A lackluster football Sunday is unfortunately followed by a lackluster Monday. My apologies. 

The Destroy all Humans franchise is steaming along with Big Willy Unleashed coming to the Wii and PSP next month and Path of the Furon slated for a late 2008 release (Q4). So it's no doubt that THQ decided a title was needed for mobile phones. Lo and behold Destroy All Humans - Crypto Does Vegas.

The game starts with Crypto and Ortho having not met their latest DNA quota which requires Crypto to head out and get some more. Play through twenty levels and find out what's really happening in Vegas.

In the realm of SNES level graphics this game manages to fall short at times. Not in the level of detail but in the repetition of the graphics themselves. There are basically 2 types of enemies, shooters and non-shooters. The shots being flashing yellow dots. The enemies all come wrapped up in showgirls, blushing brides, tuxedo-ed men, Elvis impersonators or police uniforms. Yes, that's it. Five different types of enemies. Though there is an occasional robotic squid thrown in the mix.

The sound is limited to one funky groove of a midi which plays through the whole game and doesn't remind me of Vegas at all. I don't know what else I can say about the sound except that it, like everything else, is repetitive.

The controls were something of a mystery at first. You only have 3 buttons. Why? I don't know. It's another case where the developer decided to not use more buttons when they are always available. You have left and right buttons (4 and 6) and a fire button (5). Meanwhile Crypto wanders from spot to spot as you spin him in circles trying to shoot everything and everyone in sight before they escape or touch you. The game is extremely repetitive in that this is all you ever do, spin in circles and shoot people. Oh yes, I almost forgot, aiming is extremely sloppy at times also. Nothing makes a game more annoying than bad controls.

Yet somehow I played through all twenty levels on Easy, and by Easy I mean really easy. Once you finish that, it unlocks Hard which is the same thing yet only marginally harder. On top of all this is some tired dialog between Crypto and Ortho.

The game feels to me like a cheap attempt to cash in on the franchise without actually putting any effort into it. The graphics are bland, the music is out of place and the gameplay is repetitive. I'm not sure I can recommend this game to anyone. I was considering a Test it! rating but after further review I downgraded it to a Skip it! Save the money and spend it on one of the other titles in the Destroy All Humans series. 

It has been a month of mediocre games and I am still waiting for that next big thing to hit the mobile platform. It just seems that the industry needs to mature in this respect. Not using many of the buttons and making a shitty control scheme is inexcusable. There are a minimum of 12 buttons on almost every phone out there now and to only use three of them instead of at least a four way control scheme is ridiculous. Plus stop putting the fire button right in the middle of the movement buttons. why not try the * or # keys? They're hardly ever used and they're out of the way of the other buttons. You could then even give gamers a right/left-handed option at start up and put the button on one of the other depending on their choice. That would then allow games to be played with both thumbs simultaneously and limit fat-fingering the fire button which happens quite often when you cram it between the move left/right buttons. Come on people, do you actually test these games on handsets? Next week is looking promising with the return of a classic franchise, but will it break Mobile Mondays out of the recent skid? Check in next week to find out.

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