Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11082 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Take 2
• Released on: 2002-01-25
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95

Amazon.co.uk Review
Throwing even more punches than the first, Serious Sam: Second Encounter continues where the first instalment left off with 35 glorious, baddy-infested levels to get you straight into the action. Like the first, the action, the graphics and even the puzzles hark back to the days of Doom and gaming experiences long forgotten by many.

As with all these games from this genre the storyline is fairly simple, however, Serious Sam professes no real intellect and having battled the forces of evil and stolen their spaceship in the first volume you soon crash-land in South America and the havoc starts once again.

The good news however, is that this game dispenses with the dark corridors and looking for that hidden switch to solve the puzzle, and settles for all-out action with bad guys coming in their numbers the moment you start the game.

The graphics aren't the best thing in the world, but then you'll more likely be concerned with the large hordes of aliens running towards you rather than the shadows the elaborate architecture makes on the sun scorched landscape and this makes for an ungreedy 600Mb on the hard drive and a low spec machine of PII standards.

Of course, no first-person shooter would be complete without a helping of Multiplayer action and Serious Sam: Second Encounter offers plenty for those needing the fix. In all, not the best in-depth journey into the first-person shooter genre, but still enough for those needing a quick fix of action.--Jason Denwood

Customer Reviews

Two times the fun in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
After playing "Serious Sam" (The first one), I was very pleased, but after playing and completing it, I found that there was one flaw: IT WAS TOO SHORT!!! Obviously, Take 2 (Developer) has taken this into account, as "Serious Sam: The Second Encounter" has over 35, beautifully animated levels, from Mayan temples to dark dungeons. Also, SS2 pits you against some crazy (and very well rendered) enemies, such as flying witch-harpies that lance magic missiles at you, behemoth-like robot/pirhana, and killer, beheaded kamikaze bombers (a blast from the past, if you'll excuse the pun). But what better to combat them with but pump-action shotguns, rocket and grenade launchers, chainsaws and flamethrowers.

For more squeamish gamers, there are different modes of blood, allowing you to turn it red, green, or put it in "Hippie" mode, where instead of blood and gore, enemies shoot out flowers, bananas, and cartoon hamburgers. Or, if you prefer, no blood at all.

All in all, "Serious Sam 2" is a great romp through action-filled, well-rendered worlds, occasionally supplying you with invincibility and health pick-ups, depending on which of the 5 difficulty settings you choose.

Five Stars!

Leave Quake for the children
Sharon's brother is back, and this time he brought his chainsaw. The engine has been upgraded, so the developers get the chance to show off all the new things they're able to do -- leafy South American jungles, slippery floors with reflections, endless glowing things and lens flares and all the rest. In other words, it looks beautiful. Get rid of the monsters and the gameplay and you've got the perfect archaeological sim engine...well almost. The point of Serious Sam is that all this great rendering is just stage setting for the meanest shoot-em-up battles you've ever had, leaving all those other FPSs definitely in the shade: thousands of enemies surge at you at once, and if your frag count isn't in the thousands by the second or third level you're probably playing in Wuss mode, and should go back to Half Life.

Like the first, it's non stop action, with practically no puzzles to strain what little brain cells are required. The point of each level is simply to get from A to B while avoiding death, which usually means blasting your way through hoardes of enemies all of whom are trying to shoot you, bomb you, charge you, lob rockets or missiles at you, and otherwise reduce you to pixel dust. It's a cruel world out there, no time to admire the scenery.

Though there's a clutch of new weapons and new enemies, the original game still stands up as a playable shooter in itself -- you won't stop playing that once you've got this. But SS2 also throws in tricks and games which the original was almost too po-faced to attempt, presumably in case players suddenly realised it's all just a laugh: there's a bad running joke with a telephone box, and some of the secrets are plain stupid, like oversized enemies, miniature enemies, trees and snowmen that turn into enemies, even a Santa Claus to frag at one point. Plus, of course, Sam's patented set of one liners which are almost down to Hollywood standards. Also, just to keep you from nodding off when you enter yet another room or arena, there are the "specials": a bouncy up-and-down room, a bouncy side-to-side room, a cylindrical room, and so on. Gimmicky, and as a reviewer below noted, probably signs that the developers realised how monotonous level after level of run and shoot was going to be otherwise.

However, there's enough variety to keep you interested, and with three distinct areas (first a South American area with ziggurats and temples, virtually indistinguishable from the Egyptian theme of the original game; then you're in ancient Babylon (same thing, different surface decoration); and finally some sort of snowbound spooky mediaeval castle affair which, for no apparent reason, abruptly turns into underground caves with lava and teetering stone bridges) you at least get to use a variety of strategies: some are bare arenas where you just run, pump bullets/rockets/etc at waves of enemies, others are strewn with buildings to hide behind, so the strategy is more sneak-n-pick off with your sniper rifle. Actually, the final area, the castle, is almost insultingly easy in most of its levels, thanks to all the corners you can hide in. You'll rarely need more than your pistols for most of this. Pistols are, surprisingly, the most useful of all weapons, since it's not the big enemies that are the problem (the bulls, rock-launching devils, red rocket-launching chicken things etc -- I'm sure they have names for those who can be bothered reading the manual or the info screens which keep popping up) -- they're easy to deal with -- it's the hoardes of skeletons. Nothing you'll ever need to cheat for (at least not on "Normal" level) and once you've got your strategy sorted you'll rarely find yourself in a corner.

The final level in SS1 was a disappointment, but here it's at least slightly more challenging. It begins simply enough: "The Cathedral" begins with a massive shoot-out in an arena, a token accelerator-room, then another shoot-out around the Cathedral itself (but this is also insultingly easy and again you won't need more than pistols) before entering for the showdown, which is more of a pain simply because it's in an enclosed area. The game ends with the words "To be concluded", which is either a salivating prospect or groan-worthy depending on how many times you had to click that reload button.

You may well tire of doing it from start to finish, but in small doses this is one hell of a shoot-em-up, and almost too much fun to be decent.

Better than the firt one?
I played the first one of these and loved it, gleefully looked forward to the second one and good, more of the same, just what I wanted. However and it's a big however, Serious Sam 2 after a while started to bore me, the developers had stuck in some theme rooms, ie a zero gravity room, a rotating room, a dark room all in the attempt to freshen things up but it all left me with this feeling that it was all a bit desperate and directionless.
Serious Sam 2 looks better than the first one and probably if I hadn't played the first one would have been great, but I had played the first one and was ultimatly unsatisfied with this sequel.