Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

"Furious Blasting Action, but is it fun?"

I installed the game, started it up and as soon as i did i was impressed. the graphics were stunning, even on my system. motion was perfect, i tried it on the graphics testing stage, no problems there.

In fact when it comes to looks, this game is great. then we get into the game. When you get into this game it is like a lot of other FPS games out there, however, this game has something that very few of them have. Humour.

Throughout the game you will notice reference to other FPS games and sarcastic comments from your computer all the time. Quite a few of them made me chuckle and even though a few of them are in jokes based on the first game, players of this game should have no trouble getting the majority of the jokes.

The one thing I did like about this game was the control system, first off if you have more than one person that uses your computer then you can easily load up your own personal setting from an selection on the controls menu. second they have tried to cut down on the use of buttons by assigning multiple uses to one key.

For instance, clicking the right mouse button with a normal gun will use an object in front of you (button, switch, etc), with a sniper rifle it will activate the scope, and double clicking will activate an information console about the location you are in, the task you are doing and the enemy's you have encountered.

Now for the bad point of this game, and believe me i consider this a big bad point. This game has some serious repetiion to it. Most of the enemy's you will meet in the game, you meet in the very first level. so all the enemy's you see are all the same throughout the game.

Also, throughout this game you will kill THOUSANDS of monsters, my last count was 6000 during the last game. this causes a problem with me. you go into a room, kill 100 monsters, get health & firepower powerups, then go onto the next room to kill another 100 monsters. repeat till end of game.

This makes the game very predictable and also very BORING. every level felt the same. there was no strategy whatsoever, you cant avoid 100 enemy's coming at you from all side by casually sidestepping. just get the gun out, blast away and hope you destroy all of them before they destroy you.

If it was not for this,i would have rated this game so much higher, in fact the only reason im rating this game so high is due to the fact that it does have quite an excellent deathmatch game.

So try it out, but remember, if youve played one level...youve played them all.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/25/02, Updated 02/25/02