The Destroy All Humans Remake Is Aiming For Replayability

When the remake of 2005’s Destroy All Humans

was first announced before E3 2019, I was glad to see Crypto 137 returning to the silver screen. I’m not sure how the game’s crude, sense of humor will stand up when it releases in 2020, but it’s good to see that a remake of a game I remember loving as a teen isn’t just getting pushed out the door with a up-rezzed coat of paint to make a quick buck.

As the team at Black Forest told us when we first saw the Destroy All Humans, this isn’t about building a 1:1 remake of the original, rather, creating a game that’s “not a remake, but a remake of what people remember it being.”

When we think back on the game from our childhoods, we remember Crypto being a powerful space menace who could fry you with a laser and telekinetically toss your car halfway across town. When you think back on the original, you don’t focus on the fact that you could only use either your telekinesis or your weapon at a given time, never simultaneously. Your memory ignores that Crypto’s jetpack was little more than a double-jump, or that your spaceship could only move horizontally.

The remake, scheduled for release sometime in 2020, fixes those issues and updates the game to modern standards. It also aims to foster more replayability than it’s progenitor, which was a key point of our recent demo at Gamescom.

Now, after finishing each story mission, the area becomes an open world, meaning you’ll get free reign to explore explode Turnipseed Farm, Rockwell, Area 42 and all the rest of the original locations to your heart’s content. These locations also have unique challenges, such as causing a certain amount of property damage, or getting kills with unique items (like chickens), plus a host of collectibles to find – all of which earn points that can be used to upgrade Cryptos weapons, gear and telekinetic abilities.

“When you remake a game like this, you look at what a modern audience expects and what was actually delivered in the original game,” says Onurhan Karaagacli, the Development Director at Black Forest. “One of the key differences to the modernization approach is that it’s not only about the controls or the combat scenarios, it’s about creating more opportunities to explore.”

The build we saw was still very much in pre-alpha – even using cutscenes and assets from the original game in incomplete areas – but I’m eager to see how the fully realized update to Destroy All Humans plays out when it enters our atmosphere sometime next year.

JR is a Senior Editor at IGN and is looking forward to reading the mind of cows everywhere when this comes out. In the meantime, he’ll scratch that itch by going on Twitter.