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It's payback time. For every alien blasted into gobbets of 'ick' in videogames. For every Martian curelly prodded, poked and 'explored' on a cold slab in Area 51. For every extra terrestrial portrayed by Steven Spielberg as a tree-hugging, eco-aware social sack with love in its heart and infinite wisdom in its sad eyes. Destroy All Humans! is having none of that crap. To the Furon Empire, mankind is just a moronic mass of meatsicles with DNA-rich brainstems to harvest. As for the Earth, it's just another playground to toy with, conquer and totally destroy. Humanity is pathetic. Fire up the saucer. We're going in...

It's dead easy to sum up the appeal of Destroy All Humans! Plain and simple, you get to blow epic amounts of shit up, and thanks to a small but perfectly formed arsenal, it never gets tiring. Never. Not once. Hell, we've already completed the game once and we're still invading, giggling like sugared-up toddlers every time we level a block of Capitol City with our Quantum Deconstructor. This is the ultimate in guilt-free US carnage. No conscience-pricking insertions into real-world hotspots like North Korea of the Gulf. No docufear campaigns against Middle-Eastern terrorist cells. Just a brilliantly cheeky cartoon of communist-fearing '50s America complete with camp men in black, leathery Texan generals, jive-talking varsity teens and straw-chewing hillbillies. Just thinking about them makes us want to reach for our Zap-O-Matic.

And if the appeal of Destroy All Humans! is child's play to nail, the depth, balance and long-term legs of the resulting annihilation comes as a pleasant surprise. GTAlien is a gift of a soundbite, and there's definitely some truth to it, but for a closer cousin, you're better off looking at developer Pandemic's other gleefully explosive sandbox shooter, Mercenaries. And, just as in Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans! furiously pumps out benchmark graphics, satisfying scaled perspective shifts from ground to air, and the unmistakable realisation that everything just feels, y'know, right.

The game casts you as Cryptosporidium 137, a grumpy 'grey' alien - sort, big cranium, saucer eyes - ordered to make contact with the human race and ultimately clear the way for 'Invasion Earth' by the full Furon Empire. As you learn from 137's leader, the terminally sarcastic 'brain' of the outfit, Pox, the DNA supplies used to clone Furons (hence Crypto 137) are degrading badly. Earth is one big DNA sweetshop buy Crypto's predecessor, 136, has gone missing...

First stop, a no-name cattle farm in Mid-Western nowhere, and Destroy All Humans! kicks off in style with a manure-spattered game of psychokinetic cow tipping - it may be an alien cliche, but cattle mutilation and humiliation is a big thing in this game. But back up there. Psychokinesis? Absolutely. The key to Destroy All Humans! sweetly pitched gameplay is the way Crypto's role of lone Furon gunman versus humanity is balanced and counterbalanced by surges or increasingly full-strength hardware and mental powers for you, and for your progressively well-equipped opponents. For Crypto this means a quartet of handheld weapons, a quartet of air-deployed saucer weapons, and five psychic abilities, linked to a slowly replenishing concentration meter.

Since we've mentioned it already, let's start with Psychokinesis. By locking on to a person or object, Crypto can lift and launch them skywards with the power of his bitter ET brain. Initially, this power is weight-restricted to the mass of the average Dairy Lea dispenser. However, by the time you reach the Area 42 landing site mid-game, you'll be getting your chuckles levitating tanks and lobbing them into buildings and troops like it's nothing special.

Then there's Crypto's mind-reading ability. While certain missions task you to siphon a specific character's mental activity to extract intelligence, you're encouraged to read any - and every - passing human's secret thoughts. Often funny as hell, these brain-burps are almost reason alone to buy Destroy All Humans!, but tied to Crypto's third skill, this admittedly entertaining 'take it or leave it' bonus activity becomes an integral gameplay element. The thing is, by focusing his target over a pathetic human, Crypto can create a 'Holo-Bob' - a temporary, holographic disguise - enabling him to move around on foot, undetected, without the humans running off and screaming. The problem is that, once Crypto's concentration dips, the disguise will spaz out, leaving him exposed. Cleverly though, reading minds will top up his concentration meter, so with a steady supply of humans en-route it's possible to walk among them, causing mischief until the cows come home. (Which they won't if you killed them all earlier.) Not that you'll stay hidden of course - the downside of inhabiting a Holo-Bob is that you can't use any of Crypto's guns, nor his short-burst jetpack while in disguise. Still, it's no fun decimating the human race if you can't get a good stampede going.

Number four in Crypto's cranial toolkit is the ability to hypnotize the living. Again, this has a specific starring role in a number of Destroy's 22 headlining missions (persuading a grunt in Area 42 to drive an A-bomb back into his base and detonate it springs to mind) but away from these, there's lots of fun to be had. Not only can troublesome humans be hypnotised to sleep, enabling you to sneak past them, but they can also be 'persuaded' to cause distractions. Some will dance, others will act like monkeys. Hypnotize a cow and it'll clumsily moo a tune and dance on its hind hooves. Whatever the distraction, any nearby humans will gather round and applaud, leaving Crypto free to slip by unnoticed.

