It now seems Black Forest Games of the Destroy All Humans! remakes is its latest victim. Kotaku reports that on January 24th, 50 people or “roughly” 50 percent of the studio’s workforce, were informed of their layoffs. A source told the website that the studio’s creative directors and most “if not all” the managers would remain employed. With 110 employees reported last year, these numbers would line up.

A subsidiary of THQ Nordic since 2017, Black Forest Games is working on The Last Ronin, an action RPG based on the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC. It’s unknown if the layoffs will affect the project, which is several years off from launch. Stay tuned for updates in the meantime.

The previous-gen version doesn’t include multiplayer, which seems to extend to the local split-screen co-op. Nevertheless, it offers locations like Bay City, Takoshima, Albion and more for players to rampage through as the alien Crypto. In addition to all-new weapons like Meteor Strike and the Dislocator, there are new flying saucer weapons like the Anti-Gravfield and Quantum Deconstructor.

Check out our official review of the PS5 version for more details. With the iffy performance and bugs present in the current-gen versions at launch, it remains to be seen if the Xbox One and PS4 versions will be more polished.

Aside from celebrating its accolades, the trailer also shows off a bit of gameplay.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed has players take on the role of protagonist Crpyto, who just so happens to be an alien. Throughout their play through, players will visit locations like Bay City, Albion, Tunguska, Takoshima, and Solaris.

The game also features multiplayer through local split-screen, offering co-op gameplay of the entire campaign for two players.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed was released back in August, and is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review, as well as a gameplay trailer that was released leading up to the game’s launch.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed puts players in the shoes of protagonist Crypto, who also happens to be an alien. Players will visit locations like Bay City, Albion, Tunguska, Takoshima, and Solaris as they play through Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed.

Along with featuring single-player gameplay, Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed also supports local split-screen co-op for two players, with the entirety of the campaign being playable in multiplayer.

In the days leading up to its release, Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed got a gameplay trailer that showed off Crypto making use of his weapons and abilities to take on his enemies.

For more details about Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, check out our review, where we gave the game a score of 7 out of 10, praising its vibrant graphics and fun gameplay while criticising its performance issues and bugs.

Unlike the original Destroy All Humans which was set in the late ’50s and was completely smothered in the early sci-fi monster movie aesthetic of the era, Destroy all Humans! 2 takes place ten years later at the dawn of the the 70s and in the heat of the cold war between the US and Soviet Union. This gives the game a bit of a tonal shift away from classic sci-fi to more of a low-rent James Bond spy thriller motif, but it still hangs on to a lot of the musical and visual cues of the first game. Thematically, it doesn’t work as well as the first game’s style in my opinion, but it’s definitely a fun parody of the era that applies the same level of social commentary and satire as the first.

"While the remake of Destroy All Humans! 2 does have a couple of issues that water its charm down at times, I still found myself grinning from ear to ear most of the time while playing it."

The story is a little more complex this time around too, with both the US and USSR working to uncover the origin of a mysterious mutagen on top of their own conflict. There’s also a rogue soviet agent whose path and interests are often intertwined with Crypto’s. It’s a bit much, but with how light and silly the whole thing is, you’d be missing the point by assigning too much weight to the story. Also, with J. Grant Albrecht’s Jack Nicholson-infused performance for Crypto and Richard Steven Horvitz’s Invader Zim-adjacent character Pox carrying the whole thing, you really can’t go wrong. These two characters play off each other perfectly and light up every scene they’re in, which is most of them. We’re first reintroduced to a much sharper Cryptosporidium who has been spending his days, partaking in various mind-altering substances since we last saw him.

The sabbatical is broken off by an attack on the mothership, relegating his superior Orthopox to a holographic existence, and setting in motion the story of the game. From there, Crypto crosses paths with – and often destroys – bumbling Russian spies and comically incompetent figures from around the world, which is one of the first big points about Destroy All Humans! 2; unlike the first game which took you around to different sections of America, this one has you visiting different regions of the world. All with their own slapstick characters, geographical personality, side missions, and of course a truckload of hilarious inner monologues to listen to with the cortex scan. Many missions require you to scan several humans’ thoughts to uncover important information, so don’t worry, you’ll almost certainly come across most of them organically.

