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Review: Serious Sam II
- Title: Serious Sam II
- Developer: Croteam
- Publisher: 2K Games
- System: PC (Xbox)
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 5/10
The problem comes with everything between coming to a new area and moving on. I'll get to that in a moment, though. I'd like to paint an overall picture first. Gameplay is very much like that of the original title. The title sports pure FPS-standard controls. You use the controls to aim a bevy of weapons at oncoming hordes of enemies. Where Half-Life 2 places enemies intelligently and Doom 3 had them leaping at you from the shadows, SamII throws wave after wave of unintelligent monsters in your direction, daring you to take your eyes off the prize for even a moment. The fun factor of the original Sam, at least with this facet of gameplay, is still sound. Having to deal with over a dozen critters moving in your direction at once is both intimidating and amusing. Death doesn't hold much fear, as you have multiple lives and can respawn if you do end up meeting the grim reaper. Tossing death back at your foes is accomplished with a dizzying array of weaponry, from the standard rocket launcher to a paired set of submachine guns all the way to a parrot-bomb. Each weapon, besides having an amusement factor, is capable of taking out different types of enemies. Enemy types are varied, and in addition to keeping you on your feet make you think a bit as well.
Besides running and gunning, there are some vehicles sequences as well. You'll have the option of piloting a hoverbike, a jet fighter, and a dinosaur over the course of the game. The Boss fights themselves are also a nice change of pace from the normal scenarios. As fast as you have to think with multiple incoming, you almost have to think faster while holding down your fire button to continuously fire at one creature. Aside from huge Boss fights to break up the game itself, there are mini-boss fights throughout the game. Though there isn't necessarily one each chapter there are enough of them to give a small sense of satisfaction as you make progress towards the end of the game.
The real problem is that, while all of this sounds good on paper ... it just doesn't work on-screen. The weapons are unfun rehashes of similar weapons from other titles. There's a curious lack of satisfaction to using them. How they managed to make an auto-shotgun unsatisfying to use is a trick, but there just doesn't seem to be much weight to the action. Unlike the previous title, which saw you mowing down enemies in great sheets of blood and gore, SamII feels more like a trip to a carnival. Popping enemy-shaped balloons with darts just doesn't have the same feel. The controls, despite being standards throughout the genre, manage to feel cumbersome and unwieldy in this setting. Whether I was firing a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle, I always managed to feel as though my opponents had a better grasp of the whole 'pointing the mouse' thing.
These frustrations could have been overcome, though, if the sense of pace to the title was anything like that in the original game. Just as quickly as you tore through a mapful of enemies, you were off to another locale with more bloodthirsty hordes to slaughter. In SamII you do the incredibly fun activity of walking to your destination a great deal more than I would like. At some points there is even an MMORPG level of travel involved. While I guess I can understand wanting to show off your new graphics engine, it absolutely kills the game's pacing. To add insult to injury, several levels have cutscenes to fill us in on what exactly it is we're doing as we move through the game. In almost any other title, I'd be glad to listen to plot and learn more about my surroundings. This, though, was Serious Sam! While the scenes are skippable, whenever I made the mistake of sitting through one I regretted the decision. As laughable a plot as the amulet thing is, when I actually took the time to listen to a cutscene it was like watching a joke that no one had let the writers in on. The blue midgets talking to the gravel-voiced psychopath just went on and on, when all I wanted to be doing was squishing some evil with whatever came to hand.
Despite my frustrations with how it was put to use, the Serious engine is relatively pretty. It's not Source, Unreal, or Doom, but it stands well on it's feet as a modern FPS engine. The shiny saturated look of the original game has been mostly preserved, with the monsters not only looking creepy and weird but managing to do it with style as well. The audio environment is pretty much a wash. There isn't any music or orchestration worth mentioning, and the sound effects only managed to be good enough not to annoy. Some of the weight of the sound effects from the original game seems to have been lost, as well, leaving weapons fire somewhat hollow.
For whatever reason, SamII developer Croteam chose to fill in places that weren't lacking in the first game. By adding bulk to the design and essentially ignoring what made the original title fun, they've managed to drain the fun from what should have been a hard to screw up sequel. Even the return of the first game's co-op multiplayer mode isn't enough to overcome the game's lack of soul. Vehicles and traveling, cutscenes and an attempt at a plot ... sound like any other games you know? By trying to make their game into an emulator of more serious genre titles, Croteam diluted the essential fun-ness that the Serious Sam model had to offer. Serious Sam II is a frustrating, confused experience that made me lament the fact that you can never go home again. Even at just thirty dollars on the PC, I don't recommend this title to anyone but a desperate FPS junkie looking for a fix.
Quake 4? Stand out?
You must be joking.
It's a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.
They even managed to bless it with shitty multiplayer.
