Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Destroy All Humans!: Path of the Furon

1. Official Site
2. Platform: 360
3. Publisher: THQ
4. Developer: THQ
5. Release Date: 12/01/08
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

With respects to the Destroy All Humans! franchise, THQ now represents a freewheeling alcoholic unable to stay away from the bar. A bar at which they finish each shot by slapping the bartender.

In other words, it is high time to take this franchise away from them and never let them touch it again.

Much as Eidos rode Lara Croft into the ground then dug her up only to ride her some more for good, hard, measure, the Destroy All Humans franchise is officially dead and buried. THQ clearly refuses to accept this fact, so they have exhumed the corpse, reanimated it, and sent it forth to the masses expecting... something. I don't know what. No one who actually plays Path of the Furon can tell you what the developers were thinking other than they all just wanted to punch out at 5 o'clock and go home.

This beast is flat terrible, but not just for the reasons one might immediately think of. Not only does it lack soul, quality writing, a sense of humor, or any of the reasons for playing the series in the first place, but it also has several game breakers that five minutes worth of Q&A would have revealed. But that would have defeated the “get it out the door now” mantra THQ clearly adopted.

Visually, Path of the Furon is a grave disappointment. I could play this thing on the Wii. It still wouldn't be fun, but at least I would be expected to throw my controller around as part of the gameplay as opposed to rage. Crypto and Pox both look like higher res versions of their old selves, but everything else in the game from the humans to the buildings to the vehicles all look exactly the same as they did in prior games. Let us not forget that was on the last generation of consoles.

Rag doll physics apply to the characters but only when flinging them through the air. I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not because the technology was better used back in Max Payne 2 and that was ages ago. Regarding vehicles, its like the developers figured the majority of the game would be played from the spacecraft so everything is dull and boring when seen up close. This applies to pretty much everything in the game other than the Man Eating Plant gun, which looks awesome the bigger it grows.

One good thing out of hundreds. Not a good score, THQ.

Aurally, Path of the Furon is a grave disappointment. Grant Albrecht and Richard Horvitz return to the roles of Crypto and Pox but even they can't salvage this ship. They don't even try to give it their all either, instead opting to listlessly rattle off whatever drivel was on the script page. The only actor who does make an impression is the one who plays the bimbo reporterette in the second level. I would imagine the point was the make her a Farrah Fawcett knock-off, but in truth she looks exactly like Megyn Kelly which is a whole other thing.

Back to the negatives, unfortunately. The audio has a nasty tendency of either dropping to imperceptible levels or not playing at all. I was unable to repeatedly produce it either, but considering how shoddy the entire mess of a game is it didn't strike me as worthy of the effort. Sometimes I'd take a mission briefing from Pox and the audio simply wouldn't play. Or it would play then stop midway through leaving me with subtitles. This is something that Q&A is supposed to find and fix, kids, before the game ships.

Just sayin'.

Control wise, Path of the Furon is about par for the course. The directional and movement controls are standard, and the A button is for jumping and using the jetpack, B stops time, X transmogrifies, and Y snatches a body. Or talks to someone depending on the situation. This is yet another missed opportunity. Imagine for a second if you have to go talk to someone but accidentally snatch their body instead. You could mentally scan your own brain to see if you could pick up what the guy was thinking, and if you only got snippets then you would have to figure out right quick what the guy was supposed to do.

Alas, Path of the Furon is not that game.

The LB and RB buttons see a lot of action here. The RB button is used whenever you shift through your weaponry, and the LB button plus X or Y results in mental scans or mentally distracting the puny humans with Disco Fever – the “everybody dance” distraction Crypto casts whenever he's in a tight spot. Simple, basic, not that tough to master.

Gameplay wise, Path of the Furon sucks. It goes beyond disappointing for fans of the series because first it rehashes everything the series has done before, then strips out the creativity, the quality writing, a sense of humor, and anything resembling enthusiasm. Instead, “Path of the Furon” offers players the chance to enjoy genuinely poor design decisions, writing that would be considered sub-par for a fourth grade school play, glitchy audio (see above), poor graphics (ditto), a storyline that isn't compelling, upgrades that can be maxed out by the end of the second level, and an over-arching sense of wonder that this game even saw the light of day.

Oh, and having multiple dialogue choices that never, ever lead anywhere and are never, ever funny is a great way to deliver exactly nothing. In the old school adventure games - we're talking Monkey Island here - it was possible to take conversations to places where you never dreamed they could go. The choices presented here are three to four wastes of time plus the correct answer to the move the show along. That's it.

Crypto and Pox start off running a casino on the Las Vegas strip during the 1970s, a setup to a punchline that never, ever comes. What could have been a comedy gold mine is instead treated as little more than a backdrop to poor Fed Ex and assassination missions. Crypto messes with some bad spoofs of mobsters while also taking on the army. That's it. Now for even more pain.

Take for example what happened to Crypto's ship. It's buried in the signage for their casino, but the reason why is tossed off so quick you almost have to leap to catch it. Then... nothing happens with it. Then Crypto basically destroys the whole place and moves on to the next level.

Yet, this is but the first of five stops Crypto makes throughout the course of the game and all of them wind up being little more than an excuse for Crypto to hop in his new ship and blast everything in sight. That may be fine were this 1987 and I dropped $.25 into an arcade machine sandwiched between Joust and Rampage. Unfortunately we're several games into a series that managed to surprise by aiming high with its satire in the first two installments, mercilessly flogging societal attitudes during the '50s and '60s.

Now the only thing Crypto and Pox are flogging is a dead horse.

Let's start with Las Vegas, the very first level. It's scaled as Las Vegas is scaled. Now let's think about that for a second before you say, “Hey, I like it when cities are scaled appropriately.” Fine. Go back to GTAIV and enjoy yourself. Las Vegas is built a little different than New York City. For starters, the casinos are massive and it is an arduous trek to move from one to the other because they are also spread so damn far apart. It's like a quarter mile from the front door of one to the street directly in front of it. Now scale THAT into a game and you know what you get? A lot of running through empty space where nothing happens. At all.

But what about downtown where everything is much closer together? All is well and good there until you open the map up. The mission locations appear on your map as bright yellow and pink tabs. Now tell me what Las Vegas is filled with. NEON! So take a wild guess as to what is literally impossible to find on the map? Any of your target goals, side missions, races, or anything else. You have to stumble onto everything except the primary missions, and those are signified in the game by a giant pulsating pink beam shooting up into the sky.

Is it a mission or Siegfried and Roy's next party?

Regarding the map, you can only zoom in a hair. And I do mean by a hair. Oh, and this hair only focuses on your location to the exclusion of the rest of the map. You cannot move it around. You cannot mark your locations. It is utterly devoid of use.

The missions themselves lack punch despite Crypto ending most of them with a bang. Possess people, blow stuff up, get in your ship to blow more stuff up, and that's it. Play three missions in this game and you've played the whole game. Or at least you can play until the game breaking boss at the end of the second level as I did and give up in frustration. Crypto's ship, even when the weapons are maxed out, takes a long time to blow up buildings and that's the ultimate goal of a lot of missions. So in a metaphor for the entire game, what should be fun is a slogging chore.

For the record, the second level actually managed to be less fun than the first and I didn't think that possible.

The amount of unholy devastation players can wreck on a city deserves exactly 30 points of value. Hence the score you see listed above. There are no other redeeming values present in this mess of a game. It is filled to the brim with fail, and not recommended at all.

Not even as a rental.

What began as a novelty crystalized into something genuinely special with the second game in the series. Destroy All Humans 2 remains in my ever-revolving Top 10 list of games ever because it brought an epic amount of funny to the genre while also featuring missions that were inventive, clever, and brilliantly spoofed the 1960s. Compare that to the epic fail of Path of the Furon and we see clearly what happens when you take development from the big leagues and send it on to the farm team.

Destroy All Humans is dead and Path of the Furon put the final nail in the coffin. Rest in peace Crypto.

Gaming Trend Score

56

1. Graphics: 60
2. Audio: 65
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 50
5. Value/Replay: 30
6. OVERALL:56