The new control scheme is one of the major areas where the “remake” part comes in. The random button layouts that many PS2 and Xbox games dealt with are gone, as Black Forest Games has implemented roughly the same controls as they did with 2020’s remake of the original game. Instantly recognizable elements like a clear mini-map, weapon wheel, and upgrade menus make their way over to Reprobed as well, making it play more like modern platformers than anything else. Although I don’t want to give you the impression that Reprobed is as fluid or as polished as any of them, it’s definitely not. Still yet, jetpacking around major cities that define their regions of the world, hunting down DNA while sending cars and people bouncing around the stage with the dislocator, and using sonic booms to demolish iconic super structures haven’t lost even a drop of charm over all these years.

"Jetpacking around major cities that define their regions of the world, hunting down DNA while sending cars and people bouncing around the stage with the dislocator, and using sonic booms to demolish iconic super structures haven’t lost even a drop of charm over all these years."

And while we do owe a lot of that to how objectively good the original game is, we also have to applaud the effort to modernize it by Black Forest Games. It never quite obscures its modest roots, but it does feel more than modern enough to be a consistently good time. Missions tend to break down into a handful of categories and involve a roughly the same handful of tasks. Destroying buildings, escorting characters to safety, collecting a certain number of certain things, wiping out groups of humans, or more clandestine activities like body snatching a certain person without anyone noticing or scanning cortexes of people in a certain area to gain important info. They’re all mixed up well enough that you don’t really notice the repetition a lot of the time, and even when you do, you’re still having fun with the ever-expanding arsenal of Crypto’s weapons and abilities. Grinding out some side-missions is a good way to stay ahead of the difficulty curve, so I highly recommend settling in for a few hours of those early on. These aren’t as inspired as the main missions, but again, you’re generally having fun no matter what.

That said, some rather rough edges will reveal themselves early on and continue to do so throughout the game. Texture popping is plainly visible more often than I would like for a remake of a PS2 game. Particularly when Crypto is flying around in the air and for some reason during cutscenes. You’ll also run into frame-rate dips and even screen tearing while traversing busier areas, but also in the more intense firefights and sections where you’re flying your saucer.

These are things that can be overlooked some of the time, but again, for a remake of a PS2 game on the exponentially beefier PS5, it’s tough to excuse. If I can play Uncharted 4 flawlessly at 120 frames a second on this thing, I should certainly be able to play Destroy All Humans! 2 at a consistent 60. Switching VRR support on and off didn’t really seem to make a difference. More concerningly, I also experienced things like NPC’s popping in and out of existence, vehicles completely freaking out for no reason, sound effects and dialogue inexplicably cutting out or looping, and I even had a particularly baffling instance of a main story mission failing to trigger about 12 hours in, leaving me stranded in the middle of the game even after deleting and reinstalling it. If this is why the developers decided to skip the last-gen console versions of the game, then I’m glad they did so.

While the performance might not be my favorite thing about the game, the art direction is spot on and I often marveled at the glow up the game seems to have gotten. The various sandboxes of the different regions are colorful, varied, and full of new details that really bring them to life and distinguish them from one another quite well. The Japan-themed Takoshima level in particular is an absolute feast for the eyes with bustling city streets and alleyways surrounded by cherry blossom-covered mountains on the outskirts. All of which are a treat to run through as a school girl or a ninja from one of the two feuding clans. Or, of course, as Crypto’s true form tearing through police and military officials as they mount their futile attempts to stop you.

"As with the first game, but perhaps even more so here, the dialogue ranges from legitimately hilarious to sharply critical of various facets of 20th century humanity."

As with the first game, but perhaps even more so here, the dialogue ranges from legitimately hilarious to sharply critical of various facets of 20th century humanity. Some additional features like a few multiplayer modes and a nice variety of skins for crypto and the saucer serve as a nice cherry on top of it all. Granted, the PK tennis and duel modes are pretty shallow and frankly not all that fun, and the couch co-op does hit you with the additional performance dip that you would expect, but it is still here and in 2022, any excuse to play around with some local multiplayer modes is nice to see.

Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed does a great job in most ways. By letting the writing and core concepts of the original game shine by not changing them much and overhauling the two areas that really needed it – the controls and the visuals – it absolutely has the right idea for how to remake a PS2-era classic. The jokes are still funny, the story is still a ridiculous rollercoaster ride of nonsense, and the gameplay and visuals have been given the upgrade they deserve. If the whole package was properly polished off and ran as well as it clearly could and should, I’d be over the moon. But as it is, it’s a tentative recommendation assuming the more serious bugs I mentioned get ironed out. That aside, for the price, Reprobed does seem to have most of the fundamentals in place for a successful modernization of a series that still clearly has plenty of life left in it.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

The upcoming remake’s newest trailer shows protagonist Crypto taking on an enemy alien species known as the Blisk, who’re also invading Earth. Crypto and the Furon empire have already had their eyes set on the planet for some time, of course, which means they can’t have any other alien species moving in on their territory. Using his varied weaponry as well as the firepower of his flying saucer, Crypto will be fighting back against these other invaders as well- check out the trailer below for a glimpse of that.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed is due out on August 30 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

GROUND-UP REMAKE

As its name suggests, Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed is a remake of the 2006 PS2 and Xbox original, rebuilding the entire experience from the ground-up. Of course, anyone who’s played the 2020 remake will remember how true to the source material it was, and it looks like Reprobed will follow the same script. Earlier this year, GamingBolt interviewed technical director Johan Conradie and assistant creative director Stefan Schmitz, who told us that Reprobed is also going to be quite a faithful remake. “We are developing Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed with the same philosophy as our 2020 remake,” they said. “Focusing on keeping the spirit of the original; modernizing the gameplay, mission- and world design; and completely rebuilding the game with modern visuals and tech. Building the entire game from scratch is giving us the possibility to improve features, enemy- and upgrade variety and more.”

WEAPONS

One of the joys of playing a Destroy All Humans! game is being able to wreak havoc in sandbox maps and terrorizing the human population. And of course, a varied array of alien weaponry is one of the ways to do that- so what sort of weapons can we expect in Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed? Well, there’s quite a few. There’s the Meteor Strike, for instance, which does exactly what its name suggests and can cause large-scale destruction, while the Gastro Gun summons Gastro in a drone to aid you during combat. The good old Zap-o-Matic also returns with its electrifying abilities.

MORE WEAPONS

There’s several more weapons in Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed for players to use as well. The Dislocator is a fan-favourite of course, allowing you to fire off energy disks that latch on to targets and then ping-pong them about the environments. The Disintegrator is simpler in concept, but seeing as it fires off shots that’ll burn targets down to the atom, it’ll be pretty nifty nonetheless. The Burrow Beast summons a giant monster from beneath the ground, while the explosive Ion Detonator also returns. One weapon that’ll surely catch the eye is Free Love, a visor that, when equipped, will send anyone you look at into a dancing tizzy. You will, of course, also be able to fly around in and unleash chaos with your flying saucer, which is going to have plenty of weapons of its own as well.

GENE-BLENDER

Destroy All Humans! 2’s gene-blender will return, of course, serving as the progression hub for the remake as well- though developer Black Forest Games is making some smart quality-of-life changes here. For instance, rather than a having to look for and abduct single humans that meet certain requirements, Reprobed will instead let players seek out Human Hives, where you can essentially get the type of human you need to abduct in a large group all at once.

CLONING CHAMBER

The cloning chamber is an important part of the Destroy All Humans lore, so to speak, and it will, of course, be returning in the upcoming remake to serve similar gameplay purposes. As you might expect, this is another area where Black Forest Games has done some polishing and tweaking. While the developer hasn’t gone into the nitty-gritties here, we do know that Reprobed’s cloning chamber has been overhauled, and will also let players choose from a large selection of skins to equip.

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS

Destroy All Humans 2! – Reprobed is introducing something completely new as well- or, well, almost completely new. PseudoPox the bot has been something of a fringe character who’s appeared on a couple of occasions in the series (including the 2020 remake), but in Reprobed, the bot’s going to have a larger role, and will also serve as a player-guidance system. Meanwhile, Black Forest Games has said that the game will feature better destruction mechanics.

