Destroy All Humans!: Big Willy Unleashed is a “Soylent Green is made of people” simulator/spin-off (?) of the main series developed by Locomotive Games as a Wii Exclusive. Apparently according to an interview with Ken Allen, a senior game producer on the title; it started off on the PSP, but after it was deemed “non profitable”, they moved development of this spin-off over to the Wii because of technological and profit reasons. Apparently they also had a PS2 port they were in the middle of making too before that was canceled due to lack of system memory and the fact that the game just looked worse on the older system than the Wii. Because of this, it was mainly developed for the Wii and as such was released in Early 2008 while the official mainline sequel, Path of the Furon, was released in December of 2008. I can’t really find much in the way of “Why” this game was developed but if I find any sources for that I’ll put them down, but if this documentary was something to go off of, THQ attempted to hire Pandemic to make a third game on a shorter budget and in nine months but was declined and afterwards they looked towards internal THQ studios, mandating a spin-off and a sequel.

The people they had in mind for it were Locomotive Games, who had their work cut out for them on developing this title as their first and only Wii game from trying to figure out motion controls, paying fees to the Big Boy brand for the likeness to their statue for the Big Willy statue, and issues between development members over features and development time. They had also previously developed games like Jet Moto 3 (under the name Pacific Power & Light) and an old childhood game I remember: Power Rangers Dino Thunder. Seeing that had me in a strange delight because I remember playing that game on Gamecube (though it’s probably not great now of course) and I’ve always wanted to play this game but I never had the funds as a kid to buy the Wii or the game itself until I later grew up and got a job. Once I got that, as a fan of the series and as an exclusive collector I knew I had to buy a copy of this series. However, over the many years it had accumulated dust and I moved on to buy 50,000 other games and held a focus on different titles; however, once I played both of the Destroy All Humans! Remakes I felt it was the time to at least give this game a shot as my Wii game of the year (as I made a promise to myself to beat one game per console I owned this year).

The plot of this game is built around an interesting meta concept: when you kill someone in a video game, where do the bodies go? Oftentimes, dead people just fade into nothingness as you turn the corner due to technical engine limitations, but in this case they decided to build a whole game around it to hilarious intent, which is even referenced in game.

“Pox: Crypto, what do you think happens to the corpses of all the humans of whom you suck out the brain stems?
Crypto: I always figured they just faded away when I went around the corner.”

Oh no, in this game it turns out that Orthopox-13 created a whole fast food franchise named Big Willy’s in order to get rid of all of the evidence of the Furon Invasion whilst also making a profit on the side. The food at Big Willy’s are made of food, and the game that surrounds the concept consists of 70s pastiche references, parodies, double entendres, and more fourth wall breaks. Big Willy’s is under attack by Patty Wurst (a reference of course to both the food and the multi-millionaire dollar heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by revolutionaries in the Seventies), who with her revolutionaries go out of their way to expose the crimes of Big Willy’s Furon owners; whilst Crypto and Pox are dealing with this (with a plot thread involving Pox’s last love for a rich girl fueling his hate for Patty) they also deal with side plots including a Furon Efficiency Expert giving tests, a human with an Ion Detonator messing up Crypto’s assassination missions and Pox’s use of disco to brainwash the human populace. Once Patty Wurst is eliminated in her giant tank using a giant Big Willy statue mech, it’s revealed that her boss is Colonel Kluckin’, a parody of Colonel Sanders from KFC and the main antagonist who rivals Pox and his “Big Willy” with the Kluckin’ restaurants. Fearing for the unveiling of his 500th Big Willy restaurant, Pox insists on going to Fairfield to make sure everything goes off without a hitch.

Farfield’s plot thread is mainly about a gang of roller girls who work for Colonel Kluckin’ led by one Mindy Peters, who try to take down the Big Willy franchise through stealing their recipes and planting bombs. Other side plots include Natalya (the russian spy lover from the second game) trying to give you a call to tell you about something in the middle of another assassination mission only for the human to strike again and fumble your hit, another trial involving the efficiency expert and more disco shenanigans. After a bit of meandering, Crypto and Pox come up with the idea of taking the guise of the Corncob King, Mindy’s boyfriend, and luring her out in public to eliminate her. Eventually Pox just decides to say fuck it and just burn every building down to the ground in a “freak weather accident”, of course except for his “Big Willy”.

