The human race is a bit obsessed with the idea that aliens are hovering above our skies, abducting Americans, being communists and generally making a nuisance of themselves. We've seen pretty much every type and variety we can conceive of, from bald waddling ones that try to get home to little angry penis-shaped ones that escape from John Hurt. We're ready for the aliens - we've been waiting long enough. Destroy All Humans! 2 is an interesting take on our fifty-year-plus relationship with little green men, and it combines dozens of movie references spanning just as long. This is They Came from Outer Space meets Mars Attacks, with a dash of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for good measure.

You play Crypto (short for Cryptosporidium), a sociopathic maniac from the planet Furon. As Crypto it is your job to, er, destroy all humans, and to help you do so is your trusty companion and commander, Orthopox, who is actually dead, but his wicked mind has been saved, like some kind of data file, into a hovering holographic…thing. Your arch nemeses appear to be the KGB, the Russian equivalent to MI5 or the Secret Service. They have discovered Crypto's secret identity (since the end of the first game he's been posing as the American president) and that there is an alien mothership orbiting Earth. The beginning of the game sees them blow up the mothership (which is how Pox meets his end) and completely ruin Crypto's day.

You begin by running around what can only be described as a hippy commune and scattered in amongst these flower-power people are KGB agents. With your trusty Zap-o-Matic you must fire bolts of electricity at them and make them pay! You can also use the power of telekinesis and pick them up, then throw them around like rag dolls, all the while shouting with glee and dodging red hot metal that falls from the sky (remnants of the recently destroyed mothership). Once they are all deceased you have to run and find Pox' remains amongst the debris and from here the game begins.

I must stress at this point how absolutely perfect the two main characters are. Crypto is voiced by someone who sounds like Jack Nicholson's identical twin, and he speaks to people with a laid back distain, addressing us as "the monkeys". He's an angry alien - you can tell that by his facial expressions - but he rarely breaks a sweat. He's also completely sex obsessed and will usually embrace an opportunity to comment on a female's assets. Pox is the ideal counterpart, balancing Crypto with a maniacal fury in his voice. A lucky few of those that are reading this will be aware of Johen Vasquez' Invader Zim, a character I'm sure Pox is modelled on almost entirely (if you are not aware of Invader Zim, become aware of Invader Zim). He shouts and screams about how brilliant his mind is and instead of using swear words uses the wordbrains! He provides instruction on where to go next, what to do next, and who to kill next, which is mostly the dastardly KGB, but is also a great conversationalist. As you speak to him about the next mission, you can either keep things relevant, or choose to talk about something completely different, often with hilarious results.

You begin the game in Bay City, a free roaming environment based loosely on San Francisco during the swinging Sixties, hence all the hippies, but later on you also venture to London, Tokyo and Mother Russia. Crypto has a number of abilities at his disposal, the first of which is to shoot people. You begin with the Zap-o-Matic, a glorified taser gun, and soon have at your disposal, thanks to the collection of some kind of item, weapons like the Dislocator, the Disintegrator Ray, a weapon that calls down meteor strikes and a weapon that causes humans to have…an unfortunate accident. The Disintegrator is fairly self-explanatory - it disintegrates things - but the Dislocator is much more amusing, as it fires glowing disks into people, or cars, or anything for that matter and takes them away. These disks just keeps moving and bouncing off things, jetting around in random directions, so cops, innocent civilians or even a stray VW camper van can be sent flying around you. It's hilarious! There are loads of guns to collect and even a secret super gun that's awarded to you if you collect all the hidden artefacts in the game (much like the graffiti tags in San Andreas). To upgrade your weapons you need Furotech cells, which are strewn around the landscape. Take them to your saucer and browse the various options, which include an additional disk for your Dislocator, bigger batteries for your Zap-o-Matic and extra height on your jet-pack bursts.

Another ability Crypto has, which I mentioned briefly earlier, is telekinesis. This has to be the most fun of all. You can lock onto an object or a human and pick them up at the touch of a button. Then they're yours to fling around. I found myself picking up cops and simply bouncing them up and down on the floor or into walls, and when I was done flung them off into the distance. You can use this quite cleverly to fling enemies away in fights with large groups, or pick up explosive barrels and throw them into the fray. Personally I just love throwing hippies around! Later on you can upgrade the ability so you can throw cars, and even tanks. That's when it gets really funny - when you pick up a cop car, lift it in the air until the cops jump out and then proceed to bash them over the head with it. Genius!

You can also body snatch, which involves jumping into people's bodies for a short time and controlling them. You can eventually jump into any body, but only after upgrading can you body snatch KGB agents. This allows you to walk the streets freely, because a two-foot tall angry alien armed to the teeth tends to attract a bit of unwanted attention. In alien form the people on the street shout and scream, albeit hilarious nonsense (for example "look, there's Kruschev, with a ray gun!", "psycho sexual hallucination!", although the best one I heard was "Look, it's Pete Townsend!") When inside a human body you're mostly free from attention, but only if you jumped inside when no one was looking. Witnesses to your snatching antics will run around with an exclamation mark above their heads shouting "imposter!" but you can target those individually with a forget command or affect large groups with the free love command. This works in the same way as forget and when performed it makes everyone in the vicinity start dancing with rainbows coming out of their ears.

Finally, you can also scan humans' minds to read their thoughts. This is essential in completing missions, as it tells you where you need to go, although it is quite funny listening to random people's internal dialogues. Most missions require you to be in human form at some point, to allow you to interact with other humans and complete certain tasks, such as finding out locations and what the heck those darned KGB agents are up to. It doesn't expect you to be in human form for much of the time though, giving you full access to Crypto's destructive arsenal for the most part.

