Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

"Who needs a real plot when you can blow lots of weird creatures to shreds with pause only to insult?"

Wow. I went into this game without having played the original Serious Sam, but having heard lots about it. I heard that it was as intense a shooter as I could hope for, and that it could be as hard as I wanted it. Honestly, I was a bit skeptical of that review on the first game, but I did have hope for this sequel. I am a UT player by choice, but I’ve been enjoying some of the newer games out, and I thought this one might be worth a shot. Now, I’m glad I gave it one.
Needless to say, I went out and got a copy of the game, installed it quickly on my computer at school, and went straight to work. Half an hour later (since that was the next time I really checked my clock), and still in my first game, I had already amassed well over 200 dead enemies, ranging from screaming, headless suicide bombers to a few jack-o-lantern-headed lumberjacks, chainsaws in hand, named Cucorbito.
At that point, I paused the game for a second, took a breath, looked at my kill count, chuckled, and unpaused the game again, just in time to into another onslaught of evil waiting to be vanquished by my mighty rocket launcher. I knew I would enjoy this game tremendously.

Gameplay: 9/10 The way this game plays is the major draw. The developers must have had a blast making, and later playing, this title, since it is literally non-stop action if you want it to be. There seems to be no limit to how twisted the scenarios can be, either. You can, at one point, be swarmed by well over 20 little creatures at once, handling them by whatever means necessary, only to finish them off and run into a crowd of 6 rocket launcher toting war machines, all with itchy trigger fingers. This game is fast, relentless, and utterly ridiculous in how much work you’re giving the undertakers (actually, luckily for them, all the bad guys die and vaporize into nothingness). It handles well, too, relying on the typical control scheme for nearly every computer FPS ever and not trying to do anything truly new, unique, or fancy. The one thing it does implement rather well is the menu, which I basically used to tell me the information about the creature I just waxed. Some of the dialogues here also show how good a sense of humor the writer had…
The game isn’t just about the speed and intensity, though. One thing I’ve noticed is that strategy can actually be the difference between living for 3 seconds, for 30 seconds, or for 30 minutes+. The game is very thorough when it comes to terrain, and this is one of the greatest benefits to you. Higher ground, as in real life, provides a much better attacking place than in a valley. It took a while, but I eventually got used to scouting the areas quickly and figuring out where the best places to take on the eventual hordes would be. Not only that, but also this game does require a bit more thought on weapon and ammo management than many shooters I’ve played. Then again, maybe it’s just because you’re wasting so much ammo on the millions of baddies you’re tearing to shreds, but still, it does become a major factor later on. Basically, this game is a genocidal maniac’s dream come true.

Graphics: 7/10 Unfortunately, I have become a bit spoiled by some of the other games in the FPS genre. Serious Sam 2 falls a bit short in the category of graphics, but luckily for it, the gameplay more than makes up for it. To start off, the maps where you play out this epic battle of a man against every denizen of the netherworld imaginable (all at the same time) are very well done, and with beautiful attention to detail. Unfortunately, most of this attention is paid at two scopes: very near, and very far. The mid range suffers quite a bit in the transition. When you’re looking out on a valley, the temples in the background are wonders to behold, and the grassy knoll beneath your feet has individually textured blades of, rather tall, grass, but the space about ten feet in front of you is amazingly pixilated. Unfortunately, I did notice this quite a bit, and it detracted from the overall experience. I just felt like the transitions were taken a bit more rushed than they needed to be. It was all relative, though, because 6 seconds later I forgot about it all when a cluster of 15 skeleton-dog-like things swarmed me, throwing bones at me.

Sound: 7/10 Again, the sounds are nothing spectacular, especially the seemingly LONE action track they programmed into the game for any time an enemy approaches you. It was annoying. It was repetitive. It was probably heard in 9 minutes out of 10 in the actual gameplay process. I hated it after only half an hour.
However, there was a saving grace to the game’s sounds. The producers did an excellent job with different sound effects, noises, and especially taunts. It wasn’t unusual for Sam to completely demolish some enemy and then open up the smack talk. One memorable example came rather early on where, after killing a chainsaw-toting maniac, he delightfully reminisced, “Didn’t I kick your ass two rooms back?” Some of the smallest lines, such as this one, mad e the experience all the more memorable, and utterly hilarious. You never thought that killing the scum of some world could be so much fun!

Overall: 6/10 Now, if the numbers don’t seem to quite make sense to you, then that’s a good thing, because the rest seem pretty high in normal standards to deserve this kind of Overall. The one true problem with this game is that it lacks any sort of overall plot. True, that was never the purpose to this game, and the developers make it painfully obvious, even gloating in that fact. It’s funny, at times, because this is one of the games where you just know that the people who made it didn’t care to dress it up all pretty for someone else. This game is, as was the original, an adrenaline pumping, shooter addict’s best friend. It honestly doesn’t need a plot in that respect. As I’ve said, it’s a beautiful game, with only a few annoyances in that the fields of tall grass are a bit ugly when they are coming into closer range (and the grass itself finally pops up out of the flat green ground). The game also has great sound effects, despite some pretty drab, and repetitive, background tracks. I just couldn’t ever get over the lack of any serious ‘larger picture’ plan for the game. It was a good shooter, and was packed with lots of bad things ranging in all sizes, shapes, and colors, to destroy, but that was the extent to what it offered as a game. Basically, if you want to release some tension and kill hundreds of critters just for the heck of it, I suggest this game to you. If you’ve come to love the story-driven styles of Half-life, Perfect Dark, or even the original Unreal, then I really would suggest you look somewhere else. Red Faction, for example, is very nice…

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/02, Updated 03/16/02