Destroy All Humans! Remake Gets Lukewarm Reception on Metacritic

Destroy All Humans!, developed by Pandemic Studios, was released in 2005. It is an action-adventure game that features a protagonist named Cryptosporidium 137 who visits Earth to harvest human DNA. Its fun gameplay and humor garnered it enough of a following to justify a 2020 remake developed by Black Forest Games and released on the 28^th of July. It is available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. While fans are happy to have Destroy All Humans! ported to the current generation, reviews on Metacritic, a review aggregator, show that not all critics are pleased.

As seen on Metacritic, Destroy All Humans! earned itself an average score of 69 on PS4, 68 on Xbox One and 74 on PC. This indicates “mixed or average reviews”. One of the common criticisms is that the gameplay is dated. When discussing the Xbox One version of the game, TrustedReviews wrote that the game is “a painfully outdated third-person shooter that feels out of place in the modern landscape”.  GameSkinny echoed these sentiments, claiming that players who are not fans of the original “will have a hard time finding the game’s charm underneath its dated mechanics and design”.

The ability to cause destruction is something Destroy All Humans! has been praised for.

Another common issue pointed out by critics is that the audio can be repetitive. This, once again, may be the product of the game being a remake of a 2005 game. GameRevolution complained that “repetition is what drives the dagger into the heart of the sound design” and “humans repeat the same barks over and over again”. PlayStation Country also criticized the game for repetitive audio, and noted that the NPC dialogue “gets repetitive fast and is the bad side effect of reutilising old sound clips”.

Not all reviews are negative, however. Many critics on Metacritic praise Destroy All Humans! for being a faithful remake of the original. In their review of the PS4 version of Destroy All Humans!, Hardcore Gamer noted that the game is a “rare example of a remake that changes just enough to maintain the essence of the original while improving the overall experience”, and gave it a 4/5. God is a Geek, who gave the game an 8.0 out of 10, wrote that the game “definitely falls under the ‘faithful remake’ category, with great humor, short and sweet missions, and lots of stuff to blow up”.

Expectedly, the ability to cause chaos and destruction is also praised by many critics. Critical Hit, reviewing the PC version, gave Destroy All Humans! an 8.5 out of ten, and praised it for being “a mindless romp of manic mass destruction”. Although Gamespot gave the Xbox One version a 6/10, they did praise the game for giving players plenty of opportunities to cause mayhem. They note that despite Destroy All Humans! being a remake of a 15-year-old game, its gameplay still feels satisfying, and “causing mayhem and destruction is incredibly fun and when the game is at its best”.

It seems that critics on Metacritic agree that despite its flaws, Destroy All Humans! is a must-play for anyone who is a fan of the original, and for anyone who loves causing havoc in an open-world sandbox. Due to Metacritic’s new rules, users will not be able to post reviews until the 30^th of July. Only then will we know whether gamers agree with the critics.