Destroy all Humans is one of those videogame titles that gives you an immediate impression of what the game entails. You are obviously an alien who wants to get rid of the human race, using any means necessary - there is no way that you would expect anything else from a game whose title is so willing to state its intent! Big Willy Unleashed on the other hand, does not translate into the obvious, which can put people's minds at rest. Rather, Big Willy Unleashed is representative of the lack of decency, polish and good nature that this game has, as it hasn't even bothered to bring itself up to the standard of the other entries in the series.

Taking place after the events of Destroy All Humans! 2, Big Willy Unleashed sees Crypto, the 'hero' of the series, and his mentor Pox, opening a fast food restaurant that holds a dirty and disgusting secret; the humans Crypto has put to rest over the past two games are not merely disappearing as we thought - the truth is that Pox has been collecting the bodies and using them as meat for his restaurant chain, Big Willy's! To anyone else this would be sickening, but to Crypto it's all in a day's work and he soon gets back to his mission of destroying all humans. At least, that's what should happen. Instead however, Crypto ends up sorting out Pox's problems, which escalate when fashion supermodel billionaire heiress Patty Wurst (that's how the instruction booklet describes her) discovers the nature of the meat that goes into Big Willy's. If this wasn't enough, rival fast food guru Colonel Kluckin' is out to ruin Pox's money making scheme once and for all. That's the gist of the plot and it's as uneventful and boring as it sounds, with not much else happening as the game progresses. If you want a reason for killing harmless citizens with your anal probe then you won't find one here. But did you really want one anyway?

The premise of Destroy all Humans! is just that; you must kill humans to find Furon DNA, the DNA of Crypto's species, which he hopes to use to restore his race to their former glory. That's the fun part of the game, but for the first time in the series, it doesn't feel like the ultimate goal. Instead, developer Locomotive Games have decided to go down the GTA route, with a supposedly open world that features missions dotted across the map. This style of gameplay works well in GTA and the same can be said here - if you enjoy walking across the same patch of city over and over again. After failing a mission you are either dropped back at your last save point, or you end up at the point where you failed, this relocation depending on whether or not you die. Both of these types of failures will happen more often than they should, thanks to the game's iffy control system, but the main problem is the five-minute trek back to the mission's starting point. With each mission taking up to fifteen minutes to complete and any sort of failure forcing you to start again from the beginning, the game quickly becomes repetitive - and that's just on one mission, without even comparing it with any others. This is sometimes rectified by a quick jaunt around the neighbourhood, venting your anger on some nearby citizens, but even this gets old fast.

You perform this sanitation of Earth's human infestation with a large arsenal of weaponry, making the few sections where you do destroy humans even more exciting. From the ease of use and unlimited ammo of your Zap-O-Matic to the explosive nature of the Disintegrator, you will always have a new weapon to play around with, all the while levelling up each weapon with extra ammo and the like, by performing sub-missions. New weapons to the series include the self-explanatory Zombie gun and the ball lightning, a gun that zaps nearby victims with an electrically charged ball, both of which adding to the already fun line up of weaponry. One disappointment is that the developers have taken out some of the better weapons of the previous games, such as the Dislocator, and the always-enjoyable Burrow Beast, which would burrow under the ground and devour its victims. These were great additions to Destroy All Humans 2 and are much more interesting and fun to use than the new ones added here. Why the developers would remove something that was proven and replace it with a weapon that is not as fun is beyond me.

Along with a decent arsenal, Crypto can also use his spaceship to change the tide of battle in his favour. The weapons are largely the same as the previous games and as such are still just as much fun to use. Destroying a section of the city in a matter of seconds with the Death Ray is as good as it sounds, even if you'll have to wrestle with the dodgy motion controls. The Quantum Deconstructor is also great asset, and while it is sometimes better to attack enemies from the ground, using this from the confines of your spaceship is a great laugh. The problem with the spaceship is the way that it is incorporated into the mission structure of the game; rather than allow you to control it to assist you on tougher missions, you enter it at set points during the game. This means that missions are designed with the spaceship in mind, which ends up being a bad thing, thanks to the lacklustre choice of objectives. However, on the mission front, this is merely the beginning of Big Willy's problems.

The missions themselves range from the interesting to the tedious, with both extremes merging into one mediocre feeling when considering your objectives. Age-old videogame clichés are ever present and you'll find yourself escorting trucks of human meat, destroying the evidence of plans gone wrong from the confines of your spaceship and chasing your enemy through the city. While some of these missions actually involve destroying humans, others feel out of place. For example, one mission at the start of the game has you taking the form of a human using your PK abilities - activated by hitting a series of targets that appear out of the victim's body - as you run, very slowly, after a slow moving car. This only gets exciting near the end of the mission, at which point the action gets so frantic that you're sure to either get lost or die, throwing you back to the start of the five-minute trek once more. And unlike GTA, there are only around three missions available at a time, with only one of them actually giving you any progress through the main story. This means that if you fail at a mission, there isn't much else you can do, especially if you've already grown tired of disintegrating innocent bystanders. These weaker missions don't help the gameplay in the slightest, especially as the developers have decided to forget the title that they originally gave to their series.

Obviously the make or break aspect of a third party, third person Wii game is the controls, and sadly here it is a break. The basic controls, such as movement on the Nunchuk, jumping with the Z button and fire weapons with B, are all fine, but where Big Willy Unleashed fails in the control department is its sloppy camera. You have an aim reticule on screen that's controlled with the Wii Remote, but it moves at an alarmingly slow rate. Add this to the way you turn by pointing at the side of the screen, but most of the time the Wiimote just goes out range and you can't do anything, and you have a broken camera that is relentless in trying to get you killed. It's as if a human fashioned the camera for Crypto, a human who doesn't want a freakish alien to wreak havoc in their city. This type of control worked excellently in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, but here it can barely be described as 'control'. There have been games with worse camera control on Wii, but there have been a lot more with better ones; the game is playable, but only just.

With the first two Destroy All Humans! titles looking good on Xbox and PS2, you'd expect the same here. However, the graphics for this Wii version are bad, and while they may not be the system's worst, they are definitely not among the best either. If you like the humans you are trying to destroy to look like humans then the in-game models will do the job, in a sort of Sims-like way. On the other hand, the cut scenes feature some character models that are just plain terrible. Patty Wurst is meant to be a supermodel, not a set of badly aligned pieces of clothing! But while the environments may look bland, the screen is alive with colour when you use one of your Furon weapons. The music is of better quality and works brilliantly at some points. When Disco Inferno kicked in as I destroyed the city's disco in my spaceship, the game was enjoyable, even if just for the smallest amount of time. The rest of the music fits in with the Seventies theme, even if it isn't really that special. Pushing the Wii is something that Destroy All Humans! decides against, and while it may look wonderful next to the likes of Game Party, it doesn't match the quality that the series has always had up to this point, and this lack of quality is present throughout the entire game.

The biggest problem with Destroy All Humans!: Big Willy Unleashed isn't the terrible camera, the lacklustre graphics or the uninspiring mission structure; it is purely the way that this isn't a proper Destroy All Humans! game. Yes, you do destroy some humans, but the most fun aspect of the first two games has not been used enough here. I haven't even mentioned the Big Willy Mech that you gain control of a fair way into the game - using this is the most fun you can have and for a few minutes you can actually forget about all of the things that the game does wrong. But even with this, you only unlock it after traipsing through so many boring missions that by this point you deserve an award for lasting so long. Sadly, Destroy All Humans! has lost its touch and the series' debut on Wii simply isn't worth abducting from your local gaming store for a good probing.

Reviewed by Sam Atkins for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).