Oh boy… where do I even start this game? This game is known to be the black sheep of the Serious Sam titles. But the first two games were so good, I could easily see an “ok” game take this title. In fact, my favorite series only enforced this with the much maligned Deus Ex: Invisible War. So, when I found this game on sale for literally a dollar and a half, I figured “what the hell” and added it to my collection. And in the name of the 100 Days of Gaming for Extra Life, I picked it up to play for anyone who cared to watch. I’m sorry… I mean, I hope you enjoyed it, but…. I was horribly wrong about this abysmal title and I am so sorry.
Story: Sam “Serious” Stone is exactly what you expect for an action hero from the 90s and early 2000s: a wise-ass with a short temper for those who oppose him and a LOT of guns to back it up. And if you played Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, you already know before this game began, Sam had just boarded a space ship and was coming for Mental, an alien overlord who’s empire is the main protagonist group of the franchise.
But this game, despite being the sequel, seems to forget that whole spaceship thing… or at least not care. Instead, the game starts with 3 alien beings called the Serian Great Council watching footage of the previous titles and debating if Sam is “the one” their prophecy 2.0 book had foretold. Having decided they need to try, they summon him in front of them and explain exactly how he can defeat Mental. How is that? Why by reassembling a special medallion which will cause the space overlord to be no longer invulnerable of course! And of course this medallion was broken up to be guarded by 5 alien civilizations… some doing so more successfully then others.
So with that information and a mission to complete, Sam teleports to the first world and to destroy his age-old enemy… and this is the most sense any writing in this game will have. Every level will begin and end with a video that will progress the story, but it will do so with bad jokes about anything from a village being so well hidden Mental will never find it (even as you see them invade through the windows) to arguing with the current boss who just kidnapped the local princess…. because she is hideous and neither Sam nor the big baddie wants her, and every other stupid joke in between. To say this game does not take itself seriously is an understatement.
And sadly, this includes one of the worst endings I have ever seen, and while it actually does go nowhere, you have a spoiler warning since it really is so bad I need to explain it. Ready?
SPOILER ALERT
So Sam has finally done it. He collected all 5 parts of the special anit-Mental medallion and managed to bust his way not only onto his home world, but through the front door of his own personal institution (which, btw became mobile and attacked him). And in the darkness of Mental’s throne room, a deep distorted voice speaks out as the monster tries to tell Sam something before he’s killed… something about being his fath-aww too late. Sam already shot him in the face. Couldn’t have been too important right? Nor could that final encounter with a guy that you as the player would have spent three full games chasing if you started with the first and second encounters… just a pre-rendered video of gunflashes and it’s over…
Except it’s not. When the lights turn on, the room is empty and Sam just shot a speaker on the chair while Mental took another UFO and GTFOed his way off the planet. And with that the credits begin rolling, but instead of some way to recap the game or at least some cool and/or triumphant music, we get an argument from an audience who is trying to figure out if this is really the end or if Croteam is just screwing with everyone before dropping a final encounter… but alas (and to that audience’s disappointment) the game ends with yet another “to be continued” scene… except Croteam has one last scene for us all. A “silent movie” of Sam meeting with the guys who put him up to the mission, only to chase them around the room Bennie Hill style because they have DOZENS of these medallions just lying around, rendering most of this game pointless as one last slap in the face.
Ok, spoiler over, but really, this ending is just terrible and ranks as one of the worst I have ever seen, competing with the likes of Conduit 2 (so bad I actually cracked up laughing) and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon (where the writer couldn’t let a happy note in the main character’s life go without reminding us all everyone dies and he will be alone again one day like some emo little bitch who can’t stand to see anyone else smile).
3/10
Graphics: Thankfully the graphics of this game are not as bad as the plot. That is not saying a lot, but it is true. While playing the game, everything overall actually looks pretty good. Your weapons are beautifully detailed and come alive as you wield them for the most part and enemies are actually entertaining to see. Everything in fact is vibrantly colored as if you were playing a Saturday morning cartoon instead of a video game.
And Croteam did not skimp out on the art. Every “episode” of this game has it’s own theme completely unique to it, be it a jungle, or floating islands or even a feudal Japan theme. You will honestly never get bored with the variety or the art the game throws at you.
But that is not to say everything is great in this department as this game has just not aged well technically. Throughout my game, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of distance pop-in occurring, but I accepted it as I was definitely running the game at a much higher resolution then people would have expected when the game launched. It’s just the sign of an old game with a draw-distance that goes much farther now then originally planned.
However, this is far from the game’s worst issue in the graphic department. That would be those cut-scenes I talked about in the story section of this review. They are technically terrible. Being a game made before wide-screen was common, I suppose we can forgive the low resolution, but it also does not run them at full screen on top of that issue. There is a huge black border around the edges if you run this game at common HD resolutions.
And then we can get to the contents of these videos and it wasn’t even really good for when the game came out. The characters move jankilly around like the animators just sort of said “fuck it” and used in-game sprites and animations for everything and called it a day rather then do any actual work beyond some custom background scenes, even leaving places where there should be animation and their are none like Sam dropping from the sky when teleported to the first world… and falling without ever leaving an “arms at the side attention” stance for example. (That was my first hint at the quality I was about to see… and I had not even opened an actual level yet.) And considering 3 of the 4 characters that appear in most of these scenes do NOT appear in the game itself, this is really mind-boggling.
Overall while the art is good, the total package wasn’t always the best when it launched, but is definitely growing some mold now.