CO-OP

One of the biggest new features introduced in the original Destroy All Humans! 2 back in the day was the ability to play through the game co-op, and unsurprisingly, that’ll be included in the remake as well. Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed will allow two players to play through the full game in local splitscreen co-op, which means twice the mayhem in a game that’s already quite full of mayhem. While the game will run at 60 FPS when you’re playing solo, co-op play will bring the performance down to 30 FPS.

CLONE CARNAGE

Back in May, Black Forest Games and THQ Nordic released Destroy All Humans! Clone Carnage, a standalone multiplayer spinoff. It is, of course, separately purchasable, but if you don’t want to spend money on it or don’t mind waiting a little longer to play it, it’s been confirmed as a free pre-order bonus for Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed as well.

NOT CROSS-GEN

The vast majority of games releasing right now are choosing to be cross-gen, simply because we’re still in that generational transition period where it just doesn’t make business sense to ignore the massive install base of last-gen consoles. Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, however, is not going to be cross-gen, and is releasing only for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

“We also increased active actor and NPC limits drastically from DAH!1’s 20 active limit to 50 high-res NPCs,” the developers told GamingBolt when asked about the same. “This benefits both combat and other gameplay situations, we are aiming to have roughly 2x-3x more ambient NPCs around in the game at any given time, making the world more lively and dynamic, thus prone to more Crypto-unleashed chaos.

“The levels of DAH2 are bigger and more complex than DAH!1. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the benchmarks of the visual quality for DAH!2: Reprobed compared to DAH!1 on the old console generation.”

PC REQUIREMENTS

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed’s PC requirements aren’t too demanding, if you do plan on playing it on PC. On minimum settings, you’ll need 8 GB RAM, at least 4GB of dedicated VRAM with at least DirectX 11.0 and Shader Model 5.1 support, along with either a Kaveri A10-7850K, or a Pentium DualCore G3220, or a Ryzen 5 2400G. On recommended settings, meanwhile, you’ll need 16 GB RAM, at least 4GB of dedicated VRAM and with at least DirectX 12.0 and Shader Model 6.0 support, and either a Ryzen 5 2600 or an i7 6700K. On either setting, you’ll need 50 GB of free storage space.

STEAM DECK

The Steam Deck has quickly caught on in popularity with the lucky few who’ve been able to get their hands on it, and if you’re planning on playing Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed on the device, there’s good news for you- sort of. While we don’t know whether the game will be fully optimized for the Steam Deck at launch, its developers did confirm to GamingBolt that it’ll at least be properly playable. They said: “We’ll definitely be checking the game on the Steam Deck to make sure that we hit an acceptable quality bar there. It’s an exciting piece of technology making our work more accessible to a broader audience in a more accessible way.”

Much like the previous game, Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed is all about destroying humans. This can be done through a variety of ground weapons like Meteor Strike or with the flying saucer’s Quantum Deconstructor (check out weapons for both here). Capturing humans allows for mixing with the alien’s DNA and upgrading skills.

Along with solo play, there’s also local split-screen co-op for two players with the entire campaign playable. Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed releases on August 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. For more details on improvements in the remake, check out our interview with the development team here.

First up is the Meteor Strike which, as the name implies, rains meteors down on hapless civilians. The Gastro Gun summons a little minion that fights alongside the player in its little saucer. The Dislocator unleashes a bouncing projectile and can seemingly suspend people in the air.

The Disintegrator reduces targets to nothing but atoms while the Burrow Beast summons a grotesque underground-dwelling monster to chomp down on enemies. Perhaps the hippest of the weapons is Free Love, a visor that causes targets to dance uncontrollably. Of course, your flying saucer also gets some crazy new weapons like the Quantum Deconstructor, Anti-Gravfield and Slurpmaster V8.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed releases on August 30th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC. Stay tuned for more trailers in the coming days.

2020’s remake had no multiplayer support whatsoever, because, of course, the game it was based on didn’t. The original Destroy All Humans! 2, however, did feature support for co-op, which means it’s upcoming remake will as well. Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed will allow two players to play through the full game in local splitscreen co-op, which means twice the mayhem in a game that’s already quite full of mayhem. Check out the trailer below to get a glimpse.

Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed launches on August 30 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.