Destroy All Humans: Free Willy almost more of the same

Kill humans with a Wii controller. What else can you ask for?

Big Willy Unleashed is recognizable and comfortable as the third part of the Destroy All Humans franchise, but it's under new management. New developer Locomotive took over for Pandemic with this installment, and there are some changes.

The Wii control scheme is similar to Metroid Prime 3, but it doesn't work as seamlessly, in part because Metroid is first-person and Willy is third-person. When Crypto is too close to another object, the camera moves into a pseudo-first-person view that becomes hard to control. It's also hard to get Crypto shooting where you want him in a mass firefight -- he has to be pointing the right way, even if you can put the cursor on what you want to shoot. As with Metroid, you can't get too excited while playing -- move the Wiimote too far to the side and it loses sight of the sensor bar, and you lose control of the character. However, the controls aren't terrible -- especially considering it's obvious from early dialogue that the game was planned for the PS2 and ported to Wii later.

The graphics are disappointing compared to other Wii titles; they're on a par with the previous PS2 outing, although the Wii's superior hardware doesn't drop frames when things get busy the way the PS2 did.

The biggest disappointment, though, is the writing. The sarcasm, wit, and biting satire of the previous two games is oddly absent. There's a lot of puerile jokes about Big Willy, but relatively little skewering of the 70s. Worse, Crypto no longer has the ability to read minds -- so the joy of listening to all the twisted inner thoughts of the game's residents is gone. True, you can hear some remarks by wandering around wearing someone else's body, but they're relatively few and more repetitive than in the past. The result is a game that has the mechanics that made the series good, but it's missing the soul that made it excellent.
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Source / Author / Credit: Anonymous