If you're beginning to get a little concerned about the volume of references to stealthy behaviour on Crypto's part, don't be. His last mental trick turns the tide back in the favour of wanton destruction and sets the overriding tone for the majority of Destroy All Humans! Aside from a detour to Area 42 to discover the grisly fate of Crypto Sporidium 136 (and get some payback, naturally) 137's main interest in Earth is for harvesting DNA-packed human brain stems. The extract ability takes care of this, culminating in your target's head popping like a grape and their brain and attached spinal column bouncing off down the road for you to collect. Gross.

As you'd expect with six landing sites and countless thousands of potential brain-donors, you're going to collect an awful lot of DNA as you play, and you can 'spend' a lot of this on upgrading weapons and skills. We've covered the full spread of Crypto's arsenal elsewhere (see Attack Of The Furon Disintegrations, below) but it's worth reiterating that the awesome flesh-stripping ray gun from Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! is up there with the most satisfying weapons on PS2. Firing it and watching your victims burn away to skeletons before crumbling to dust remains funny right up until the final credits. However, it's not all good news for Crypto. Even if he is packing a universe of alien hurt, there is only one of him. And while his personal force-field will replenish over time, once the game's four-stage alert mode creeps up to 'Majestic' (see below), chances are Crypto's invasion will end embarrassingly early.

As Destroy All Humans! unfolds, it's revealed that the humans aren't quite so pathetic after all - and have been busy getting acquainted with Furon technology, thanks to Crypto's crash-landed predecessor. So it is that you rapidly come to despise the game's black-suited Majestics. These persistent agency men not only come toting laser rifles, but also deploy experimental agents equipped with some of Crypto's psychokinetic powers. Add to this the army's guided missile and ack-ack batteries, tanks and superior manpower, and while you've technically got the upper hand, you're always kept enjoyably on your little grey toes.

What finally fixes Destroy All Humans! on a collision course with greatness is its structure, with the inventive, essential story missions sitting alongside scores of optional mini-game challengnes in expansive, open-ended maps. Complete the core tasks in Santa Modesta's Californian suburb, for example, you you still have the freedom and plenty of reasons to return with your saucer any time you want.

Just the thing to lavish some precious Furon 'me time' on Crypto. Collect a few hundred brainstems here, race checkpoints there, seek out the 50 hidden Furon probes secreted around the map (an absorbing game in its own right) or just resist the impulse to land, and level the entire frigging town with your saucer's mighty Death Ray. And it's this unscripted, unwarranted, utterly enjoyable levelling of swathes of '50s America that provides the game's enduring money shot. It's every big as cool as it looks from these screenshots. Funny like few games are - the script and vocal performances virtually warrant the entry price alone - and blessed with some of the most consistently and instinctively enjoyable gameplay we've ever experienced, this is rock solid shooterising at its nuts-out best. Destroy all humans? With the possible exception of Lindsay Lohan and the guys who slaved away at Pandemic to make this, we couldn't agree more.

Raise the alert in Destroy All Humans! and you'll earn yourself a world of hurt...

1. Alert Level One: Civilian
   No real threat to Crypto, but people will be more reluctant to give up their brainstems if they've seen you coming. Funny, that.
2. Alert Level Two: Police
   Almost an irrelevance alone, but get a group of cops on your tail and they can be hard to lose. They're also armed, but not with a Disintegrator Ray like you...
3. Alert Level Three: Army
   Much tougher to take out. It starts with the trucks carrying lots of troops, but moves on to tanks, guided missiles, automatic turrets and (gasp!) prototype killbots.
4. Alert Level Four: Majestic
   The 'men in black' come packing Furon kit, so they can kick your ass if you're not careful. If you can't lose them, make for the saucer and take 'em out from the air.

1. The Zap-O-Matic
   The default Furon rifle shoots a crippling arc of lightning. Weak at first, but it can be upgraded to spark off up to four additional targets at once.
2. The Disintegrator Ray
   OPS2's personal favourite. A powerful 'ray gun' that burns flesh and crumbles bones in a righteous Mars Attacks!-style. Utter genius and a lot of fun to use.
3. The Anal Probe
   Requires charging and is a little too slow for anything other than novelty attacks. Victims crap themselves to death, though, so not a total disappointment.
4. The Ion Detonator
   An incredibly powerful projectile weapon that can flip tanks like beer mats. Sadly, if you don't lob it far enough you'll visit all that pain on yourself.
5. The Death Ray
   Great for cutting down puny humans and - if you've got the time and upgrades - for torching whole cities, this is you saucer's default weapon
6. The Abducto-Beam
   With the Abducto-Beam you can pick up any object on the map and sling it into the middle of the end of the world, which will be just a matter of time at this rate.
7. The Sonic Boom
   Mighty powerful, the Sonic Boom can level whole buildings in a couple of shots. Makes mincemeat out of artillery, too. This one does need ammo, though.
8. The Quantum Deconstructor
   One of these puppies will lay waste to an entire block. It's fairly slow to reload but hell, the fleeing humans will be too disorientated to put up much of a fight.

Graphics 90%
Stunning, with superb voice acting and B-movie score.

Sound 100%
Brilliant voice acting and B-move score.

Gameplay 90%
The destruction simply never gets tired.

Lifespan 80%
22 missions and plenty of replay value.

Overall 90%
With sharp humour and great design, this is the perfect antidote to a world of gritty shooters. Damn near essential.