Destroy All Humans! 2

The joke that carries the sequel is that Crypto has gone native. After the first game's cattle-mutilation Americana, Pandemic pushes the calendar forward to 1969 and recasts its little grey murderer as a low-rent secret agent with a cigarette-holder voice, cruising a Bay City full of stoned protestors and a version of London where every woman calls him love. Pox is now a hologram wired into the mothership, having lost the body but none of the contempt. The satire is broad and it is dated, but it is aimed at the era's own self-image rather than at easy targets, and that keeps it funnier than it has any right to be.

Mechanically the big change is body snatching. Instead of a holographic disguise that drains away while you stand still, Crypto now hollows out a human and wears them, which turns infiltration into a resource problem: find a cop, a hippie or a KGB officer whose face opens the door you need, and dump the husk when it stops being useful. Psychokinesis, the Zap-O-Matic and the Anal Probe all return, joined by the Dislocator, which flings crowds and cars around like a physics toy. The saucer handles better and hits harder, with abduction beams and a genuinely nasty sonic boom.

The five open districts are small by modern standards and thickly populated with side activities, most of them variations on wreck this, escort that, scan brains for gossip. Repetition sets in around the third city. What holds attention is the escalation of the fiction: Blisk aliens, Soviet mutants, a moonbase, and a plot that gets sillier without ever losing its nerve.

It also runs a two-player split-screen co-op through the story, which was rare for a sandbox in 2006 and remains the best way to see it. Chaos is more entertaining when someone else is compounding it.

Aged textures and a loose camera date it, and the mission design is thinner than the writing. Still, few games of the generation understood that the pleasure of playing the invader is being petty about it.