DESTROY ALL HUMANS

Publisher: THQ. Formats: PS2, Xbox. Price: £39.99. Family friendly? Er...a bit too much violence for younger gamers.

THE timing couldn't be better. In the week Tom Cruise zaps the cinema box office in War Of The Worlds, games publisher THQ unleashes a new slice of interactive entertainment about an extraterrestrial invasion.

Destroy All Humans uses the Grand Theft Auto principal of a free roaming world filled with things to do (or, in this case, disintegrate) but avoids the pitfalls of aimless wandering by chopping things up into manageable chunks.

Just five minutes is enough to reveal this game has more in common with Tim Burton's lunatic Mars Attacks than Spielberg's War Of The Worlds. It's a comedy game laced with a wicked brand of dark humour. Human heads explode like out-takes from Scanners as your psycho alien taps into their DNA. Cows - the perennial alien fall guys according to real life UFO-ologists, who reckon heifers are regularly hi-jacked for medical inspection by little green men - are splattered across the screen in a way that won't win this title any endorsements from the Humane Society of America.

As with all good alien invaders, your little grey man has psychic abilities. He can pluck the thoughts of passers-by right out of their heads. Sometimes this can reveal a useful titbit of information; mostly it's banal stuff and just another good reason to chase them down and turn them into ash.

Your alien arsenal runs to the usual incinerators and ray guns (hilariously called the Zap-O-Matic) as well as more, er, exotic weaponry such as the anal probe.

If hand-to-hand combat gets a bit tiring you can always take to your space ship and blow away whole buildings. And if you're in the mood, why not use a tractor beam to pick up an everyday object such as a car and use it like a giant fly swat? Is this mindless blasting fun? Oh yes.

By their own admission, Destroy All Humans became something of a labour of love for the team tasked with making it a reality. It's the care and attention to detail (plus the great gags and terrific creativity) that makes Destroy... one of the standout games of 2005.

It would have been easy to dash off a by-the-numbers platformer or yet another first person perspective shoot 'em up. Selecting the free roaming template raised the bar because games that allow players to ostensibly go wherever they please are notoriously hard to get right.

But when you laugh out loud at a video game, as I did several times at Destroy All Humans, it's a sure sign that somebody somewhere got the mix just right. To coin a clich: Destroy All Humans is simply out of this world.

PREDATOR: CONCRETE JUNGLE

Format: PS2, Xbox. Publisher: Vivendi Universal. Family friendly? No. Price: £39.99.

THE Predator franchise has something of a chequered history across video games platforms. From simple shoot 'em ups on the Sega Mega Drive through Alien Vs Predator on the spectacularly bad Atari Jaguar and movie tie-ins on the PC, it seems as though every console has to have a Predator title.

Now we have Concrete Jungle for the Xbox and the PS2. Is it as good as the first movie or as bad as last year's dire Aliens Vs Predator?

To be honest, it's probably more like the second Predator film (you know, the one set in America and starring Danny Glover) - in that it's a reasonable stab at an adventure yarn that's diverting without ever threatening to become particularly memorable. The action spans two time periods hundreds of years apart. You take the predator and his imaginative weapons through each multi-level adventure, blasting virtually anything that moves. Cerebral it ain't (except in a "keep the brain in a jar" kind of way).

Fans of the movies will enjoy this game. Console veterans will probably move on to something better.

CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER 5

Publisher: Eidos. Format: PC. Price: £29.99. Family friendly? Yes, but why bother...?

EIDOS should hang its head in shame. It has taken arguably the greatest brand name in PC gaming and, with one diabolical mistake after another, totally ruined it. Thankfully, the geniuses behind the original Champ Manager have long since done a Bosman and transferred to another team (in this case, Sega). That way the game that should have been Champ Manager 5 can still be published - albeit now called Football Manager.

Eidos - left with a great name but no game to go with it - simply asked another team to come up with a footie management title. And they did. Unfortunately, they also made all the same mistakes that every other football management title seems to have fallen into since the dawn of gaming.

The game moves at a swift pace but that's because the artificial intelligence working behind the scenes is more Gazza than Arsene Wenger. Don't believe me? When did you last see a nine-nil scoreline? Why do strikers freeze in front of an open goal? And how often do keepers run to the corner flag to take a goal kick?

Eidos, you must be having a laugh. This is Championship Manager in name only.

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