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.