Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Preview

How do you start a story about a sequel of a game that appeared out of the blue this spring and rapidly won the hearts of many FPS fans? Many developers tried to make good shooters, and ended up selling poor Half Life replicas, clearly not realizing that people need something new and refreshing. This is where Croteam, a little known developer team from Croatia comes in with their Serious Sam: The Fist Encounter. Even though this game only had to offer a mediocre plot, typical characters, and decent AI, it attracted a lot of attention because it gives you raw action without too much ado, which made people return to this game time and time again. The simplicity, frenetic action, huge (indoor and outdoor) levels, nice graphics and immense numbers of enemies (and probably the fact that it was only about $20) made this game extremely popular.

Right, you definitely need some plastic surgery mister ! Don't worry, I've just the thing.

It's Halloween again!

After the tremendous success of SSFE (Serious Sam: The First Encounter) Croteam stated that Serious Sam: the Second Encounter (SSSE) shouldn't be considered a sequel, as much as just the second episode. The winning format of the SSFE has been kept, but they also added some improvements which will make the game much more than a map-pack for the old game.

SSSE begins where SSFE left off. Sam "Serious" Stone stole a huge spaceship from the aliens, but he only managed to get as far as the South American jungle, and the Aztec and Maya ruins within it. This is where you start your adventure. Now, what ever happened to Egypt? Pharaoh and pyramid lovers may be a bit disappointed, but the guys in Croteam realized that the game would be a déjà vu if it took place on exactly the same locations as its prequel. So, they forgot about Egypt and introduced three completely new settings: South-American jungles, Babylon and medieval Europe. Each location will have four levels in it (12 altogether), which means the game appearance will severely change as you progress through it. All levels are humongous and crammed with different monsters. The monsters range from relatively small ones to absolutely huge behemoths, and as you are on your own in the game, you will have to take really good care of yourself. Game features several new enemies which will join efforts with good old beheaded kamikaze gnaar and the kleer skeletons to make it as hard for you as possible. The most interesting new character has a pumpkin for a head and runs around with a chainsaw... and he is not after wood, mind you. You will also meet characters which will throw lava-balls at you or can shoot from laser rifles.

As we might have anticipated, the SSSE weapons' arsenal now features three new toys that will give the game a completely new feeling. First, there's the chainsaw, lethal in close quarters combat. Than, there's the sniper rifle ideal for taking monsters down from quite a long way away on huge outdoor terrains (you will need but one bullet to kill a werebull in the zoom mode). Finally, there's the flamethrower which is sure to become one of the favorite weapons. It is extremely powerful and can incinerate everything in front of you. The entire arsenal from SSFE is still here, all from the knife to the cannon.

The best feature in the first episode was that it threw you "in medias res" of the action, and that is what they intend to preserve in the second episode. The AI hasn't changed much... the enemy will still rush at you senselessly as soon as it spots you, but AI is definitely not one of the most important things in this game. Gameplay has been improved; you will frequently run into (relatively easy) puzzles, and the surroundings are more interactive than they used to be. Your flamethrower, for instance, will be able to incinerate both enemies and objects on the map. You will run across many traps, especially in the Maya ruins. There will also be a lot of secret passages and ammo depots. Another nice feature is that the high grass will act as an obstacle when targeting enemies, and some smaller enemies like the gnaar will be able to sneak up to you through it and attack you without you seeing them. The transitions between open and confined spaces are smooth just like in SSFE.

The graphics are the aspect of SSFE that made the best impression with most players. I'm primarily talking about big open spaces with crystal clear and lively colors, and the impressive buildings (OK so most of the scenery was sand, but it still looked good). In SSSE they took a step forward, and introduced lower and higher grass, snow (no, not in the jungle) huge mountains and new buildings, as well as the fantastic lens-flare effects, that always make me stop for a moment and enjoy the sight. The flamethrower effects look great, and the things you incinerate will keep burning even when you stop flaming them. The textures are far more detailed. The Serious engine which has no trouble in generating large spaces and lots of enemies has been further improved, and now works even better than it used to. The difficulty will remain about the same as in SSFE, as finishing that on Hard level really required a lot of skill, not to mention Serious or Mental level (which is unlocked once you finish the game on the Serious difficulty setting). If you need a bigger challenge than that, try hunting lions armed with a pocket knife.

That may not be E.T. in there.

So, we meet once more, take that!!

The developers thought of improving the multiplayer mode as well. Apart from the old cooperative mode, where you go through the single player levels with your buddies, the game will also feature "Seriously Warped Deathmatch" (developed by A few screws loose from Texas) which will contain several modes: team-play modes like Deathmatch, Capture the flag etc. The game should ship with about 20 multiplayer maps. The Alfa worked perfectly on my relatively slow rig, I am therefore pleased to say that the game functions pretty well even in its current state of development.

It may seem a bit strange, that less than a year has passed since the First Encounter appeared and we already expect the Second Encounter to appear in stores afore Christmas. We cannot anticipate how this would influence the sales, but we can rest assured that Croteam and GodGames studied the market well before making this courageous move.

The last thing I heard was that the guys from Croteam got to the Beta phase, which means that all material, levels and enemies have been done. All they have to do now is tweak the game a bit, sort out some minor bugs and gameplay issues, and that would be it.

One interesting piece of news directly from the official Croteam site: "Sadly, there is one bad news and one very good. Bad is that strippers are definitely out :( . Decision was hard to make, but instead of that, (good news) we will probably have Serious Slo-Mo Delay (SSMD) feature as default in the game. It means that the WHOLE game will run 20 times slower, making it more fun to play (not to mention game time which will go from 15 hours to incredible 300 hours !!!!). It's something we incorporated in the Serious Engine long time ago, but we never used it."

If you liked SSFE, you will love SSSE, because it features all the best characteristics of its prequel and much more: new settings, enemies, weapons and better graphics, as well as an improved engine. Could you ever expect more for $20?