“Why don’t you spill your guts before I do?”

Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon nearly succeeds on spunk and attitude alone. Featuring a wickedly satirical if nonsensical story that sees the curmudgeonly Jack Nicholson–inspired Crypto and his holographic commander Orthopox rampaging through facsimiles of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Paris, it endears itself to the player with caustically zany plot developments, witty dialogue, meta commentary on video games, ‘70s style funk music, and goofy gameplay elements like the Anal Probe and Disco Fever. The story is all sorts of janky, gibberish fun, beginning with the Furon duo harvesting human DNA within the bowels of their “family friendly” casino, before moving onto Kung Fu monasteries, UFO cults, mass cloning, mystically-granted telekinetic and time-stopping powers, and a conspiracy on the Furon homeworld.

For all the outré delights generated by the game’s parodic tone, when it comes to actually playing the thing, Path of the Furon is a wet noodle. Missions are dull, gameplay is clunky and overstuffed with pointless features (though the jetpack controls quite fluidly and some of the guns, like the Black Hole Gun, the Venus Human Trap, and the Superballer, are neatly conceived), control is too often wrested from the player, and objectives are over-explained. Worse, the game is riddled with signs that developer Sandblast Games was understaffed and the game under-budgeted—awkward pauses and laughable lip-syncing in dialogue, fake dialogue trees, characters getting stuck on scenery, cutscenes that cut off before they’ve ended, glitches that render huge explosions completely silent, enemies that you’re required to dispatch disappearing from the map.

All of it amounts to a game that has no business being a game, which I find myself thinking pretty much anytime a game has style and charisma but no sense of immersion. The first two Destroy All Humans! games did a much better job of bridging the gap, of offering both an enjoyable tone and a fun gameplay experience. In any case, they scratched the itch if you were looking for a Mars Attacks! style game. This one just falls flat on its face, which may simply be a symptom of Pandemic putting the series out to pasture, only to have it get scooped up by THQ and milked for every last drop. It’s hard to state the case against Path of the Furon with more venom than Ellie Gibson at Eurogamer: “It’s as if Pandemic’s once shiny, happy puppy grew old and tired, as is the way of things, but then instead of being put down was handed over to a bunch of tramps. Who shaved all its hair off and fed it on Tesco Value Pilsner and let it get mange. It’s time for THQ to get the shotgun.”