Reviews// Destroy All Humans!: Path of the Furon (PS3)

The different weapons are as varied as before, with some fun new additions. I always found myself falling back on the Zap-O-Matic on foot and the Death Ray in the saucer. If you're willing to grind for a bit, you can have these maxed out with a few hours play on the first mission in Sunnywood, the second location in the game. For some reason, the alert meter doesn't go up and there is no time limit to the mission, so you can just ignore the objective and hunt DNA.

The missions themselves are the usual mix including destroying lots of buildings, impersonating someone to persuade someone else, and defending someone from attack. Of all the missions, the last type is easily the least rewarding. I always felt relieved that the missions were over rather than elated that I had completed them.

The voice-acting is top-notch with the main actors J. Grant Albrect and Richard Steven Horvitz, (after being replaced in Big Willy Unleashed) returning to voice Crypto and Pox respectively. The story is a reasonably involving one with a few twists and turns and a couple of betrayals and surprises thrown in to keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, the game is let down by long load times, poor presentation and dodgy graphics.

The worst of these faults is the graphics. For all the power of Unreal Engine 3, PotF seems to have managed to bring out the worst in at least the PS3 incarnation. Although not as bad as in previous games, pop-in still makes an appearance but the stand out awful prize goes to texture flicker.

At times the textures on buildings and scenery will flicker on and off in a most annoying way. I initially though this was just a glitch and restarted my game, but the problem persisted. It even happens in cut scenes! Did anybody from QA even look at this game?

Put this together with the occasional deformed model - like the singer, Faire, (of Sammy and Faire fame) having something weird going on with her hair or microphone during a mission in Las Paradiso - and combine these with awful soundtrack synching problems in the mission acceptance conversations, and you have a highly distracting experience.

Destroy All Humans!: Path of the Furon isn't by any means an awful game, (despite the 360 version getting only 35% on Metacritic), but it is nowhere near as good as the previous games in the series.

There were difficulties in production; original developer Pandemic Studios' holding company was bought by EA, and publisher THQ moved development of PotF to Sandblast Games, an internal studio that was closed in November 2008, presumably just after completing this game.

However, the central game play mechanic is still fun, if a little tired. Playing as the bad guy in the Destroy All Humans! games is always a blast, but the missions could do with a little more variation. There's only so many times you can defend a fixed object from attack before you start to think the developers were uninspired and perhaps just completing a contract.

Conclusion
By no means a bad game, Destroy All Humans!: Path of the Furon is probably still best suited to fans of the series rather than new players. If only a few more months had been spent on the game by a set of motivated developers THQ would have had another hit on their hands. As it is, this Furon doesn't quite reach the end of his path.

SPOnG Score: 62%