I’m back again with another Steam Deck Review! This time we’re staying going to shoot and snatch bodies on earth as Crypto one more time. We’re covering Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed. We’ll not only cover the game but if it plays well at all on the Steam Deck, and if so, did it work straight away or with settings enabled? Let’s grab a raygun and blast into the review!
Description:
“Crypto is back with a license to probe. The alien invader returns, groovier than ever and now with genitals! Experience the swinging ‘60s in all its chemical-induced glory and take revenge on the KGB for blowing up your mothership. As you uncover the schemes of your enemies, you’ll have to form alliances with members of the very species you came to enslave.
Citizens of planet Earth, experience a completely remade cult classic with an expanded arsenal, an improved saucer, a much more open world and a fully playable story in local co-op.
Visit locations like Bay City, Albion, Tunguska, Takashima, and Solaris to seek your revenge and give those pesky humans a good demonstration of your broad weapon arsenal.”
Trailer:
Probes & Cons:
- This game is massive, so I want to keep my positives short because we could be here all day! Let’s start with just how absolutely great this game looks. The original gameplay is there, so rehashing that may be moot. But we’ll for sure bring up the fact that they’ve taken a game that was out on the original Xbox and PS2 with a dingy, foggy look and modernized the hell out of it. If you have time, find comparison videos on YouTube so that you can see the night and day difference between their looks. This game has proper lighting, it has fantastic shadows, and shading and the models are all so diverse and colorful. There are tons more buildings and plantlife filling out the world you’re in. I decided to put the photo down below there so you can see just how robust every element of this game can be.
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Speaking of colorful and diverse, this game has loads of costumes (50) for Crypto. This is aside from the humans that you can wear! I think most of them are fun, but some may be a bit culturally insensitive (more on that later). The color not only is all around you in the natural world as you traverse the globe. You’ll also see that the various weapons and abilities that Crypto has can really light up and change the way a level looks while he’s using them. Vibrant colors and neon glowing lasers and lights make the levels fun. Especially when there is already trippy tye-dye from the hippies (more on that later too). - What I will say about the gameplay is the best parts about it. You play as an alien named Crypto in this third-person shooter. You can control so many different weapons and you also have alien abilities. From using psychic powers to jetpacks to flying in a ship to guns with auto-lockon (to make it more accessible). This means that you can be dodging fire while firing at different people and not think too hard about it. Getting overwhelmed? Just launch a nearby parked vehicle or other objects at the baddies. If you need to blend in, you can disguise yourself in a human body. The humans are taller and let you get away and traverse levels even easier. Finally, there is a lot of destructibility in this game brought over from the original!
- There are a few multiplayer levels, and I didn’t really get to enjoy those as I was playing this game on a Steam Deck and not docked. So it’s a single-player experience for me. But if you play it elsewhere, you do get local multi-player with 2 players total. However, three multi-player modes are a fantastic bit of positivity that this game (and the original) have and make it worth your buck so I’m going to cover it quickly.
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The first and most obvious mode is a co-op mode for the campaign/story mode. You get the full same game that is the single-player experience, though I’m unsure if this increases the difficulty. Maybe it’s only in place so that you can take down whichever difficulty with 2 times the firepower! You can have that save file that you make with a second person transfer over to a single-player experience if that other person leaves or stops playing.
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The head-to-head multiplayer mode is just a death match between you and the other person. You get to choose any of the five main areas from the story mode to play in. I think that for you and only one other person, the areas that you play in appear to be really large. So it may be boring to play, but this is just a guess and not a certain thing.
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Finally, PK Tennis, and that’s just a mode where you use your brain powers to move a giant ball back and forth. The goal is to get it over the net and into worm holes on the opponent’s side. You don’t want them to get the ball into the wormholes on your side. It looks like it could be fun, but I couldn’t find anyone talking about it from before, so I’m unsure. - And the game’s story is…um…out of this world (excuse the pun). The Russians are aware of the alien invasion from the first game that took place in the US and they want to stop it before it reaches their country. This game seems to be set in the late 90s (judging by the car designs) but it also has a 70s hippie aesthetic going on in the US levels. I’m not sure why they chose this originally, only Pandemic games could know that. They chalk it up to a festival happening and he has to start fighting during that festival, but it doesn’t explain why the decision was made for the game in the first place.
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There is a warning when you boot the game telling you that the game was originally made in a different year. It mentions that they didn’t change any story or audio elements from the original. So it reminds you that a modern mind might find some elements a bit unsavory. I have yet to discover any of those story beats that make me cringe, just the costumes. However, he isn’t human, so I’m not sure if it’s cultural appropriation for an alien to wear some of the things Crypto wears in the game. No matter what, you’ll just have to put yourself into that early 2000’s mindset. If you can watch old Disney movies without complaining, don’t complain about this game! - The only real downside I saw (and other people online corroborated this) is the tutorials. It seems as though they really did just bring the text and stuff forward into this game. It could’ve been clearer what we needed to do in the objectives. Usually, they’re just a sentence and require you to effectively guess and check if you’ve done it right. I think that at the very least they should put together a PDF file of the list of objectives in each level and explain what to do. Luckily, a lot of things can be found out by looking at GameFAQs for the original release of the game. However, I really do feel that something more official should exist if the developers didn’t want to enhance the game anyway except visually.
Steam Deck:
Upon loading up this game for the first time, the Steam Deck (and likely Steam on PC) asks if you want to load the game as is or if you want to load the DirectX 12 version. I started by testing the DX12 version on my Steam Deck. When I loaded it, it was a bit choppy loading the initial cutscenes. I immediately pressed the button on my Steam Deck that lets me increase/decrease settings allocated to the game. I went down the list of them turning all of them up (frame rate, FSR, etc) one by one until I noticed the choppiness disappeared. It turns out I had to enable all of the settings and turn them all of the way up to make the choppiness disappear entirely.
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Once I had done that, the game played like a treat. I decided since the Steam Deck was already giving its all, to go into the game’s settings and increase those too. It worked, although, some visual settings are likely for larger screens. I didn’t notice changes on some of those settings, so I disabled them in order to save a few drips of power. But all in all, the game worked completely. So yeah, increase all of the Steam Deck’s settings to the maximum and you can play this game. It sounds great, there’s no stuttering or ghosting, there are no dropped frames and the cutscenes work with zero issues!
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Final Thoughts:
I just want to wrap this up by mentioning how absolutely buck wild this game is. The first game was indeed crazy, but this game goes all around the world which really keeps it fresh. I was also pumped that this game worked find on the Steam Deck and it’s a brand new title. Although with games like Spider-Man and Cyberpunk 2077 working on the Steam Deck, this really shouldn’t be a surprise. However, this game will be a treat for you no matter where you play it. The story is over the top, the characters are bat-crap crazy, the weapons are a riot, and throwing humans around has never felt better!