Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
.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.
I picked up both Serious Sam 2 and Fear (I can't be arsed typing all the capitals and
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.
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!
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.
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.
Against the grain
Not paying a fee month to month comes to mind.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
Yeah jumping is not manly at all.
They should stand there and take it, like real men.