Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

The Second Encounter is everything the first encounter was, but better. A sort of Doom 2 in that it adds new content rather then being a new game all together. The multiplayer has been expanded with more maps, rather then the one deathmatch map in the first game. We have new snazzy weapons like the chainsaw and the flamethrower now, too. If you loved the first game, this one will just bombard you with double the fun.

Serious Sam is an old-school run-and-gun FPS, focused on constant, high-pressure action and an arcade-like feel. SS:The First Encounter had a number of weaknesses that prevented it from reaching its full potential, but The Second Encounter fixes almost everything I complained about and adds some delicious extras. It is a serious blast of non-stop fun. VISUALS: As with The First Encounter, this is a fairly simple, but attractive game. You can swap freely between first- and third-person perspective, the latter of which can be helpful when surrounded, particularly with one of the fun new weapons. There are a ton of options in the engine that a reasonably modern machine should be able to max out completely. The engine is mostly the same, but seems to have a few improvements, and the environments are far richer. As before, you won't see fancy water effects or gorgeous bump-mapped enemies, but you won't care as you're fighting the angry hordes. There is a lot of destroyable scenery, as well as nice touches like fields of high grass. One of my minor complaints about the first game was that the environments (particularly the architecture) lacked variety; this has been wonderfully addressed. There are three time periods, each with a distinct architectural style, as well as a plethora of special environments within each, from forests to lava caves to christmas villages and an ice lake. Atmospheric effects have been improved, and little touches like charring on burned enemies or vegetation provide further variety. Lovely reflective floors are featured multiple times. All in all, the game looks as good as can probably be managed in this engine. AUDIO: The soundtrack for The First Encounter was pretty good, but the soundtrack for The Second Encounter is great. The biggest improvement is in the battle music, which is now almost always a heavier variation on the area's base music, so that it blends in and out more smoothly and really enhances the feel of the game. Furthermore, there is greater variety, and the music matches the world well. (Just wait 'til you get to the Christmas Village and get attacked!) Most sound effects are the same as in The First Encounter, but everything sounds a bit better-mixed to me, and there are many more enemies to hear. As before, all monster types have an idle vocalization and alert sound, and anything that charges will cry out, yell madly, thunder on the ground, or otherwise let you know it's coming. The kamikaze yells seemed easier to localize and distance-estimate than before, and I didn't notice any odd audio behavior indoors. The sounds don't just help you when being charged from all directions - the game loves to make you jump with the sound of a chainsaw suddenly revving up behind you, or the scream of an arachnoid you didn't know was there. The developers clearly had fun with this, and there are several occasions where they'll probably get you to fire at a spawning powerup in a panic. [Look out though, on Serious some of those fakeouts become actual monsters!] CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: You have the usual set of customizable FPS controls (still a fixed screenshot key though), with finer-grained control over the use/special function key than before. Unfortunately, there is still no "last-weapon" fast-switch key, which becomes more of a problem than it was before, thanks to the further doubling-up of weapons, in particular the flamethrower and sniper rifle. Every other number key selects between two related weapons (single/double shotgun, knife/chainsaw, machine gun/minigun, etc), while slot 6 (which was grenade launcher in the first game, leading to plenty of reflexive selection errors in this one) is now flamethrower/sniper rifle, ie the two most different weapons in the game, one of which is often an emergency weapon. Worse, the fact that the sniper rifle is second means that your sniper rifle reflex will be a double-tap, which fails when you're wielding the flamethrower. As before, weapon switching also feels just a bit too slow. Thanks to all this, at least a quarter of my deaths were due to weapon-switching issues. As I just mentioned, you get new weapons, and this addresses a bigger complaint I had about The First Encounter, that the weapons didn't feel varied enough. With the flamethrower, close-quarters fights are much more interesting, and it provides new tactical options in several situations. The sniper rifle adds not only ultra-long-distance stopping power, but also the possibility of effective, fast emergency snap-shooting. This allows the level designers to make far more interesting use of monsters like Arachnoids, and gives you more tactical choice in dealing with Werebulls. (Plus, sniper rifles are just plain fun.) Beyond these, you get a chainsaw (particularly useful with one of the new enemies) and a very limited supply of screen-clearing super bombs. To spice things up a bit further, timed powerups for speed, damage, and invulnerability have been thrown into the mix. These are critical to making some of the arenas more fun, and always provide interesting tactical decisions. A good selection of new monsters has