Simply put, Serious Sam II just feels alive.Ĭroteam has elected to respond to this challenging dismissal of their casual brilliance in two keys: charging more than $20 a copy this time out, and creating the best graphics engine ever. Whereas other recent high-profile shooters proudly flourished 900 variations on lightless corridors festooned to the rafters with steam-wreathed pipes, misty ducts, and faintly smoking gratings, all golf-clappably rich in detail and uniformity, Serious Sam lovingly shrivels your retinas to raisins with vibrant, fully destructible environments that look nothing alike, or like anything youâ€™ve seen. Fortunately, Serious Sam 2 tries to fix this, and it ends up being less frustrating as a result.Įxuberance literally screams from every frame, in blazing swashes of color and fury including, but not limited to, the cascades of flowers you can once again substitute for blood. The balancing issues weren’t noticeable when you faced a few dozen monsters, but when charges turned into stampedes, the game just didn’t work. In the original two games (the creatively named “First Encounter” and “Second Encounter” were either too hard on the lowest difficulty and way too hard on the middle ones. And itâ€™s hard, but not stupid hard like before. In fact, once you get to play through the dumb but fun levels of Serious Sam II, you’ll probably end up asking yourself “Duke Who?”įor a product whose sole object is to squash and mince you, itâ€™s all love. Serious Sam Stone appears to relish the prospect of inheriting the solipsistic Duke mantle of tough guy vs.hoards of aliens, if only to improve on it. Understandably deciding it had bigger fish to fry, Croteam quietly backed down and went on to create the original Serious Sam, a popular title with a superior engine to anything on the market, while Duke Nukem made like a tree and disappeared forever. Developer Croteam swore this wasn’t the case, but they received a lot of grief over certain troubling resemblances between the shirts worn by the heroes of their respective games.

Dumber than Doom, funnier than Half-Life, stranger than Painkiller.įew people know that the template for Serious Sam – a buzzcut, tanktop-wearing badass with a big gun – was actually Duke Nukem from then vaproware title Duke Nukem Forever.

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