Destroy All Humans! 2 is the sequel to the ingenious original game released last year, Destroy All Humans!, which I loved for its creativity and rampant mockery of the silliness of the 50's. For all the reasons that I loved the first game, I was not so impressed with Destroy All Humans! 2. And this saddens me, because I really was anticipating this game. This game takes place in the swingin' 60's and tries to capitalize on everything funny about the era, but ends up feeling rehashed and convoluted.

The visuals are good, don't get me wrong. Stoned hippies abound, Communist agents romp about and the areas seem very stereotypically 60's. This is a good thing. I liked the cleverly named area called Hashbury for Haight Ashbury.

Once again, you can tap people's thoughts to aid you in your quests and just to get a laugh. But again, I quickly lost interest in doing this, as they all seemed to say similar things. In the original game, I spent tons of time listening in because they were all just so damn funny. There are a few laugh gags here, but they just seemed phoned-in. Crypto, however, is still pretty funny with his Jack Nicholson-esque sneering voice and ardent hatred for all things human.

Once again, you reprise the role of Cryto Sporidium, only this go, he is masquerading as the President of the US, having been so successful in the last game. He has somehow been able to grow genitals and he's having the time of his life with the free-lovin' ladies of the 60's. However, the Soviet Union makes an assassination attempt on the Pres and also blows up his mothership, along with Pox, who manages to escape as a hologram to aid Crypto in his quest to find out what the hell is going on.

In addition to the main storyline and your objectives there, you'll also run across various little side quests. These side quests, while more fleshed out than the mindless ones of the last game which usually involved snatching the brains of X number of humans, etc., are deeper and more tiring, to be honest. One involves some ancient Furon sex-crazed god named Arkvoodle. His statues pop up from time to time and you have to do certain things to appease him. One involved terrifying as many humans as possible, raising the alert level to red. I figured, OK no problem. I've done this tons of times. So I run around wreaking undue amounts of havok, murdering policeman and army guys in front of people. Surely this will bring out the big guns and the Men in Black. But no. I ran around for some 20 minutes and I couldn't get it past orange. Why? Because apparently the game hadn't deemed my running about important enough. I had to step foot near an army fort before I raised the level to red. Stupid, because when I did set foot here, there was no one around to notice it, yet boom! I raised it to red then. Needless to say, this was my last mission for Arkvoodle.

Other missions involved fetch quests, running to and fro to speak with various people and often the same person over and over. Even having the scripted conversations where you have choices as to whether to play nice or be an ass weren't fun because you got the same outcome no matter what. I found the voice-overs for all of the main characters aside from Crypto to sound uninspired and somewhat annoying.

Although you are provided with 5 large areas to explore, such as the Bay City area, Japan, Britain and Tunguska, I just never really had the drive to move forward like I did with the first. I beat the first game as I really wanted to see the ending. Not so with the sequel.

Once again, you've got a lot of weapons at your disposal, like the trusty Zap-O-Matic, Disintegrator Ray and Anal Probe, but you've also got some new ones like Burrow Beast who burrows under a human, devours them and then looks for more prey. There's also Gastro, an angry little fella who blasts everything in sight to help you out until he runs out of power or is killed.

If you are spotted, of course, the alert level raises. However, you can use "free love" to make the humans around you dance like fools to some generic 60's tune and they forget all about you. A nice little getaway feature. Then, you can body-snatch someone undetected and this results in a "clean snatch". Did I mention this game is not for the kiddies? Crypto likes all things sex-related. If the alert level is high, you can also go to your nearest police station, use the phone outside and either call for back-up, call off the dogs or play a phone prank. This was fun once or twice for a laugh. There's also a multiplayer feature where a friend can jump in and play along with you, blasting humans as you both go, without any explanation for why a red version of you just jumped into the game. Eh.

Destroy All Humans! 2 is not necessarily hard, but it can be frustrating and boring. I just never really felt like I had a true purpose, but was just mindlessly running around blasting stuff. The difficulty often came in things such as not being able to raise the level appropriately because the game didn't like the area I was in. Sure, this made the level harder, but it didn't make it fun. I never felt completely ganged up on by enemies to where I couldn't make an escape and this did happen from time to time in the original game. But again, it was part of the challenge and that wasn't really present here.

Crypto has lots of abilities such as PK (psycho-telekinesis), brain extraction, making humans follow him and protect him (pretty funny), being able to transmogrify things to destroy them, etc. They are all pretty much accessed by holding down L1 and then pressing the various face buttons. However, I found that, in the heat of the moment, I might select the wrong damn thing. Also, there were so many side quests going on such as collecting Datacores fallen from the mothership, Furotech Cells to increase weaponry, and Alien Artifacts that sometimes I would get distracted from what I was doing. "Oh, shiny thing..."

Overall, Destroy All Humans! 2 is not a bad game, it's just falls way short of the genius of the first game. It feels far more jumbled with all the stereotypes thrown in here, and the storyline doesn't seem as concise or worked out. Basically, it's a sequel. I was disappointed in it, but maybe, had I not played the original, I would have loved it. If you are a fan of the 60's and didn't play the first game, it might be your thing, baby! But if you played the first game, give it a rent to be sure you dig it first.