Review: Serious Sam II

The genre of the first person shooter was born with simple elements in mind: shoot, strafe, win. Since then it has moved on to loftier frontiers, better stories, bigger things. Despite this it's an lot of fun to go back to the basics once in a while. 2001's Serious Sam was the kind of mindless fun that a PC gamer needs every once in a while. No long cut-scenes, no intricate plot, just the opportunity to turn some harpies into feathered confetti. The sequel, Serious Sam II, has a lot of potential but manages to miss out on the essentials that made Croteam's first encounter a success. Read on for my impressions of Serious Sam II.

• Title: Serious Sam II
• Developer: Croteam
• Publisher: 2K Games
• System: PC (Xbox)
• Reviewer: Zonk
• Score: 5/10

On loading Serious Sam II, a group of strange coloured midgets look on at footage of the original game and wax philosophical that Sam may indeed be ... 'The One'. The rest of the game goes downhill from there. In the original cutscene, though, the plot goes on to babble some nonsense about a magical amulet that's split into sections and entrusted with different civilizations. The story in SamII has you moving from place to places assisting these little guys against the ravening hordes of evil. After you beat the boss of one area, you get a piece of the amulet and can move on.

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.

Comments

Unfortunate release timing

[RogueyWon]

Serious Sam 2 had the misfortune to come out in the middle of a fairly bumper crop of big PC fpses. In particular, Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. really stand out.

I picked up both Serious Sam 2 and Fear (I can't be arsed typing all the capitals and .s again) last weekend and I can tell you now that switching between sessions of the two games is a truly mind-bending experience. One moment you've got incredible amounts of cheese (and I think Zonk kind of misses the deliberate badness of SS2's cutscenes), then the next you've got brooding darkness and pants-wetting terror.

Bouncing through a Fear map in a happy, bouncy Serious Sam 2 mood is to set yourself up for a serious scare - in my case, making a high volume "urk" noise and nearly falling off my chair - the first time you run merrily around a corner. Playing Serious Sam 2 in a state of nervous exhaustion, crouching in corners and freaking out at the sight of each enemy, on the other hand tends to... well... take quite a while.

On a side note, I more or less agree with the review above, although it does seem a bit too harsh in places. The plot made me smile, with its complete and blatantly deliberate disregard for plausibility and sanity and the weapons seemed satisfying enough to me. Besides, the cutscenes are skippable and slamming a game for having cutscenes just seems a bit too "I'm l33ter than you because I think cutscenes in games suck and are not for REAL GAMERS". The vehicles do suck, though. Least entertaining fps vehicles ever.

Re:Unfortunate release timing

[Tet]

I more or less agree with the review above, although it does seem a bit too harsh in places.

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).

Re:Unfortunate release timing

[RogueyWon]

Quake 4's a rehash, yes, but I don't think it's entirely without value.

First of all, it manages to do a lot of stuff on the Doom 3 engine that I'd not seen there before. Now, I understand that Raven had to virtually re-write a lot of the engine, but the results are still damned impressive. Outdoors looks a bit sparse compared to Farcry, but it actually manages to *do* outdoor sequences without grinding to a halt, which is more than could be said for Doom 3. In fact, the game in general looks every bit as good as Doom 3 and yet, for some reason, runs significantly better on my far-from-stellar system (P4 3.4ghz, 1 gig RAM, Radeon x800).

The gameplay isn't half bad either. Sure, it's essentially the same run-and-gun gameplay as Quake 2, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing - the play-style was fun then and it's still fun now. There's a good range of weapons and they're all satisfying to use. Plenty of enemy types and the game manages to keep throwing new ones at you until right near the end. Even a few creepy sections, although the game never really replicates the constant tension of Doom 3. It's not a genre-defining game, but it's still about as good a game as the PC can hope for these days.

The multiplayer seems very Quake 3, which disappointed me a bit. I always loathed Quake 3 and thought it was a major blip in id's record. However, I'm sure the multiplayer scene will be graced with the usual assortment of mods that should extend the game significantly over time.

HOWEVER, I do have one very major gripe with the game that lowers the score I would have given it from the 8 or so it should have deserved to about a 4 or so. Namely, the retarded copy-protection system prevented my DVD+RW drive (the only drive in my gaming desktop) from reading the disks at all. The "helpful" customer service guy explained that this was a "known" issue with my brand of drive... no fix in sight. Eventually, I worked out I could install the game over the network by sharing my laptop's DVD drive, and then downloading and installing a crack. Hardly ideal.

