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If there are alien races out there smart enough to build spaceships to fling them to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, I wouldn't be surprised if they came to Earth, saw our excessive love for violence, reality shows, and idol singers; and decided, "That's it. The whole thing has got to go."
Only the Furons have been to our planet before, in ancient times when the wise didn't have infomercials hocking self-help books, and got very friendly with the natives. To the point that every human, so many hundreds of years later, is the carrier of a small fragment of Furon DNA. Something the Furon Empire needs to fill up the old cloning banks to keep their race going strong.
Take the psychotic bunny from Sam & Max, give him the voice of Jack Nicholson at his most sadistic, jam them into a little grey (not green!) body of stereotypical alien, and you have Crypto, the game's great protagonist, and antagonist of the entire human race. Now set him loose in a mock version of 50s America with all the usual stereotypes in full force: the slack-jawed farm yokels, the drunken Irish cops, the "Albert Einstein on acid" scientists, and the Joe Friday G-Men. Somehow, the murderous rampages that follow feel entirely justified, especially with the witty banter of the game's first class storytelling, above and beyond what normally passes for writing in even good videogames.
Kidnapping, torture, and wholesale slaughter are all in a day's work for Crypto. The myriad missions handed down by his superior Pox will make full use of his abilities, from disguising himself as a human to flinging around their primitive transports through the power of psycho-kinesis. He has four weapons on foot for varying flavors of blowing stuff up, but the biggest bangs come from his saucer, which can level buildings with a touch of a button. All of which can be improved via upgrades as long as you've got the DNA to pay for them, extracted from the brains of humans that lost their heads in the most literal way possible.
The visuals are some of the best you're going to get on the PS2 (the Xbox version offers is just slightly better graphically), rich in both color and detail with little popup and zero slowdown. Though much smaller in scope, the added elements like tall grass and bloom lighting make these locations feel alive compared to the visually bland GTA series. They also got their money's worth out of the Havoc physics engine, providing the enjoyment of tossing around tanks and clearing out traffic jams with ion detonators, while vehicles tumble in the air and people's limbs flail about as you smack them into the concrete.
The one big germ-infested wet blanket of the whole experience is there simply isn't enough of it. Determined players can complete the story missions in under five hours, and after that there's no real incentive to continue. The side missions left on the various maps are too few, and while random destruction is fun by itself, there will plenty of that during the main game to satisfy those sort of urges. Having only four weapons just isn't enough, especially when the anal probe and kill-o-matic become useless later in the game, and there aren't enough useful upgrades to justify large scale DNA harvesting. Hypnotism feels underused, and would have been great to mesmerize members of the military to your side, rather than limiting it to distraction or sleeping.
Considering the wealth of missions Mercenaries, though poorer storytelling, it's clear Pandemic had the talent and ability to make Destroy All Humans! a more complete package, but production costs and deadlines must have forced what could have been a true classic into a B-movie experience.
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