Now here’s where I’m going to address my thoughts on the first half as well as address the plot and it’s length in general. Harbor City does an interesting job of getting your attention and moving you along from place to place as you try to stop Colonel Kluckin’, but there is a bit of meandering in terms of missions and such. Harbor City consists of multiple assassination attempts on Patty that just kind of go nowhere and it feels kind of the same for Fairfield besides a few points here and there. That’s not to say stuff like this doesn’t happen in the other games, it’s just that they tend to do stuff in a way that pushes the plot forwards a lot more or at least makes it interesting, in which case this is kind of…not so much. Which is also strange considering the short length this game takes compared to the others, I completed this game I think in about 5 hours or so, which is way less than what the other two games had and it doesn’t really feel like there’s a lot of substance to certain set pieces, which is sad considering it’s kind of an ingenious plot with really cool ideas.

So for the third part of the game you travel to a place called Fantasy Atoll, a parody of the Fantasy Island series, which is owned by Mr. Pork and Ratpoo (Ratpoo as a name is honestly fucking hilarious in hindsight). I don’t even remember why Crypto and Pox go there to be honest, I think it’s to follow a signal from Kluckin’ but truth be told it’s kind of a distraction from the main plot that follows Pox’s obsession for getting a new body after the memories of the past flame made him fall weak to Mr. Pork’s promise of “a new body”. What culminates is a fetch quest (literally named fetch quest, which falls into the category of “Not as funny if you still go along with the tedium of something even if you’re making fun of it” as you gather parts for his new body, trying to turn it into a kaiju monster attraction for other guests. It’s a trick of course, and Colonel Kluckin’ sends soldiers to ambush everyone on the ship as Crypto protects Pox’s physical body and the scientist nearby before everything goes to hell and Pox is sent flying to another side of the island. After finding his body and calling Furon tech support in a somewhat humorous but frustrating mission, Crypto/Pox finally kill Mr. Pork (after learning that his necklace protects him from damage) by brainwashing his servant Ratpoo into grabbing him and jumping into the large volcano (named A’Rkvudal here funny enough for fans of the lore) before finally finishing him off on his Hate Boat, a giant war ship which requires you to take out shields before dropping torpedoes into one of four sides of the ship in a somewhat difficult mission. Before flying out to Kluckin’s last known location, Vietnahml, plot threads include a disco party involving kidnapping people to form a group called “The Village Humans”, the Furon Efficiency guy challenging you to another test and Pox finally believing Crypto about the human interrupting their assassination missions.

Then comes the final part: Vietnahml. Crypto arrives with Pox to help their proprietor Trahn (played by Nolan North, it’s one of those old “have white people play asian people stereotype” roles that shouldn’t be taken seriously but can still be offensive) fight against Colonel Kluckin’ and his Khmer Beige rebels by wiping out a convoy and then infiltrating their base and destroying parts of their operation. However, eventually Crypto ends up captured and it’s revealed that Trahn is both a double agent (with the convoy from earlier being sent to kill Kluckin’) and that Kluckin’ really loves your plan and has been doing the same thing, and wants to team up. Problem is though, he uses the brain stem in his food and the Furons need it for their DNA so that’s out of the picture. After escaping and rescuing his “Big Willy” (lol), and saving his UFO from being torn apart by scientists working with Kluckin, Crypto and Pox destroy the base once and for all. Afterwords Trahn attempts to kill Crypto on a bike with a shield and throwing explosive chickens but dies and it culminates in a final mech battle between Crypto in the Big Willy and Kluckin’ in the statue of a Vietnahmlese robot rock god or something. Kluckin’ dies and the Furons live, though Pox gives up on the fast food industry with the competitiveness of it all and after being given the profits from “A shrimp boat and a mentally disabled war veteran”, Crypto persuades Pox to join him into going to a business venture in Vegas, setting up (but kind of contradicting) the third Destroy All Humans game coming up, Path of the Furon. The game then ends on the credits sequence with a YMCA dance from Crypto, but if you followed the side plot stuff you’ll get no disco mission, but you will learn that the Furon Efficiency Expert is actually a con artist who you chase down and kill before the original clone is locked up in a prison and that the human with the Ion Detonator who keeps ruining Crypto’s hits turns out to be both his and Natalya’s son.