6/10
Sound: Like the graphics, the sound is a fairly divided package in this game. Sound effect themselves are actually pretty good, but that should surprise no one who played the previous titles. The reason is a number of them sound just as good now for as they did when the original encounters came out. This is not a complaint as the game carries over a lot of the same (if visually revised) enemies and weapons, so this makes perfect sense.
The issue here is the voice work. This was god-awful. Now don’t get me wrong. The monsters in this game sound alright but have very little work in the voices. However, just about every friendly character in the game have one of the the same two chip-monk-style voices… one for boys and one higher pitched for girls. This INCLUDES in cut-scenes. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part they are similar enough I’m entertaining the possibility they were all done by the same guy (even these female voices) with the pitch adjusted and funny accents.
However, there are three voices that actually do stand out. Sam himself, his computer assistant and the dragon that serves as episode 5’s boss. Sam sounds exactly as he always has in the previous games, and is perfect for his roll. Ever since I started playing this series, I just could not imagine Sam with any other voice and he delivers the same doses of sarcasm, bad-assery, and befuddlement when things go wrong or just plain weird as hell that we have come to know and love.
His computer, on the other hand, is new to the voice game. In the previous titles, it was simply that: a terminal screen you could bring up at any time to get info on whatever weapons you were using or enemies you have killed. Now she suddenly is a voice in Sam’s ear with a British accent that actually sounds pretty good!
And if you can get far enough through the game without vomiting to see the cut scenes, the dragon boss at the end of it’s episode was not bad either. It’s sadly a lot less of a payoff, however, as this is only heard in the cutscene before and after one of the worst fight in the entire game… but we will get to that.
Gameplay: At it’s core, Serious Sam 2 is an arena-first-person-shooter. You will play the roll of Sam “Serious” Stone as you enter an area, have the doors close behind you, and the hoards drop. When you kill them all, the next door will open, allowing you to proceed. Rinse and repeat. It’s a time-tested formula that can be very entertaining when done right. Serious Sam 2, however, does not.
A good game of this type uses enemy placement and even spawning to create a certain flow which the player can react to, allowing for skill-based gameplay and the level designed to back this. Serious Sam 2 forgoes these choices for the most part creating many cramped rooms with pure chaos of randomly spawning enemies and little if anything to use as cover. And when a number of them either have enough hitpoints that you are usually well underpowered to kill enough of them to avoid getting hit or use weapons that are line-of-sight so you can’t dodge their projectiles and the game has artificially and frustratingly increased it’s difficulty. And it’s fairly obvious when you finish the first level Croteam knew they fucked up here. You see, Serious Sam 2 is a very retro-style game which still uses scores and high-scores and uses multipliers to increase or decrease your score based on the skill you chose. Finishing on normal multiplies your score, where it’s EASY that leaves your score alone, suggesting that was the one they expect you to play.
But the game also doesn’t stick to it’s core gamplay, choosing instead to pull what amounts to random gimmicks you likely will never see again after the level you are on… and most of these simply suck, removing the enjoyment you might other-wise get without them. Things like an entire level basically made of riding slow-flying vehicles without any railings and very little space to actually move, but in a game engine that doesn’t like doing this without turning the ground you are on into ice. Or randomly being in a frozen landscape and having to get to “warm places” before you freeze to death near the end of the game and for all of 2 levels. We even have a skeleton boss who could regenerate his health unless you do something with the crystals about the map, and don’t ask me what I did… I honestly don’t know even as I was able to beat him.
But the absolute worst was that dragon I talked about in the audio section. You are in an arena with respawning spring shoes that let you jump up the cliffs surrounding it to fire ballistas set at the top of these cliffs at the dragon… the ONLY way to do damage to it. There are several problems here. From these spring shoes only lasting 60 seconds and having to be recollected from the center of the arena, to requiring you to collect ammo for the ballistas BEFORE reaching them wasting more of those 60 seconds, to the arena in general being way too big for this, increasing the time required to finish the fight by just how long you will run across the god-damned map, it is a huge gimmick fight that while easy, is slow, cumbersome and if I wasn’t playing this for the 100daysofgaming, would have been the breaking point where I just quit the game and railed on it here.
Add to this some incredibly obnoxious level design/invisible wall placements following this boss and… well, maybe I should have done just that.
2/10
Bugs: I can not even say this game ran without any bugs. Yes, combat worked pretty much bug-free, but… there were two major issues that should NEVER have made it to the final game, much less still be there for a game that was still being patched a decade after release.
- The Game Crashed: That’s right, this game outright crashed on me once while playing. Oddly, it was not during gameplay, but during a cut-scene. I was able to watch the video as an unlocked after the fact, but… yeah, that happened.
- The mysteriously disappearing HUD: Throughout the game, the HUD had parts randomly disappear and re-appear. It never actually effected gameplay, but suddenly, you couldn’t see how much ammo your current weapon had, or in one case, after losing a life against a boss, their health disappeared from the screen entirely! This is at best annoying, but in a game like this which will run multiple weapons out of ammo before you finish the current round of baddies, is actually a serious handicap since you can’t be sure when that weapon you are relying on will simply give out.
Score: Simply put, Serious Sam 2 is an awful game. It is a real shame considering how good the First and Second Encounters are, but reality should not be denied. This game is trash. Between the lackluster quality of level design and trying to make up with it by the variety of throwing many many many gimmicks randomly into how levels work in the game, the game just sucks. It’s not worth your money. On sale for under $2 it was not worth mine. Avoid at all costs.
2/10
System Requirements:
- 1.5Ghz Athalon XP/Pentium M or 2Ghz Pentium 4
- 256 MB RAM
- DirectX 8 compliant video card
- 3 GB hard drive
- Windows XP
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) running at 4 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- NVidia GeForce 960 GTX with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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