been added, thoroughly addressing my major complaint about lack of combat variety. You will still encounter a lot of Kleer, but a new (tougher) fast melee attacker has been added to the mix, and there are two new common shooting monsters that significantly upgrade the eminently ignorable beheaded variety. Mixed forces are a lot more common, including kamikaze mixes; thanks to this and to improved level design, every major combat feels unique. As with The First Encounter, levels are primarily composed of sequential arenas in which you face several waves of enemies, but level design has been tremendously improved. Most closed arenas require you to be properly sealed inside before triggering, so you don't have the option of abusing the door for easy play and boredom. Easy rocket-jump exits are extremely rare, and many walls have teleport zones to send you back, just in case you manage a clever escape. This is entirely an improvement; thanks to the new weapons and better overall design, arena traps never feel cheap. There are a few completely open outdoor arenas, but more common are extremely large but enclosed areas in which wall-to-wall (or otherwise widely dispersed) enemies will charge you, handily avoiding the run-away-and-pick-them-off exploit so frequently possible in the previous installment. Long, turning 'canyon' type yards with many distinct, individually triggered waves also feature prominently, and these are a lot of fun, with later waves sure to push you back quite a way (and the occasional spawn behind you to keep you on your toes). Most notable, though, are the many trick rooms with altered gravity, bouncy floors, wind currents, jump strips, or other complications that (while sometimes frustrating) undeniably keep combat very interesting. STORY/ACTING: As with the first game, this is an old-school shooter - constant action with a bit of framing story to motivate the running and gunning. Acting comes down to the occasional one-liner from Sam, which are appropriately silly and macho, although Sam's a much more agreeable character than, say, Duke Nukem. This ain't Half-Life 2, but you're not going to care as you desperately pour lead into wall after wall of charging foes. This game has more funny moments than the last, with a lot of callbacks to the first game (or future ones!) or to other elements of gaming culture at the time (Duke Nukem Forever!). Your digital assistant gets more of a personality than before, but since it only shows up in your briefing screen, that doesn't add much (nor does it irritate much if you don't like her, though). DIFFICULTY: As before, the game offers 5 difficulty levels, ranging from "suitable for those with no FPS experience" Tourist level to "are you serious?" Serious level (and the initially-locked "you're not serious" Mental, which is Serious plus enemies fading in and out of invisibility). The lower levels increase starting, maximum, and pickup health, while the levels above normal mostly increase the number of enemies and the damage they do. Serious may increase the speed and leap-attack distance of some enemies as well. The vastly improved level design forces you to play through arenas properly, and it almost completely removes the boredom-vs-difficulty tradeoff option that was so prevalent in The First Encounter. The difficulty is therefore much more consistent, although some fights are naturally harder than others. My first thought was that the hardest fights in The First Encounter had been more challenging than those in The Second Encounter, but then I went back and replayed those; to my surprise, they were uniformly pretty easy. Only in The Second Encounter did I really learn to play properly, it seems. Still, many parts of The Second Encounter were possibly a bit too easy (although very fun), particularly the long yards - thanks to generous supplies of ammunition and the expanded set of effective weapons, even huge waves could usually be dealt with before being completely backed into a corner. On the other hand, the boss fights this time around were actually challenging, and each one had unique mechanics. Many of the crazy-mechanic rooms (particularly those with bouncy floors) turned out to be rather hard. I had been unused to taking advantage of respawning goodies in the thick of combat, and it took some time to learn to maneuver properly to take advantage of those present in most of the confined-space arenas. The game periodically reduces you to your starting weapons, allowing it to provide interesting challenges throughout the game without resorting to ever-increasing hordes of enemies. This is completely justified in the story, and it doesn't feel cheap; in fact, it is quite fun to learn to handle familiar enemies with different weapon selections each time. At the highest level, you will need to effectively use every weapon in your arsenal to handle the various tactical challenges thrown at you. In The First Encounter, ammo balance was the main reason to change weapons, but here you will find yourself situationally pulling out many different weapons, particularly the new toys. The flamethrower's ability to hit multiple massed enemies and the sniper's snap-shot elimination will put a smile on your face and let the level designers throw things at you that would have felt positively unfair in the first game. As before, you can quicksave anywhere (and the last 8 quicksaves are retained), which could further reduce the difficulty if you don't discipline yourself in using this feature. Fortunately (perhaps), the best battles will keep you under enough pressure to make abusing this feature non-trivial at least. Most players will likely find it particularly useful in combination with the Serious Bomb, which will give you a short but critical breather in any tough fight. Wave structure does take the existence of this weapon into account; the toughest fights use continuous spawning to ensure that you can only defeat a fraction of the overall forces with a single bomb - thus they are best used as emergency weapons when cornered, allowing you to recover from a small number of critical misjudgments over the course of the game (or simply to reach a critical health pack in one of those crowded indoor arenas). Happily, even if you expend all 3 of your bombs in a boss fight in order to focus on the primary opponent, you will not find yourself bored. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: I simply cannot mention enough the fantastic improvements in level design over the first game. Enemy pathfinding is still not great, but the environments have been designed to limit how often this becomes a problem. The existence of a better weapon selection allows the designers to spring much nastier traps on you, and getting out of them is quite satisfying (although some of the obstacles are a bit irritating). Secrets continue to be generously sprinkled throughout the game, mostly being simple tests of exploration or mild puzzles, but a couple really fun skill challenges have been added as well. One time-based secret (which announces itself when triggered, so you will know to try for it on a second run without looking for a guide) drives you to complete most of the level at a reckless pace, which I found tremendously fun. Secret levels have been replaced with large secret areas, ranging from side yards to entirely separate, often humorous mini-zones linked by teleporters; the designers had a lot of fun with the look and feel of many of these. As mentioned above, the levels are much more varied in design, and they are also much more detailed. The grass is pretty, but you may find youself cursing it in levels where it conceals approaching enemies. The abundant trees will often interfere with sightlines, and the trunks have an irritating habit of blocking shots when you think you're shooting around them (I have wasted tons of sniper bullets this way) thanks to much wider hitboxes than their display geometry [the same feature that lets you abuse corners against heavies]. Be aware that enemies can see and shoot through foliage (as you can, but the seeing bit is kinda hard . . . and the sniper rifle in zoom mode has no enemy indicator). Because of all this (and because explosives that you dodge might explode usefully against a tree just behind you), it can be wise to cut down trees in your vicinity before major battles. However, note that a lot of secrets rely on not cutting down plants near triggers - so always try to pick up all the items near something you intend to cut down first. The chainsaw finally provides a way to destroy most scenery without wasting valuable rockets (which are, however, plentiful) or chaingun ammo. It works on most statues as well. Enemy spawns (and secrets) triggered by destroying objects are less common, and since there are now dozens in every level, the new recommended course is to only bother with those that interfere with combat. A tip for completionists: There appear to be two unattainable secrets. You start out with a total count of 13, despite the existence of only 12 in the first level, and in Level 2 (Valley of the Jaguar), one item find that is almost certainly a secret does not register, leaving you with 7/8. [If you manage to find either of these, congratulations, you've beaten the Internet, please post in the forums!] THE VERDICT: This installment really achieves what Serious Sam was meant to be - a crazy, hectic run-and-gun extravaganza that won't let you bore yourself even if you try. It captures and expands upon some of the best moments in classics like Doom and Quake, and it looks good doing it. I was never bored; didn't take me long to finish, but darn was it fun the whole time. (And after going back, I found that nothing in FE was all that hard either.) That said, it isn't perfect; it has some remaining control issues, irritating hitboxes, and with all the difficulty options, I wish that Serious were a bit harder. Being released as a Good Old Game prompts an unfortunate and perhaps unfair comparison to Painkiller, which simply does everything a bit better. All this prevents it from earning that coveted 5 (with which I am very stingy), but it is a very solid 4, in good company with other games I have really loved. If you like FPS games at all, or even if you just want to try out the genre, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is seriously worth your time. Check it out!

I will preface this by saying this: I didn't grow up playing quake, Unreal Tournament (though I did play the console version) or Doom. I was a console gamer until about two years ago, so I can't really make comparisons to those games. What I can say though, is that I'm a 20-year old guy who has been jumping and giggling at this game pretty much constantly for the past few days. It's manic, ridiculous, and the most fun I've had playing a video game in a while. I can't comment on the multiplayer aspect as I haven't tried it yet, but the single-player is awesome. A definite buy, at least from where I'm standing.

This games singleplayer stands up on its own, but the best part of this game is the coop multiplayer. Its pretty cool killing about a hundred aliens at once with allies at you side. If you need a coop game, this is what you want.