Overall, my feelings on the plot are that it has a lot of cool ideas, but that I don’t think are always expanded upon in the right way or format. Not a lot of it is fleshed out as much as it should be but it’s serviceable enough; what really carries this game is the humor and tone, which isn’t very serious and include references to everything from “the previous two games” to certain music artists to lots of immature sex jokes (“my Big Willy” of course being one of the top cracks) which I have a severe weakness for when done right and this game made me chuckle a couple of times doing it. The only other thing I can think to add in this is the inclusion of Vietnahml: I think it’s an ingenious idea to have the whole fast food thing come from dead bodies, and what produces the most dead bodies? War, specifically in this case a giant parody of the Vietnam War. Personally, I’m not offended by it’s inclusion in this game, even with a deceased grandfather who served in the war but I can see certain people not being okay by the pisstake on the war itself so if you’re one of those people that is in there as a warning. Again though its length, and its pacing feels kind of weak in certain aspects and truth be told even though Fantasy Atoll is my favorite location, my not knowing why we were even there was kind of indicative of how kind of barebones stuff feels. I like it, and it’s one of if not the best part of the game but I wish it was way more developed than it actually was.

The gameplay, being on the Wii, has its fair share of pros and cons on the game’s quality. The whole point of the game series is the namesake, to Destroy All Humans right? So you’ll be able to go around, murder humans with an assortment of weapons both on foot, in your flying saucer and in the Big Willy mech and for that I applaud the game for adding more in what could be considered a limiting experience. On foot you have weapons such as the four main weapons: the Zap-O-Matic being the electric gun, the Disintegrator can follow the namesake and vaporize enemies with ease, the Anal Probe can one shot enemies and have their brains pop out and the Ion Detonator is basically your remote controlled grenade launcher. Other weapons you’ll get are the Zombie Gun and the Lightning Ball, along with the shrink ray; the problem with these weapons is that while the first and last gun are cool and unique, the Lightning ball felt kind of useless whilst the other two are just kind of unceremoniously thrown into your lap by text prompts after beating missions and if you’re not paying attention to the screen when they tell you this, you won’t even know you have the weapon at all unless you scroll through it on accident. For the Shrink Ray even, you unlock it by completing the final mission and as such, using it will shrink people, vehicles, animals and props down to smaller sizes; however I didn’t even know how to use it because the text appeared on screen but it said it was locked in my inventory. After looking it up on the internet, I learned that in order to use it I had to open up the cheat menu and turn it on to have it appear in my inventory. I’m not sure if this was due to the potentially rushed nature of the game, but it’s not a great way to introduce any weapon into the game just by throwing a sentence on screen and I felt it could’ve used some actual practical in game examples, even if to just let people know that these weapons exist. To finish off this section, there are other abilities like PK (the ability to pick people/objects up into the air), throwing stuff with PK (which requires you to thrust your controller forward (heh)), hypnosis (which distracts everyone around you), body snatching (which allows you to hop into a human being and control their body undercover for a while) and transmogrification (which allows you to break down objects into ammo) and all three of the latter abilities require you to complete a small mini game where you click the A button on all the little circles floating around the screen. If you take too long, more circles will spawn but I just kinda spammed the A button and flinged it all around the place and I completed it quickly more often than not. However, that doesn’t stop the overall gameplay package from feeling iffy in certain regards.

Even on foot stuff, the motion controls in general are a mixed bag for me, sometimes they actually worked well and I went on for a specific amount of time and didn’t even notice any issues in this regard. However, a lot of the time I wasn’t in that weird Zen-like state; sometimes trying to move the camera with the nunchuck/motion thing to the left was kind of frustrating and after a while my right wrist would hurt. Aiming the weapons can sometimes be a little jank due to this motion as well, though truth be told, I’m not used to the Wii and I personally believe it’s adapted to the game the best it can be. However, I didn’t really want to go around and engage in it much due to the motion controls, and overall that kind of hurt the experience for me personally. The camera/motion movement was the biggest chore in this regard; with one mission in particular being the bane of my existence in this game: Customer Service. In this mission you have to walk around, zap some satellites then finally defend a building from being attacked by the military. Fair enough, in the OG games this would be cake but in this game you have constantly spawning military planting bombs, which you have to precisely aim on this bomb and toss it (which the throw doesn’t go far in this game compared to the others and kind of hurt my hands a bit) but pile that on in an enclosed beach with people shooting at you right next to the building, the camera flinging me all over the damn place and military boats hitting you with missiles and a limited amount of time to throw the bombs away before they blow up the building and fail the mission? I legitimately got infuriated at the lack of gameplay cohesion in this enclosed space and nearly fucking screamed, the only saving grace being that my death would let me spawn right next to the building but if I failed I had to do the entire mission all over again including getting to the mission in the first place. Other than that mission, it was kind of a struggle but for the most part the on foot stuff was fine, though the lack of being able to read minds for funny quips had me sad and disappointed considering that was one of my favorite things to do in the other games. Also like the other games, going into water will hurt/kill you and it’s even worse in this game as stepping into a puddle will lead Crypto into having a convulsion and instant death which made the first mission in Fantasy Atoll trying to get instructions to the visitor center a bit of a trip with the lack of ability as moving people around via motion controls either gets them killed really quick via accidentally slamming them into things at full force or them also drowning in puddles.

