Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed for Wii Reviews by Gamers

When Destroy All Humans was first unveiled, it was pretty obvious that Pandemic knew its stuff on the PS2 and Xbox fronts. The company that has since continued excellence with the Star Wars Battlefront series, trail blazed with its unique Mercenaries original franchise, and is now working on an unnamed Lord of the Rings project. But what of its Destroy All Humans franchise? Where does it go from here?



Well, it goes to Wii, and later will be ported down to PSP. Still owning rights to the game, publisher THQ has since moved the franchise over to a newer developer, Locomotive Games. Still an impressive developer in its own right, Locomotive Games was responsible for the astonishingly good Cars PSP game, and THQ has since allowed the developer to stretch its legs a bit with a full console title. And while Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed has its charm, a few things are very obvious from the get-go. For starters, the series has reached a saturation point, and needs to take a different direction. And along those lines, a low-powered system needs to focus more on making controlled, definite environments more often than not, taking care to not let the concept of an open world run away with an otherwise engaging concept.



Destroy All Humans has always been open world, so it's no surprise that the third iteration in the franchise is again along those same lines. This is the first time the series has been on a Nintendo platform, but the main concept remains. Players control an alien by the name of Crypto, as he this time travels to the '70s in order to again attempt to take over the world in the only way aliens know how: Blasters, UFOs, and anal probes. Following suit with the template set up on PS2 and Xbox, you'll travel the open world, select missions, and basically blow the hell out of everything in a campy throwback run-n-gun fashion. If you took the open world of GTA and forced it to do the nasty with the gameplay from Ratchet & Clank, you'd be on the right path of discovery to DAH's design.



Along the way though, things haven't held up to well for Crypto and the gang, and while the necessary design was there for Wii (IR controlled weaponry, motion integration, and the like), it's just too sloppy of an overall experience to really capture the humor aspect of the game; something that Destroy All Humans has focused on since the beginning. The worlds are pretty sizable, but with the emphasis in DAH being a go anywhere, do anything experience (one without loads, we might add), the world has to be simple enough for players to hop into a UFO or the newly-created "Big Willy" mechanical-fast-food-icon-made-killing-machine, and that makes things look pretty uneventful when back on solid ground. Models are extremely simple, textures are basic, and the frame-rate struggles to hang at 30 as you navigate the world. As a result, this particular version of Destroy All Humans suffers from some issues we've already seen working perfectly in previous games. There's a tremendous amount of fade-in on objects, textures actually pop at very close proximity to the player, and the whole world has this fuzzy haze to it that isn't exactly the most pleasant environment to look at.



Then again, if the gameplay is fun, we can overlook the graphical shortcomings in favor of a still-entertaining experience, and to a certain extent, that's what ends up happening with Big Willy Unleashed, though it still isn't the most rewarding experience out there. The humor is still there, and the entire story is fun enough to keep us going (it's the classic tale of alien meets man, alien kills man, and then alien tries to grind up man and feed it back to him in the form of delicious fast food burgers), and the dialogue, while very hokey, is still charming. The problem arises when you try to incorporate all the classic Destroy All Humans concepts into a world that isn't optimized for them.



Due to a sketchy frame rate, IR isn't smooth enough to be as quick as we want it to be, and while we'd still take it over the traditional dual analog setup, it's certainly on the lower level of pointer functionality we've seen so far on Wii. The team included the ability to change the turn sensitivity, and in that sense it's obvious the high concept for Destroy All Humans is there. What it really boils down to is that the environment isn't controlled or optimized, so the basic control and design of Destroy All Humans is fighting itself. It would stray from the formula, but smaller, polished levels would have been a great alternative to the somewhat crippled open world.







With that being said, Destroy All Humans can still be a fun experience while it lasts. Locomotive explored the possibilities of the Wii remote throughout development, and the end result is a few entertaining gameplay elements that translate well on-screen. UFO control, which is a mixture of analog stick, and Wii-mote tilt for not only rotation, but also lift and drop control, feels surprisingly fun once you get the hang of the controls. We would have thought it was too much reliance on tilt and analog stick at once, but it works well. In addition, the IR mini-game used to hypnotize people (amongst other in-game weapon abilities) is a great innovation, having players lock on to a target, and then zap tiny floating icons that orbit that object to gain control of it.



And then there's the Big Willy itself, which is a stomping, jolly killing machine. Grabbing and throwing is done with motion, and it works well, but the real joy is in popping the heads off unsuspecting humans and chomping down on them. Willy's animations are pretty inspired, and it's fun to run around as the lumbering lard lad himself. It would have been great to co-op the entire game with side-by-side Willy mech units, but unfortunately the multiplayer aspects of the game have also suffered a bit, with only a couple missions to play through, totally around a half hour of play time.



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