I want to be entirely straightforward about the nature of this review; this is not a review of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, this is a review of The Second Encounters HD remake and subsequent Xbox 360 port. I will not be going over the design of The Second Encounter, instead I want to discuss my gripes with the HD remake, and then the weird oddities of its console port. With that being said, this is by far the worst way to play what is probably my least favorite Serious Sam experience. I am already not the biggest fan of The Second Encounter, and the issues that stem both from its remake and port job only serve to make it a worse experience.
I will not regale you with the copious amounts of versions, re-releases, and ports that make up the Serious Sam franchise. The only important bits to know for the sake of this review is that the original Serious Sam games, The First and Second Encounters, were released in 2001 and 2002 respectively, and then were both remade come 2009 and 2010. These remakes, appropriately, remade the first two entries in the then new and fancy Serious Engine 3, and with that process came a complete new look. Weapons and enemies had brand new models, textures were upscaled to match the standards for the time, and add some nice new gibs and animations for some of the enemies. Of course, I am probably not touching everything these remakes set out to do, but that is the gist. The problem I have with these remasters is that, in the process of making everything, quite literally, shiny, Croteam severely messed up any sense of art style and cohesion that these games had. The First Encounter gets off slightly easier because the Egypt aesthetic is consistent throughout, so while it is still very shiny and plastic look to it, like every model and texture looks like they have a cheap RTX filter on them at all times, it at least isn't a complete aesthetic shift every couple of levels. The Second Encounter has both the aforementioned Botox injection, and the drastic aesthetic shift; the latter isn’t that big of a deal in the original versions of the game, but here, with the horrible upscaled textures and really shiny everything, it is much more jarring. On top of that, The Second Encounter features levels that take place in massive outdoor areas, but because every surface looks like it was freshly polished near minutes before Sam got there, all of the plants and grass that look normal in the original, look drastically unnatural. As well, a lot of the weapon models were taken directly from the original Xbox port and then upscaled, which does not look good. These models were made for lower resolution textures, and so they also look slightly out of place. But that is all aesthetic criticism, there are some technical critiques I have.
This port does carry over a lot of the bugs that are present in the original PC release, such as enemies getting stuck on walls and terrain, but the port does have some of its own dedicated bugs. Firstly, and the one that was most baffling, is that the AI pathfinding is absurdly broken. It's not that noticeable at first, but as soon as the player reaches the alleyway fight in City of the Gods, it makes itself apparent. In the larger, more open combat arenas, such as the before mentioned encounter, almost all of Ziggurat, and especially in The Grand Cathedral, enemies just start bolting off the complete opposite direction of the player, or worse, the strafe around them. I can not tell you how much ammo was wasted due to these bugs, it is almost impossible to hit enemies that fall victim to these bugs, and it completely destroys the combat structure the game is so dependent on. I am unaware if this bug is present in the PC version, but I never hear it brought up when this game is in discussion, so I can only assume it is a problem in this port. As well, being a PC to console port during the 7th generation of consoles, there are some slight performance issues, and some sluggish controls. There is some slight texture pop in with some of the bigger maps, and some frame drops when a big amount of enemies are on screen, and the load times are just painstakingly long. They make dying so much more of a pain because you are just sitting there on the loading screen scorned by whatever got a cheap shot at you from around a corner. The controls aren't that bad, I have definitely played worse, but they fail in comparison to the smoothness of the original Xbox port. They are very choppy and feel like it's trying to emulate mouse movement. Additionally, the two methods of swapping weapons are not the best; the player can either use the shoulder bumpers to linearly cycle throw weapons, or use the D-pad to open up a weapon wheel to specifically select one. These aren't bad options, but they really should be swapped, like how they are in the 2017 Fusion release of the game, because the Xbox 360 D-pad is probably the worst D-pad out there, and using the bumpers takes way too long during high octane combat encounters.