The UFO has the usual three as well: Death Ray, Sonic Boom and Quantum Deconstructor (which each three has its uses being for average destruction on both ground forces/buildings, ground forces mostly and a giant nuke) in every game as well as one more weapon: the Electro Cone, which when you bring down to the ground will vaporize all ground forces in your vicinity in an excellent display which is amazing. The ability to abduct people for DNA and drain vehicles for health are still there as well, though the controls to abduct took me a while to figure out and draining vehicles requires precise aiming on top of a prop or vehicle which led to my death countless times. If I were to give any thoughts on the UFO, it is that the motion controls make it kind of a slog for the most part to actually move around. Moving it around requires you to move your Wiimote stuff left or right, with pushing forward making it go down and backwards making it go up as well; this mixed in with the camera sometimes being finicky and the health drain needing to be accurate can sometimes lead to missing stuff entirely leading to death or alternatively picking something or someone else up entirely. The main thing that popped out to me as genius is the fact that the cloak in the game, instead of making the UFO invisible it just turns it into a blimp which I think is actually a pretty clever stealth mechanic in public, at least aesthetically.

The Big Willy statue, the newest addition into the series, also has the least amount of depth in game and I rarely used it during my time. While cool as hell, it only has four or five functions: one is to grab people by pressing the back trigger and A and you can either grab people to eat their brains for health or pick up objects. Throwing them was kind of a mixed bag requiring you to hold the back trigger and A again at a precise time to actually throw it, and oftentimes I either slammed the prop down onto the ground for a small ranged attack or just accidentally dropped it. Health for the most part in this wasn’t bad, and Big Willy can take a lot of damage (heh) but it’s still tiring trying to fight with the motion controls. The only other weapons for this are laser eyes, vomiting acid which clears ground enemies, or farts which I never used because like the other weapons I didn’t even know this existed until after I beat the game.

And finally, a lot of these weapons require upgrades; however they work a bit different compared to the original games. This game has more of a “Use this weapon and it’ll upgrade itself” system. You’ll still collect pieces of tech out in the open world and via missions but the truth is that the more you use a weapon or power ability in certain ways (like Body Snatching for 25 minutes along with other prerequisites lead to an upgrade), the more effective it’s become. You don’t buy these abilities on your own, but to make them more effective I had to do a tad bit of grinding with certain prerequisites in mind but after some progress was made I dropped it and by the end, I acquired 75% of all of the upgrades by the time the game ended. Other things I want to point out are that when in your a cutscene, be careful of pressing the back trigger (or B Button) as if you do you’ll skip cutscenes (unless you want to do that in which case, ok) and I tended to hit it by accident trying to rest my arm in the middle of everything. By completing the game/side quests and putting in certain codes, you’ll also get a cheat code screen; some of these are just skins for Crypto and the Saucer/Blimp but others include the usual infinite health and ammo, but also stuff like everyone turning into a zombie, or zombies becoming radioactive and killing enemies quicker, the ability to body snatch animals in your environment, and etc.