As you wander the city in Crypto form you have a jet pack to help you cover large distances and reach high places - but somehow it's just not quite enough. What would an invasion be without a flying saucer? Crypto's is quite the toy and with it you can zap things until they burn as standard, but you also have a tractor beam. This allows you to pick up vehicles and 'drain' them for extra health, or simply carry enemy tanks to the sea and drop them in. You can pick up humans and abduct them, then perform genetic experiments on them. Unfortunately you can't physically take them to the operating table and start probing, but you can collect different types of human to unlock certain abilities, like the ability to psychokinetically lift and throw about cars. The Saucer has a cloaking device, essential if you want to get around undetected, as a flying saucer tends to attract attention rather quickly. The cloak only lasts a certain amount of time and without it the army will soon be firing shells and heat seeking rockets at you from the ground. You can blast them with your ray gun of course, but they are pretty persistent and for all its firepower the saucer isn't very fast or manoeuvrable, so it's difficult to stay ahead of incoming missiles.

To get rid of the 'heat', you must body snatch a cop or army type person and find a telephone. In normal human guise you can make prank phone calls on the telephone, which pretty much involves calling the police switchboard and telling awful jokes, but it's Jack Nicholson's voice (for legal reasons we must specify that it isn't actually Jack Nicholson, it just sounds exactly like him) so it's all good. As a cop or army person you can call off the troops and give yourself a bit of breathing space, or call in more troops if you're feeling particularly bloodthirsty.

The missions are a little tricky, mostly because you don't always know what to do. It's not always made clear that you should be reading someone's mind or getting someone to follow you, especially when all you want to do is destroy humans like the box promised you would. The missions are varied though and are challenging without being really annoying, and there are 'odd jobs' to do if you get frustrated with the main mission and fancy a break. They're quite clever too - not just excuses to kill lots of people (there's plenty of opportunity for that between missions) and are packed with snippets of humour. That's something to remember about this game - it's very tongue in cheek and never, ever takes itself seriously. Mind you, the title should have told you that. The storyline is fairly compelling, but I wasn't expecting Of Mice And Men. There's a twist midway through and some interesting characters to interact with (Ponsonby of MI5 was my favourite), but for the most part the plot serves to take you from one destructive arena to the next whilst following the KGB.

One new element of the sequel that'll have people running to fetch their friends and a second controller is two player co-op mode. In split screen fashion you can team up and bring serious destruction down upon your enemies. This gives rise to all sorts of imaginative scenarios, like player one throwing people into the air and player two shooting them like clay pigeons. The only issue is that you have to stay in the same area, rather than individually running around wherever you please, although to be honest it's much more fun when you're shoulder to shoulder, causing all kinds of havoc. As a two player mini-game there's a tennis mode, where you psychokinetically throw a human over a net and player two 'returns' him, and there's always the standard duel mode as well if you just fancy killing each other.

Graphically, Destroy All Humans! 2 is very pretty. It has its own pseudo cartoon style, but the environments are detailed, there are plenty of pedestrians and cars and inanimate objects to destroy or fling around with your mind and the surfaces are rendered nicely. The cities are large - not San Andreas large, but there's absolutely no need for them to be. Crypto himself looks really cool and is animated really well; when you use the jetpack a pair of robotic wings unfold seamlessly from his shoulders then fold back in again when you're done. The rag doll effect on the humans is hilarious, so when you throw them around their arms and legs flail wildly in the air. I had a couple of clipping errors where people's arms or legs got stuck in the road, but that's only because I was pummelling them into the tarmac surface for giggles. The whole thing has the look and feel of a Fifties B-movie (a colorized one!) similar to the soft focus, high contrast colour scheme that Mars Attacks used.

As for sound there's the usual wobbly high pitched…noise that usually accompanies alien movies (apart from films like, er, Alien of course). It's not overly used, which I was afraid it might be; instead the game is accompanied by a score that gets more intense as the gameplay steps up a notch. The real beauty is in the sound effects though, in the voices of pedestrians, the sounds of the weapons and the richness of the background noise. The whole spectrum of sound helps to bring the game to life and give it depth, without it feeling too noisy or cluttered. As I've mentioned, the characters are voiced and scripted superbly and if they don't have you laughing out loud then you have no soul. It's not just the main characters either - it's nigh on everyone you meet.

I have absolutely fallen in love with Destroy All Humans! 2 - it's fantastic fun to play, even when you're not engaged in missions but just wandering the streets messing with the humans. There's so many ways you can play around with them, from the use of a huge variety of weapons to the telekinesis and the body snatching, so you don't get bored for ages. Most of the game is full of character, something that has lacked in a couple of recent free roaming GTA clones I could mention. There is absolutely nothing else like this out there (apart from the excellent original game, of course). In Pandemic we trust - following their run of pretty darned good games (Pandemic are responsible for the Star Wars: Battlefront series and the seriously destructive Mercenaries). This is a title in their repertoire that they can truly be proud of - it's dark and twisted but surprisingly light hearted and fun at the same time. It's well made, sounds great, funny as all hell and there's plenty to keep you playing - I can see myself playing this for ages to come and happily recommend it as a worthwhile purchase. If you're still reluctant then you owe yourself a rental at least - once you step into Crypto's space boots you won't want to stop until every last human is destroyed!

Reviewed by Jim Powell for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).