Destroy All Humans is one of the success stories of the Australian games development industries. Developed by the late Brisbane studio of Pandemic and debuting in 2005, the first Destroy All Humans game enjoyed a pleasant critical response and solid sales. It was followed by a sequel a year later, which also enjoyed a positive response. The series took a nose dive when Pandemic declined the offer to develop the third game in the series, prompting THQ to look elsewhere and almost killing the series in the process with the release of the reprehensible Big Willy Unleashed for the Wii destroying most of the fan goodwill accumulated by the first two games. It seems that wasn’t enough to eliminate interest in the series, so they’ve sent in Path of the Furon to finish the job.

Path of the Furon is one of those games that is so bad that it makes other bad games shake in their boots. So bad, in fact, that THQ shut down the developer Sandblast games a month before the game’s US release. Path of the Furon is really ugly, perhaps the worst use of Unreal Engine 3.0 to date. Perhaps more disturbing is the dated feeling of the gameplay; it fails to offer the same level of freedom that the original offered on the PlayStation and Xbox. A dreadfully uninteresting story, devoid of humour and full of really cringe-worthy one-liners is the icing on the cake.

Picking up where Big Willy Unleashed left off, we find Crypto living in the 1970s running a casino in a Las Vegas-inspired Las Paradiso, which he and Pox use to raise cash and harvest human DNA. The mob takes exception to Crypto’s presence in the city, and they clash. During his dealings with the mob, Crypto starts hearing a voice and seeing visions of a spiritual master. Of course that means the developer can assault you with a steady flow of racially-driven jokes designed to drive back Anglo-Chino relations back another hundred years or so. Crypto hooks up with The Master to learn the ways of the Furon, which is really just the same crap you’ve been doing for the last three games with a bunch of tired jokes about the 1970s thrown in for good measure.

Path of the Furon’s cast of characters quickly wear out their welcome. Jack Nicholson-wannabe Crypto still bears the scars of design by committee, and is well past his use-by date. His never ending flow of one-liners will result in a lot of face-palming and head shaking. Sidekick/guide character Pox makes a lot of references to his no longer having a physical body, most of which surround his lack of Furon reproductive organs. Most of the rest of the cast are painfully grating racist stereotypes with horribly insensitive names like Don Goombah. Whoever came up with this stuff should really be ashamed.

Gameplay structure is fairly straightforward, with a series of 30 story missions and 20 side missions spread evenly across five different locations. Each world is extremely empty, devoid of anything meaningful to do. You can fly around in Crypto’s saucer, melting buildings and abducting people, or run around on foot, shooting people with anal probes, reading their thoughts, tossing them around with telekenesis, or stealing their bodies with the bodysnatching technique and making them dance. Not that Crypto can do that for long without the government showing up out of nowhere to quickly dispose of his grey hide.


Rather than creating any exciting scenarios or gadgets that are preferable to the default weapons, Sandblast has decided to instead force the player into a series of extremely repetitive and unimaginative missions with little choice over what they use. Many of Crypto’s gadgets are either useless, impractical or both. Mission objectives are always simple, usually involving killing a group of enemies or stealing an object and returning it to a set point. Instead of mixing it up as the game progresses, the developer has just decided to string more and more of these objectives together. So after roughly an hour of play, you’ve seen all of the missions you’re going to undertake, and you’ve still got another 10 or so hours of wading through crap to go. It’s really quite amazing how they have managed to make a concept such as unbridled destruction and mayhem so trite and dull.

Perhaps the most painful aspect of Path of the Furon’s gameplay comes with navigating the game’s painfully small environments. Crypto’s saucer makes travelling much faster, but for some reason or another, Sandblast games has decided that you can’t land the saucer anywhere - instead the player is forced to complete some arbitrary mini-games to unlock saucer pads. The game even starts to mock you about it later on, though I find it greatly amusing that the developer would mock the player for something they obviously didn’t have the technical prowess to achieve.



Path of the Furon packs in roughly 10-12 hours of content, but you’ve got to have either insane levels of fortitude or stupidity to stick around for more than an hour of its insufferable nonsense. The Xbox 360 version of the game has a full set of achievements, but the PlayStation 3 incarnation is lacking trophies, despite promises from Sony that all 2009 releases would incorporate the feature. The game also bears a number of local multiplayer options, but much like the rest of the product, they’re just utterly pointless.

One would think that four years after the debut of the original Destroy All Humans, the fourth game in the series would look much better. Sadly, that is not the case by a long shot. Despite using the celebrated Unreal Engine 3.0, Sandblast has produced a game with the pop-up and fog problems reminiscent of a late era Nintendo 64 game. Character models are lacking in detail and are woefully animated, yet the game worlds are small and sparsely populated. Texturing, lighting and particle effects are all unimpressive. This is the sort of game that calls for quality explosions and debris effects, but Sandblast really failed to deliver. To top it off, the game’s frame rate is sluggish at the best of times. Major glitches and game crashes are commonplace, particularly when it comes to triggering the game’s music. Realistically, the game should not have been allowed to pass certification in this condition – perhaps that is why the PlayStation 3 release is only available in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, with SCEE’s certification process being notably less restrictive and intense when compared to their American counterparts.

Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon is a shameful piece of software. Absurdly bad technical presentation combined with atrocious gameplay design, boring missions, a terrible story and lame character design show that THQ had good justification for shutting down developer Sandblast Games. One really struggles believing that they couldn’t make a game as good as the original four years after release, with far better technology to work with. After two horrendously bad games in a row and far too many signs that his shtick is past its use-by date, I think we can all agree that it’s time for Crypto to face permanent retirement.