As for the graphics and sound design stuff, I’ll start with the sound design here as there’s a bit of a mix up between certain sources. Instead of the actors J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Horvitz as Crypto and Pox respectively, they instead went with actors Sean Dennelan (whom I know nothing at all about) and Daryl Kurylo (whom I only know from the first Yakuza game on Playstation 2, one of my all time favorite games ever). As such, Crypto’s voice, while not bad, has changed and it’s clearly obvious that it’s not the same actor but the entire time playing the game I didn’t know that Horvitz wasn’t in it, so Daryl did a pretty good job at imitating Horvitz’s voice work. The reason for this ranges from the original actors wanting percentages of game sales but SAG stuff (funny with the times now) led to that falling through and Richard Horvitz saying that THQ lied about what consoles it would be on as a negotiation tactic to try to pay the actors less money. Regardless, everyone did a decent job on the acting side and I never felt my immersion break once which is pretty good. The soundtrack is ok for the most part, it takes place in the 70s so there will be tracks like YMCA and Disco Inferno but truth be told I don’t think there was much in the way of licensed stuff, probably due to the game’s smaller budget so I’m not surprised it didn’t fully embrace that aspect. Finally, the sound design is actually pretty solid as well, I never once noticed any sound glitches or any noise that felt weak or anything so that’s all good on that front.

Graphically however, the game as I said suffered under budget constraints and you can tell. First is that the game doesn’t look great for the most part, to the point that the original PS2 games look WAY better and they were on the previous generation. This is from what the sources would say due to the fact that the Wii assets were originally from the PSP, so instead of remaking the assets, it was just transferred over to the Wii as is. Due to this and the budget, other things suffered as well, especially lip syncing which was noticeable as immediately as I entered the game. This was something that was in the conflict between development teams as well, but in the end was cut out presumably due to time and money again. Most of the environments look ok, but don’t really become their own until the latter half of the game when you’re in Fantasy Atoll and Vietnamhl (mostly due to the amount of people they have fighting on one screen, especially considering they barely have ragdoll physics in general), though even then I noticed that probably due to limitations that most of the game except Fantasy Atoll is just flat surfaces with no verticality in terms of actual land. In fact, most of the maps are just small as hell in general, which is understandable though sad to see, and I feel what disappoints me the most in this field is the fact that the first half of the game just feels uninspired and unoriginal compared to the other games; Harbor City just reminds me of a sunnier Union City from the first game while Farfield just straight up feels like Rockwell and as such because of it, I felt it was rather dull in that regard. I guess the only thing I can really say about this is that I naturally understand that as a Wii game it was bound to take compromises in this regard, it’s going to look worse and have more limitations (including repetitive Crypto animations during cutscenes, ESPECIALLY his thrusting animation) and I also kind of chalk it up to “it is what it is I suppose”, I just wish stuff was better in these regards, even though I’m not really a graphics guy.

Overall, my thoughts on this game are exactly what the fans and critics thought of it when it came out: it was very mid. I enjoyed the plot for the most part, and the twelve year old humor that still makes me giggle, for the most part you can play the game well enough with the control schemes, the Big Willy mech is a fun addition and for a Destroy All Humans title on the Wii it’s pretty impressive for what it is. However, at the end of the day while frustrating in some regards, it’s also a sort of inoffensive spin-off title for the Wii that kind of misses in certain departments. As I said in my Destroy All Humans 2! Reprobed review, it’s a so-so game and truth be told as I haven’t played Path of the Furon yet, to me it’s the worst one in the entire franchise, though that isn’t necessarily bad. However, this is one of those times where even though I’m tired of everybody and their grandmother getting a remake (now Assassin’s Creed 4 is getting one? Why?), just to keep a consistency, I’d love to see Black Forest Games go back and remake this title, but actually expand upon it in terms of gameplay and plot because there’s a lot of ideas in this game that are actually really cool. Would I ever play this game again? I don’t know, maybe just to show some friends what playing this game is like, or maybe if I’m stranded somewhere with just my Wii I’d consider it, but the truth is I’m way more likely to go back to the second and sometimes the first one more than this so I don’t know. It’s not a bad Wii or Destroy All Humans game, but I’d be ok with a remake and if there isn’t one, then there are other Destroy All Humans games or even Wii games in general that feel better to play than what we have here, though if you really want to try it it’s a short 5-7 hour game and could probably be bought on Amazon between 5-30 dollars USD.

Links:
https://www.gamespot.com/games/destroy-all-humans-big-willy-unleashed/cheats/

https://web.archive.org/web/20090113205258/http://wii.ign.com/articles/847/847320p1.html

https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/08/04/destroy-all-humans-psp-cancelled

https://www.gamerguysreviews.com/2020/11/aliens-stole-my-wii-interview-with.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYUQUHidN8I&t=1886s&ab_channel=GamerGuy%27sReviews

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DestroyAllHumansBigWillyUnleashed

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestroyAllHumans/comments/ppqrj4/the_history_of_destroy_all_humans_big_willy/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1078189/