Agreed. I installed a Windwos partition on my machine for the first time in 3 years or so specifically so I could play SS2. I was a bit disappointed, in that it seems a bit watered down. The violence is a bit more cartoon like than before, and there's less of a feeling of utter terror as you're overwhelmed by hordes of enemies. But that said, I still enjoy the game, and felt the review was overly harsh. I'd have given it an 8/10 (as opposed to the original which gets an 11).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
But wasn't there a sequel to Serious Sam 1 the very next year after it was released called Serious Sam: The Second Encounter? I remember playing the hell out of that one. So why is this one called Serious Sam 2? Yep IMDB shows it was released in 2002.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Although, as I point out in an earlier post, I'd be tempted to be a bit kinder about the weapons than Zonk was, I can probably explain some of the points he's making here.
The main difference from the weapons in Doom 3, Quake 4, Half-Life 2 etc is the near-complete lack of reloading. Weapons have a set rate of fire. Some, like the double-barreled shotguns, have what looks like a reload animation, but other than the pistol, none of them actually interrupt their normal rate of fire for a reload. The game doesn't even have a reload key. This can feel a bit basic after playing other recent fpses, but it fits SS2 well.
The shotgun's a funny issue. It's not actually a bad weapon, if you think of it as a normal fps shotgun. It's got about the same rate of fire, damage and spread as you'd expect. However, the model for the shotgun shows a huge great multi-barrel affair, that looks like a gatling gun. When you pick it up, you expect that holding down the trigger would unleash a fully-automatic hail of death. It doesn't. Once you get used to this, the gun's fine. However, the model does create a bit of a false expectation. The double-barreled shotgun also seems to have less spread than I remember from the original game.
God knows what he meant about the controls. They feel fine to me.
The aiming on the rocket launcher does feel a bit broken, though, which may be what Zonk was referring to elsewhere. There seems to be a slight lag between pressing fire and the weapon actually triggering. The shots don't always seem to go exactly where they were pointed, either. Could be my imagination, could be some random left-over code from the console versions, or could be neither of the above.
In fairness, the game has some pretty damned unique weapons. The flying parrot bombs aren't something I've seen elsewhere.
I don't really understand what problems people have with this game. It has just as much action as the first serious sam. I also don't understand the lack of satisfaction in the weapons. I thought some of the weapons were more satisfying. Nothing like sending a flying death bird towards your enemies, and the sniper rifle is very satisfying. The music sounds great. The sound effects are good. I don't understand why it's so bad for some of the humor to fail. I watched all the cutscenes, and I at least laughed some of the times. It's a silly game, but that shouldn't make it bad. We need more sillyness out there. I've read several reviews of this game, and none of them satisfactorily explained what was so unsatisfying about the game. I personally give it a 9.5 out of 10. I love it.
The only thing that makes Quake 4 stand out is it's title. The rest is pretty mediocre. I totally agree with the eurogamer review on that.
IAAL
I know what you're getting at, but in fairness there are hundreds of FPS' out there that are at the realistic end of the market. You can always play one of those if you'd rather be crawling on your belly just to get an accurate shot. ;)
To me the main thing that makes UT and the like *fun* is that they're unrealistically fast, and that skill-wise they're not all just about aim. Learning and getting good at the movement (including jumping!) gives you an extra way to get better and better. Cunning movement tricks have really added an extra dimension to a bunch of the classic multiplayer FPS - strafe running in doom, strafe/curve jumping in quake2, boost jumping in UT2003, etc
Take these things out of arcade FPS titles and you're left with games that can feel pretty shallow and have less of a learning curve and therefore typically less incentive to keep playing month after month. In UT2003 I was learning new ways to get across maps 2 years after I started playing because of the flexibility of the movement.
In Serious Sam, Halo (and most 'realistic' titles also) I feel like my feet are glued to the floor or I'm running through syrup. After playing quake and ut for so many years it's a pretty frustrating feeling. The controls/movement just don't have any flexibility or feel.
It's just a shame that there aren't many fast arcade FPS' coming out any more, but it looks like everyone else would prefer to have another WWII 'sim' shooter.
Wasn't much of a FPS, but I think the first walkthrough 3D game was Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
Here's a link with screenshots:
http://nitros9.stg.net/daggorath.html
Here you go: Infestation, released in 1990. Most definitely an FPS, was in true 3D, and seems to have been entirely forgotten since it wasn't for the PC but the Atari ST and Amiga instead.
;-)
It's bastard difficult, though - I've only ever managed to survive thirty seconds or so. Apparently you can get inside and remove your helmet and wander round, so it's a proper indoors/outdoors FPS engine!
I think I'm off to have another play...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Remember good old Descent 3 ? Either you hated it because you couldn't figure out how to control the ship in 3D or you loved it because it felt like the most free environment short of a space sim. Totaly 360 degree, and very playable with a mouse + keyb.
;]
Dust off the old copy and install it on todays hardware. I'll bet it'll impress all over again. It did for me. The sounds are great, the graphics sweet, and playability is good too. I liked the cunningness of the AI and being a hotshot at the controls, strafing everywhere in 3D. The indoor/outdoor dual fusion engine behaved smoothly in transitions and gave you more options when dealing with the baddie robots.
Ahh the memories.. too bad the average gamer was so conditioned to the Doom style of play back in the day, and couldn't appreciate the extra degree of freedom and excitment.
The Descent genre needs a resurrection. Especially now with Mars exploration
-- Robi