And that's really it. I would not recommend playing either the original 2010 release of The Second Encounter HD, or its Xbox 360 port. If you are interested in this series in any way, I would highly suggest you either check out the classic release of the game, the original Xbox port, or the modern 2017 Fusion build that is available on PC and all modern consoles, there is no reason to go back and play this version, if only to say that you have like me.
I will not regale you with the copious amounts of versions, re-releases, and ports that make up the Serious Sam franchise. The only important bits to know for the sake of this review is that the original Serious Sam games, The First and Second Encounters, were released in 2001 and 2002 respectively, and then were both remade come 2009 and 2010. These remakes, appropriately, remade the first two entries in the then new and fancy Serious Engine 3, and with that process came a complete new look. Weapons and enemies had brand new models, textures were upscaled to match the standards for the time, and add some nice new gibs and animations for some of the enemies. Of course, I am probably not touching everything these remakes set out to do, but that is the gist. The problem I have with these remasters is that, in the process of making everything, quite literally, shiny, Croteam severely messed up any sense of art style and cohesion that these games had. The First Encounter gets off slightly easier because the Egypt aesthetic is consistent throughout, so while it is still very shiny and plastic look to it, like every model and texture looks like they have a cheap RTX filter on them at all times, it at least isn't a complete aesthetic shift every couple of levels. The Second Encounter has both the aforementioned Botox injection, and the drastic aesthetic shift; the latter isn’t that big of a deal in the original versions of the game, but here, with the horrible upscaled textures and really shiny everything, it is much more jarring. On top of that, The Second Encounter features levels that take place in massive outdoor areas, but because every surface looks like it was freshly polished near minutes before Sam got there, all of the plants and grass that look normal in the original, look drastically unnatural. As well, a lot of the weapon models were taken directly from the original Xbox port and then upscaled, which does not look good. These models were made for lower resolution textures, and so they also look slightly out of place. But that is all aesthetic criticism, there are some technical critiques I have.
This port does carry over a lot of the bugs that are present in the original PC release, such as enemies getting stuck on walls and terrain, but the port does have some of its own dedicated bugs. Firstly, and the one that was most baffling, is that the AI pathfinding is absurdly broken. It's not that noticeable at first, but as soon as the player reaches the alleyway fight in City of the Gods, it makes itself apparent. In the larger, more open combat arenas, such as the before mentioned encounter, almost all of Ziggurat, and especially in The Grand Cathedral, enemies just start bolting off the complete opposite direction of the player, or worse, the strafe around them. I can not tell you how much ammo was wasted due to these bugs, it is almost impossible to hit enemies that fall victim to these bugs, and it completely destroys the combat structure the game is so dependent on. I am unaware if this bug is present in the PC version, but I never hear it brought up when this game is in discussion, so I can only assume it is a problem in this port. As well, being a PC to console port during the 7th generation of consoles, there are some slight performance issues, and some sluggish controls. There is some slight texture pop in with some of the bigger maps, and some frame drops when a big amount of enemies are on screen, and the load times are just painstakingly long. They make dying so much more of a pain because you are just sitting there on the loading screen scorned by whatever got a cheap shot at you from around a corner. The controls aren't that bad, I have definitely played worse, but they fail in comparison to the smoothness of the original Xbox port. They are very choppy and feel like it's trying to emulate mouse movement. Additionally, the two methods of swapping weapons are not the best; the player can either use the shoulder bumpers to linearly cycle throw weapons, or use the D-pad to open up a weapon wheel to specifically select one. These aren't bad options, but they really should be swapped, like how they are in the 2017 Fusion release of the game, because the Xbox 360 D-pad is probably the worst D-pad out there, and using the bumpers takes way too long during high octane combat encounters.
And that's really it. I would not recommend playing either the original 2010 release of The Second Encounter HD, or its Xbox 360 port. If you are interested in this series in any way, I would highly suggest you either check out the classic release of the game, the original Xbox port, or the modern 2017 Fusion build that is available on PC and all modern consoles, there is no reason to go back and play this version, if only to say that you have like me.