Vehicles at least let you move, but lack the thrill of the on-foot sections. The turrets in particular are a real bore, with ten-minute stationary fire-fights testing your will to continue through the game. There’s the odd jumping section (but these aren’t too painful), but what I’m trying to get at are the vehicle and gun turret sections. Now, as I mentioned earlier, 95% of the game is an action fest played out on foot, but that leaves 5% that is played a little differently. It can be turned off, but it does come in very handy. Without it the dual-analogue control would cause some serious problems to all but the most experienced console FPS players. Now, at first this seems far too easy, but given the nature of the game and the sheer number of enemies that come at you – at speed – the severity of its lock-on is a godsend. Firing these weapons is a little different in the Xbox version, as the game uses an auto-aim feature. He even uses a cannon – the kind more commonly found on a pirate ship – which fires cannon balls that can take down a whole line of advancing enemies. He’s got a shotgun, plasma rifle, double Uzis, rocker launcher, mni-gun – the list goes on. This is made all the more fun by the assortment of weapons that Sam has at his disposal. The variety really is quite wonderful, and boss encounters are equally as entertaining.įrom the moment you start a section until the cutscene at the end, you rarely have time to breath, let alone take your finger from the trigger. With exploding evil clowns and ninja zombies, the giant steroid-using aliens with rocket launchers come off as rather normal. The enemies are the real stars of the show, with designs that no sane development team could have created. For 95% of the game you’re running across fairly large areas blasting wave after wave of freakish enemies. You’ll play through roughly ten hours (depending on the difficulty – don’t go lower than normal) of pretty relentless FPS action. There’s not really much to say about the actual game. This makes for five distinct sections to the game, with each section covering a number of locations. As is the case in recovery missions, things aren’t as easy as they seem, with the artefact having been split into five parts. An alien race has lost an important artefact and they ask Sam to get it back for them. The original games had little in the way of story, but SS2 (helped by the bigger budget which is joked about early on in the game) attempts to give some reason to the endless slaughter.
While Serious Sam 2 takes the series forward on a technical level, the gameplay hasn’t changed much at all. Considering games have been becoming ever more complicated and life-like over the last few years, Sam’s simplicity and non-stop action must have hit a cord amongst gamers, desperate for some pure, uncomplicated gaming action. It even spurned a semi-sequel, an Xbox port, and PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions of the game.
Serious Sam came from the unknown Croteam and became a cult hit among action loving PC gamers.