All too often I'm driven to a game based solely on its premise. Take Destroy All Humans! for instance: aliens invade 1950s United States, and you're the one piloting the infiltration? Why there's scads of satirical gold to be found in that concept! Like a moth driven to a candle, I swoop in and scoop up the game only to find myself firmly singed by the end result and wishing the experience was a fraction of what I had imagined it would be. Somewhere in Destroy All Humans! development cycle the writers were inspired to include such hilarious gags as a woman being forcefully 'probed' coupled with dozens of gratuitous lines of dialogue that does nothing but vacuously portray 1950s America as an array of overly hormonal puppets. So much for the satirical gold.

Destroy All Humans! places you in control of Cryptosporidium 137 (Crypto for short), an alien desperately trying to be Christian Slater whom takes his orders from a superior named Pox, annoyingly voiced by Richard Steven "Invader Zim" Horvitz. Your goal? Steal DNA from humans and allow the Furon species to continue propagating. And how do you go about executing such a plan? By carefully plotting scores of missions in 'sandbox'-esque cities, of course!

With each city Crypto heads to he's given an objective, be it kill a number of scientists or simply destroy a number of buildings. However, most of the time you'll be reading human's minds. See, Crypto is able to scan humans to hear their thoughts, which somehow powers his camouflage powers and allows him to stay disguised as a human. It's quickly discovered that many, many of these thoughts Crypto gleams from civilian's minds are nothing but unamusing sexually charged remarks. Obviously humans often have sexually oriented notions from time to time, but Destroy All Human's remarks are simply infantile. Bits about a man allowing his gaze to linger a bit too long in the gym shower, a housewife murmuring that she lusts over Doris Day instead of Rock Hudson or a woman fantasizing over Tarzan's Jane, each wear their welcome out faster than you can say 'juvenile'.

These thoughts aren't funny, they're not prolific, it's not even good satire. They are predictable pot shots at a culture that developer Pandemic finds distant and foreign. The characters delivering these lines are not lifelike caricatures, but caricatures of caricatures of stale B movies and pop references passed down like a rusting family car that should have been retired decades ago. NPC musings like "Will you get a load of this new brassiere? I could torpedo a U-Boat with these things!" and "Oh, he's cute! I wonder if he's - oh wait, I'm a married woman!" ring hollow, and fail to satisfy any satirical quotient the game requires to be fun and tongue-in-cheek.

Even worse, the sexually oriented 'humor' takes a turn for the dark with one objective: hypnotize beauty queen Miss Rockwell to get her back to your ship. This sounds almost innocuous until it's mentioned that upon being abducted, she'll be probed. You can practically see the lecherous glint in his eyes as he utters the word 'probed'. There's no mistaking the joy these two take in their job, and that Pandemic enjoys theirs, as they put a loving amount of detail in displaying Miss Rockwell orgasmic pleasure as the Furon's spacecraft beam pleasured her. Sure, Destroy All Humans! is a game where one of your primary weapons is an anal probe but regardless, this little exchange crossed an uncomfortable line for me. I wished I hadn't actually completed the mission, in fact I probably should have just put the game down right then and there. Unfortunately I plodded along through a handful of other clunky missions, committing one vile and violent act after another.

Oddly enough, these displays of violence fail to elicit much of any reaction. What smooths over the wanton strife is actually part of what makes the writing fall flat on its face: the sheer one-dimensionality of the game's inhabitants really distants you from the fact that you're ripping out their brain stems with your mind, leaving them a headless corpse, or burning reams of civilians (and inevitably, police) until they're a pile of dust. Or lasering entire town structures into rubble. These experiences didn't have me batting an eyelash, as there was nothing to empathize with. I felt like I was wrapped in a rubber Godzilla suit, trampling a cardboard town populated by stiff miniatures and that's fine by me. Well fine if you neglect listening to the same abject attempts at humor while constantly having to 're-energize' to keep up my human facade, fighting the inadequate camera and being bored by the repetitive and unengaging gameplay.

Ultimately, it's not the gameplay that kills the experience but the poor writing. If they had executed the game with some panache, some smarts and made it more of a cutting edge satirical piece then perhaps Destroy All Humans! could rise above its humdrum game mechanics. Perhaps the problem stems from the fact that I was hoping for the equivalent of a well-written Twilight Zone episode, but received rape jokes instead. Maybe the scanned thoughts escalate to something meaningful and worthy of a chuckle later on in the game. Perhaps the over-arching plot of pillaging human brainstems took a turn for the brilliant halfway in the second act. It doesn't matter - I flew too close to the candle: three hours with Destroy All Humans! was more than enough acerbic bunk for me.

This article is in reference to the Xbox version of Destroy All Humans!.