I'm so used to remakes/remasters trying to put a full face of makeup on a pig that I'm actually really glad this game still fucking sucks in all the ways it did when I was a little Mira.
For better or worse, this is just lipstick on the pig. Yeah it looks prettier so it can be sold to single-cell entities that refuse games that look older than 2018, but it's ultimately Destroy All Humans 2 at its core.
It still has that same awful sense of humor, using one of three jokes: Haha weed! Haha sex! Haha cold war! Rinse, repeat, try not to cringe at the racial stereotypes in the Japan level, hope you liked Austin Powers and alarming levels of barefaced misogyny.
It still plays like ass, having floaty and impactless combat where your best option for 99% of the game's runtime is the Disintegrator. Missions are, once again, either total cakewalks or annoying gimmicks with a lot of pointless "go from A to B" that makes GTAV look restrained.
And, naturally, the hollow open levels have returned. If you've ever had a craving for empty open spaces with nothing in them but missions and the odd collectable, DAH2R is a lovely portal that lets you experience them but from the PS2 era.
There are some bits that're better; on the whole it handles a lot more smoothly, they cut that one transphobic mission (mercifully) and a lot of the QoL improvements were ported over from the last remake. Plus, despite what I said up above about the missions, some (not all) were made less irritating from their PS2 incarnation.
...But you're still playing Destroy All Humans 2.
This game was dated when it came out, and it came out on a platform where about 3/4 of the releases from North America ended up dated later down the line. If you have no nostalgia for it, stay clear. Go play Saints Row 2 or something.
For better or worse, this is just lipstick on the pig. Yeah it looks prettier so it can be sold to single-cell entities that refuse games that look older than 2018, but it's ultimately Destroy All Humans 2 at its core.
It still has that same awful sense of humor, using one of three jokes: Haha weed! Haha sex! Haha cold war! Rinse, repeat, try not to cringe at the racial stereotypes in the Japan level, hope you liked Austin Powers and alarming levels of barefaced misogyny.
It still plays like ass, having floaty and impactless combat where your best option for 99% of the game's runtime is the Disintegrator. Missions are, once again, either total cakewalks or annoying gimmicks with a lot of pointless "go from A to B" that makes GTAV look restrained.
And, naturally, the hollow open levels have returned. If you've ever had a craving for empty open spaces with nothing in them but missions and the odd collectable, DAH2R is a lovely portal that lets you experience them but from the PS2 era.
There are some bits that're better; on the whole it handles a lot more smoothly, they cut that one transphobic mission (mercifully) and a lot of the QoL improvements were ported over from the last remake. Plus, despite what I said up above about the missions, some (not all) were made less irritating from their PS2 incarnation.
...But you're still playing Destroy All Humans 2.
This game was dated when it came out, and it came out on a platform where about 3/4 of the releases from North America ended up dated later down the line. If you have no nostalgia for it, stay clear. Go play Saints Row 2 or something.
Clever trick to pull, showcasing Natalya with even bigger tits than the original game in the trailers and championing the ‘perfectly faithful remaster’ angle, only to cut an entire mission and several lines of dialogue for the ever-nebulous ‘modern audience.’ Please die and take your poorly performing, unbalanced technical mess back to the black pit you spawned from.