I hate games piracy. Really, I do. I know a few people who work in the industry (although I wouldn't work there myself if you put a gun to my head) and outside of a few of the biggest studios, profit margins on PC games are pretty minimal in most cases. Games piracy digs into this already slim margin and, for once, the hype about it costing jobs seems pretty justifiable (unlike in the music industry, for example). Until the advent of these retarded copy protection systems, I'd never used a warez site or a peer to peer network to find a game or a crack for one. Sadly, even though I still purchase all my games legally, I'm now intimately acquainted with both. And I'd be lying if I said that the temptation to go further wasn't there now.

Re:Unfortunate release timing

[ucahg]

len("Fear (I can't be arsed typing all the capitals and .s again)") = 61
len("F.E.A.R.") = 8

61 > 8

Whatever you say.

Sorry, I quit FPSs when they wanted me to jump

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Sorry, I quit FPSs when they started to want me to jump from place to place. I guess I've been tuned out since 1995.

Re:Sorry, I quit FPSs when they wanted me to jump

[affliction]

Yeah jumping is not manly at all.

They should stand there and take it, like real men.

Re:Sorry, I quit FPSs when they wanted me to jump

[flocculent]

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.

Who could ask for more?

[honeypotslash]

More guns, bigger guns, more explostions, more monsters. And now vehicles! Along with no plot to get in your way of killing all the baddies!

Shouldn't that be ...

[krgallagher]

"SamII"

Shouln't they have called it "Son of Sam"?

Cutscenes

[Fiver-]

I agree about the cutscenes. This is Serious Sam, not Deux Ex. I don't care about the plot. I just want to shoot hundreds upon hundreds of monsters. It's frustrating because on one hand I don't want to sit through the rather lame cutscenes, I just want to get back to the action, but I'm also afraid that some vital plot point will be revealed in one of the cutscenes, so I'm hesitant to skip them. Stupid blue midgets, I don't care about your village.

Refreshing

[ninjakoala]

What I really like about Serious Sam is that it's sort of a mix of my still-favourite FPS games: Duke 3D and the two original DOOM games.

It has Duke cheese written all over it - which is a good thing in my book - and is one of the most arcade-like first person shooters around.

Personally I'm tired of the oh-so-realistic games and just want something that's crazy, exaggerated and comic-like. Oh, and fast. Serious Sam delivers. It's the Sonic of FPSes pretty much.

There are lots of people this sort of game won't appeal to, but it's a fresh breath of air to me.

Re:you guys still buy new games after WoW?

[Rude Turnip]

Not paying a fee month to month comes to mind.

Weird Stuff

[Arkiel]

I've played and beaten this game, and after reading this review, I have the following things to assert.
1) The game's diverse set of locales is an improvement over the original. It is the next logical step up after The Second Encounter gave us vast plains, Mayan architecture, and snowy fields.
The vast majority of levels in Serious Sam II have significant differences from one another. The first jungle episode being the weakest example.
2) Croteam is about as funny as a dead family pet being found under the power-lines. Hire a writer. This wierd stuff may fly in Croatia, but the rest of the civilized (I'm guessing Europeans, Australians, Asian countries won't get it any more then this American did) world does not want to watch what could be gently referred to as retarded 70s British comedy.
3) They took out localized gravity and portals. This was pretty much eye-candy in the first game, true, but damn-it-all, the gravity was FUN. The only reason they took it out of this game, I would think, is that they couldn't make it work in the new engine.
4) *spoiler* No Mental, and he did the joke we all just knew he'd do (maybe it was done in SS:SE? Reeeal familiar, anyway).
5) Underpowered weaponry, good way to describe it. I want a double-barreled shotgun that can take out a crowd, not just two at the most. That said, some of the weapons are fun to look at
6) Boss battles are fun, but sometimes uneven. For instance: Second-to-last boss battle involves you running like hell from a marauding robot which has Mental inside. You run up and suddenly find yourself in a helicopter. Now, the controls are logical, but this is the first instance where you have piloted something that can actually move freely in three dimensions. That little moment of startling uncertainty is fun, and unique in the game. It is probably not such a bonus to people lulled into a shoot-reload malaise.
7) The best FPS computer game featuring co-op play out this year. Also the only one.

I love it

[Falconoffury]

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.

Games like this keep reminding me of Descent 3

[RobiOne]

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 ;]