History is filled with examples of trilogies that fail. The third in an installment is almost never as good as its predecessors, having lost or diluted what made the originals great. The Matrix Revolutions, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Spiderman 3, the list goes on and on. Serious Sam 2, unforutnately, is an example of a failed trilogy. And despite its misnomer of a name, it actually is the third in the series.
The first two games, Serious Sam First Encounter, and Serious Sam Second Encounter, followed a simple formula. It consisted of non stop killing action with a game engine that specialized in handling dozens upon dozens of enemies on the screen at once. It harkened back to the mindless days of FPS, when all you had to do was point at shit and kill it. The main hero is an amalgamation of Duke Nukem, Ash from Evil Dead, the Doom marine, and the Quake grunt, all rolled up into one. Think of a game of DOOM on nightmare mode, and then think of that game on PCP and crack, and you'll have a rough approximation of Serious Sam. The only thing keeping you from dying at the hands of legions of enemies are some fancy footwork, lightning reflexes, and a fast trigger finger.
Sadly, Serious Sam 2 just doesn't have the same feel as its predecessors. The first red flag occured before I could even start playing: A crappily rendered cut scene with bad acting and horrific dialog involving humanoids with humongous bulbous heads speaking in high pitched shrill voices.
Then the game actually started and things got even worse. I began in a village filled with cutesy looking blue humanoids, who also had humongous bulbous heads and shrill voices.
GAAAAH. And that is one of the unanimous complaints from old fans. The graphics had become cartoonish. Monsters and even bosses were no longer menacing, they were adorable. Levels involve cheerful locales such as fairy tale castles and carnivals. The color pallette used in most stages can best be described as bright and happy. Fuck it, here are but a few atrocious examples:
Then the game actually started and things got even worse. I began in a village filled with cutesy looking blue humanoids, who also had humongous bulbous heads and shrill voices.
GAAAAH. And that is one of the unanimous complaints from old fans. The graphics had become cartoonish. Monsters and even bosses were no longer menacing, they were adorable. Levels involve cheerful locales such as fairy tale castles and carnivals. The color pallette used in most stages can best be described as bright and happy. Fuck it, here are but a few atrocious examples:
This is giant land:
This is a happy fairy tale village with an ugly villager:
This gross monstrosity is a boss:
The game engine also looked a lot better but it seems to have sacrificed the ability to render massive amounts of units at once. Most of the fights were lackluster. Perhaps there'd be a dozen units on screen at once, as opposed to the original games, which sometimes had a hundred. As a result, most of the fights lacked intensity. Making things worse, vehicles and turrets scattered throughout the game gave you serious firepower, making moderately difficult battles a walk in the park. There were very few parts in the game that captured the original games' difficulty. A couple of levels toward the end, reminiscent of running man, involved a race to finish the stage under a time limit, all while fighting off bad guys. The final level finally ramps up the difficulty as well, culminating in a ridiculously difficult final boss fight. Well, it is ridiculously difficult unless you hold off using a Serious Damage power up until the very end. If you do, the fight is a breeze. In fact, none of the bosses (save for the final one), presented much of any challenge.
The storyline is dumb and pointless, just as in the previous games. However, the previous games downplayed the plot's importance, and instead, wisely focused on the non stop action. In Serious Sam 2, despite the obvious fact that the story is yet another flimsy excuse to shoot things, every level starts off with yet another painful cutscene that drags the storyline (which nobody cares about) forward. Many of these are just flat out strange. One for example, shows a bunch of Kleers watching the boss, Kleeropolis perform a magic trick. Its completely irrelevant and just weird. The guys at Croteam do have a rather unique sense of humor. One can't help but wonder what kind of drugs they were on when they designed these cutscenes.
In the end, I beat the game, because I am a stubborn fan. I admit I did have some fun. However, I, like many others, had some Serious complaints (hahahaha horrible pun intended). The game feels like its lost its roots and turned into something else. That is never something you want to do with a franchise. What you want to do is mantain the formula so that you still have your old fans, and tweak and modify it to bring in new fans. Instead, this game drastically altered the look and feel, alienating old fans, and ended up with a weird game. I can't even find it in the bargain bin anymore.
