Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

released on Jan 24, 2002

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, the highly anticipated arcade action FPS sequel to the Serious Sam: The First Encounter, is a high-adrenaline arcade-action shooter heavily focused on frantic arcade-style single player action. In a world where cyberpunk meets fantasy-fiction and advanced technology is mixed with black magic and psycho-powers, Sam travels through the three beautiful worlds, confronting countless Mental's minions on his way to the Mental's base.


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It's more Serious Sam, and that was perfectly fine with me.

Now you get to visit cool new locations and kill new baddies with a few new guns thrown into the mix.

Serious Sam was a bit like fantasy virtual tourism to me, but with mowing down hordes of enemies and large bosses getting in the way.

Less fun, but it is still enjoyable.

I don't remember much about it, but I think I finished it at some point :D Basically, it was so similar to the first game that I could hardly tell them apart.

IF ADVENTURE HAS A NAME… IT MUST BE INDIANA JONES SERIOUS SAM!

One of the best action-adventure games I have played. Drawing very clear inspiration from movies like Indiana Jones, and probably The Mummy too, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter doesn’t just imitate their aesthetics while greatly misunderstanding them the same way games like Uncharted do, because it turns out you can actually do an Indiana Jones-inspired game where you travel back in time and annihilate entire battalions of alien creatures to find and kill an extraterrestrial warlord that invades planets for fun. And not only does it understand the material it is inspired by, but also finds its own identity.

One thing this one has that puts it over the first game is that it has less obnoxious enemy placement and more good level design. While the The First Encounter had mostly bland environments that were serviceable at best, reminiscent of other First Person Shooters that came before, The Second Encounter commits itself to making the world feel as ancient and liveable as possible. The first act in particular has all these temples full of mechanisms and traps in the way that turn otherwise anodyne and tasteless levels with a cool coat of paint over them into actual temples that meant something to the people of the past. This adds a lot of meaning to the journey believe it or not. When falling into lots of wacky traps you're warned that this is hostile territory, even if those traps were not set up by the aliens. This way, the places you visit start feeling more like actual places instead of corridors with nothing important to them. And the many, many secrets these places hide help to intensify the idea that you’re walking on unexplored territory. A pretty good detail is that along the first act, there are some wind traps you need to get through, and Netricsa tells you that “a mysterious breeze pushes you around”, and later, when you get to the boss battle, you fight against the Wind God the Mayans worshiped. It is details like this that bring a mystical and almost spiritual connection to the journey, making it a much more memorable archeological adventure, even if it drops the ball towards the next chapters of the game with less inspired boss battles and some perfectly-fine-but-not-great level design.

What makes this one such a great adventure game, is how everything needed to progress is strictly diegetic and natural to the world you’re in. Even Netricsa, an AI that helps you with important information, is a diegetic element and even has a personality of its own. The path is always clear due to the linear nature of the game, which is a bit of shame since I believe it would benefit from having more open-ended levels that reward exploration, similar to the likes of Doom, especially in the interior sections, an important portion of the game. Everything I've said up this point helps at making the world feel like a real and habitable place instead of transitory spaces that lack any meaning while also emphasizing the feeling of adventure it wants to evoke. I completely forgot what historically important artifacts/places I was going after in any of the three Uncharted games, but the epic search through time for the Crystal Skull - yeah, Serious Sam predicted The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, no poor CGI aliens this time, take that Spielberg - and the Holy Grail is one I’m sure to remember and one I could find myself coming back to at some point. Looking at the Grand Cathedral, in the big flat field before the final boss battle, feels magical thanks to the god rays that shine over it, turning a fairly average boss battle into a much more meaningful and important moment than it would have been otherwise.

This game suffers from being effectively Serious Sam: Part Two, in that it plays and looks exactly like The First Encounter. The excuse you’re given as to why you’re back on Earth again is rather stupid and nonsensical - the literal dev team crashes with the UFO Sam was driving after it took off after the final battle from the previous game - which might be a huge let down due to how tough everything was in that game, but this is the worst thing I can say about it really. The tone of this game is one that perfectly fits for what it wants to be, equal times clumsy and epic. Sam ‘Serious’ Stone is one tough badass, dropping one-liners at every chance, even more one-liners than in the previous game, where he was silent most of the time. He’s just one of the funniest guys ever. Plus, some levels have some funny easter eggs like the secret hall of fame room on the first level and the bit with the red phone booths where Sam calls himself from the future. The epic tone is reinforced thanks to the massive battles you partake in, full of enemies coming from all places and very big arenas. The enemy design, in regards to their behaviour and how they encourage horizontal movement in different ways, make for a much more complex and elaborate combat system. Plus the arsenal, which is much more interesting, helpful and creative; The flamethrower and sniper are two awesome additions to the arsenal, one for clearing close enemies en masse and the other one for long range and powerful enemies. If we mix the different types of enemies, the updated arsenal and the open arenas, we get one of the most epic, badass and satisfactory combat experiences in the medium. There is truly no other game like Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, the best Indiana Jones-like.

This game is so silly because I've never played a game before that feels like it hates me and wants me to stop playing

Is this game like... a sequel? An expansion pack? It's hard to tell honestly, but it's certainly a great improvement over the first one!

Levels are more fun to explore and visually varied (a great compliment with how the first encounter's levels were), the weapons feel amazing (especially the addition of a sniper rifle!), and its visuals genuinely still hold up to this day!

This game's also a ton of fun with friends, I enjoyed my time with it playing co-op even more than the first!