Nintendo
Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed
By Ryan Newman
Apr 14, 2008, 7 :01 am

Nicholas assures me that Destroy All Humans! is a good series. My sole experience with it being Big Willy Unleashed, I have my doubts. Not only do I have my doubts, but after having spent hours fighting an unresponsive camera, hearing a grating impression of Jack Nicholson and being assaulted with just how not funny a script can be, I would say he’s borderline insane. Seeing as how Locomotive Games is behind this, and not the series’ creators Pandemic, and that he is insane, I’m going to have to believe him.

I pick the worst times to get into a series.

As it goes, Crypto is back on the clock, destroying humans and whatnot, in this third installment of what had otherwise been a fairly noted series. This time it is the 1970s and Pox, Crypto’s omnipresent holographic superior, has run into the problem of activists trying to shut down his Big Willy restaurant. I was going to put a bad joke at the end of that sentence, but the game is so full of them that I would rather spare myself the groaning. Patty Wurst, a spoof of a noted kidnapped heiress, is out to shut down the restaurant with her band of chanting and sign-toting supporters. She is the obnoxious evil tree-hugger to Crypto’s poor man’s Al Bundy: a hilariously outrageous combination! Her character is actually used to poke fun at the prominence of celebrities in our culture and their own shallow greed. There’s nothing more behind Crypto – he’s just grumpy and poorly voiced.

In what looks like an abandoned Dreamcast game, you take Crypto around a small city to various sub and main jobs. The side quests, as they are, tend to be short and monotonous. They are made difficult only by fact that the camera is absolutely horrible. In a scheme that has failed all but one time (Metroid Prime 3), the targeting reticule is used to turn the camera. The problem with this is obvious: anytime you move your arm, which tends to happen as holding it in one place becomes uncomfortable, the camera moves. This wouldn’t be so bad if the camera was easy to readjust or had an auto center, but it wasn’t uncommon for it to simply not respond or to lock at a certain point. I would say that a good quarter of my time with the game consisted of me trying to realign the view into something that was remotely useful.

When not wiggling and waggling, I was shocking, burning, abducting, and anal probing the better part of a metropolitan area. The main tasks aren’t any better than the sub ones, only that you have to hear even more of Crypto’s grating voice and innumerable jokes involving the phrase ‘Big Willy’. It isn’t just that there are a handful of bad jokes: the game is nothing but bad jokes. If the joke doesn’t involve a veiled reference to a penis, then it involves disco or other topics you wish had stayed in the ‘70s. It gets to the point that Pox and Crypto get into an argument of how repetitive the missions are and how bad and unnecessary all the jokes are. You know, being aware enough of how bad something is to mention it and not doing anything to rectify that doesn’t make you irreverent, it makes you hateful and, in this case, an enemy of comedy. Needless to say, the mute button was used heavily.

It’s a shame that so much of the game felt like a watered-down valueware port. Abducting people and absorbing material to upgrade Crypto, his flying saucer, and Big Willy is a good idea and was implemented really well. The telekinesis was also implemented well, but it was hampered by the controls and never really taken advantage of. Still, Crypto’s arsenal does lend itself to wanton destructive, save for the silly anal probe, and I have a hard time disagreeing with a gun that turns people into zombies. He also has a jetpack that allows him to bounce around the city, avoiding detection and/or fire from the police. Crypto has a number of Furon abilities as well, including body snatching and turning objects into ammo. Once an object has been selected a number of small icons appear, floating in a random pattern, which must be shot with the remote in order for the action to be successful. The controls flubbed this up from time to time, but it was an otherwise decent attempt to give the game some variety. There are definitely some good ideas present, so it isn’t entirely on the design that the game’s problems lie but on the implementation.

The multiplayer is also a disappointment. There is co-op and versus play, but it’s fairly limited and also implemented into a game that isn’t very good to begin with. You can either defend Big Willy against protestors or attack a rival chain together as partners or try to take control of beacons as enemies. It’s all pretty basic stuff, and I don’t see it wooing too many people.

And for being in the title, Big Willy itself was a letdown. It’s a giant clunky mascot that throws things, fires lasers, eats heads, and barfs. He has to be recharged after a few minutes of usage and is blessed only with a handy lock-on system, for when that launched car absolutely has to hit its target. In the end, I preferred to use the flying saucer. He may fit in with the game’s style, but that doesn’t make him all that enjoyable or memorable. So those wanting to relive Ghost Busters and unleash on a city, ala Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, will want to move on along.

Overall: 3/10

Well, you can terrorize a town with a flying saucer, giant mascot, and an array of super sci-fi weapons. That sounds pretty awesome, right? Unfortunately, Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed is ugly, derivative, and intent on driving you crazy with bad jokes. There is a core game that anchors all of the Destroy All Humans! series, and this release is no exception, but I would leave Big Willy Unleashed for only the unhealthily obsessed folk, content to ignore its faults in favor of gleefully smashing a city underneath giant plastic feet.