player's in the kitchen making nachos by this point, right?"

Good for Geeks Because: You're playing an alien and you can destroy buildings with your flying saucer. If that's not enough to get your slide rule, uh, sliding, there are enough pop culture references to get their own VH-1 special, and many of them are really geeky (Rocky Horror, Red vs. Blue, The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.) With a little bit of work, you could even turn it into a drinking game. But remember, geeks: if you're drinking alone, you're not partying. You're an alcoholic.

Bottom Line: It's really fun, it's really clever, and the story is well designed. It does what a good sequel should do, and takes all the things that made Destroy All Humans fun, and builds a great game upon that foundation. It's not quite San Andreas to Destroy All Humans!'s Vice City, but it's still a hell of a game. If you missed out on the Wii, didn't feel like dodging bullets in a PS3 riot, or have a hatred of Microsoft irrational enough to keep you from buying a 360, have no fear. Destroy All Humans! 2 is available for those quaint and obsolete PS2s you have propping open a door right now, and for that Xbox gathering dust in the closet that you swore you were going to mod into a media center. It's a perfect game for the special geek in your life (and let's be honest with ourselves, people: for most geeks, the special geek in their life is them. And there's nothing wrong with that.)

Grade: A-

Wil Wheaton is totally going to mod that Xbox into a media center.