Needless to say, such a formidable array of interdimensional targets won’t go down easily, even for someone like Sam Stone who, as you may recall from the first game’s jewel case, has never lost a battle. John Dick officially returns as the voice of Serious Sam, while updated versions of the creepy headless bombers attempt to swarm you. In keeping with Croteam’s taste for the gleefully deranged, the 42 types of minions Sam squares off against run the strangely consistent gamut of zombie stockbrokers and witches swooping around on rocket-powered brooms and in surprisingly agile floating cauldrons, to gargantuan demons on tank treads with rocket launchers for fists, chicken-legged robot-Walkers with the heads of T-rexes, and sinister clowns who fling delicious but exploding cakes frosted sinisterly with images of your official legal likeness. Where the first game was pretty stale, Serious Sam II features a variety of topographies, from bucolic tropical islands, swampy marshes, and ridges of sizzling lava to snowy ice fortresses, Chinese cities called Hong Pong whose inhabitants apparently worship King Kong, and even a “Valley of the Giants†segment replete with skyscraper-high grass blades. In theory, it should provide more gameplay hours than the first two Sam “encounters†combined. It includes 24 levels — plus some “secret†ones — strewn over seven episodes set in seven uniquely distinct environments. Although a direct sequel to the “events†depicted in the first two titles—which Croteam sees as a single game that deadlines of the moment forced them to split up, Kill Bill style—Serious Sam II features a much beefier storyline complete with cheerfully goofy cutscenes detailing cheerfully goofy interplanetary mission objectives. In addition to the editor and the engine Croteam hoped to make a fortune licensing out, Serious Sam II also comes with an actual game attached. Volumetric lighting, bloom effects, precision pixel shading, richly detailed textures, and a new system of bump-mapping are all being put at the service of creating the largest shooting gallery ever pre-rendered. The game plan is to optimize Serious Sam II’s engine to within an inch of its life until it’s able to present an unthinkable number of characters on screen with no loss in frame rate, and they’re doing it. 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 you’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 it’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, it’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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |