Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD

 

Recently I finished Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and I wasn't really planning to write anything about it because who gives a shit about Serious Sam in 2020?  But upon putting the game up on my Twitter as part of a tweet train tracking my game clears over the course of the coming year, it got a bunch of positive feedback on it.  People saying how much they remember enjoying playing the game and I'm nothing short of completely baffled by the comments.

To start off, I enjoyed First Encounter quite a bit.  It wasn't anything special but it was fun, fast paced, had fun weapons and some decent-ish level design.  The kind of game that you can just fire up, switch your brain off and shoot things.  When I finished the first game I quickly jumped into the follow up expecting more of the same and while it is sort of more of the same the game is just kind of lacking and ended up feeling like a boring slog more than a fun murder romp though fantastical settings.  

At its core, it really is just more of the same thing as the first game.  Lot's of running around, shooting monsters and finding trinkets to open doors that lead to more monsters for you to shoot with your fun array of weapons.  But The Second Encounter is extremely lacking in its level design and it has exactly one trick up its sleeve to try and kill you that it uses over and over and over again for it's entire playtime 

Every single level in The Second Encounter is just a big room, usually square, sometimes rectangular and if the developers were feeling particularly mean they might put you in a corridor.  Upon entering the room, you will quickly notice an exit on the other side and as you are crossing it the game will spawn in enemies for you to shoot and the door will not open, in most cases, until all those enemies are dead.  Now when I say the game spawns in enemies, I mean A LOT of enemies, it can easily feel like hundreds per area depending on the type of enemy they decide to use too and with every room being a flat box this kind of encounter gets very boring very quickly.  

There are a few exceptions to this rule, for example there is one room that sticks out in my memory where Sam and the enemies are bouncing off the walls like crazy and shooting shit while things are flying all over the place sounds like fun, the whole thing actually just makes aiming anything a massive pain in the dick and it becomes a test of patience and frustration instead.

It wouldn't be fair to call The Second Encounter a "bad" game per se, it's still a competently made shooter with fun weapons and interesting enemies but after the first episode of the games content, the game feels like a slog.  More flat rooms with more endless waves of enemies for you to kill ad nauseum  until you either see the ending or get bored and turn it off.  It crossed the brainless threshold JUST enough to go from cathartic to boring, and it's a damn shame

FPS Used To Be Better

FPS is one of the biggest genres in the industry and always kind of has been.  A long long time ago we had Wolfenstien 3D, Doom, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D among many many others and now the big players in the genre are things like CoD, Battlefield and other more realistic military type shooters.

But that's kind of my problem with the modern FPS game.  Most of them are sort of realistic type military shooters like Call of Duty.  The only other thing we have aside from that are things like Halo but that's just a military shooter with a sci-fi coat of paint.  These games aren't bad by any stretch but they don't come nearly as close to the thrill of the old school FPS.  The fast paced, acrobatic, labyrinthine and colorful shooters of days passed has been replaced with gritty, realistic yet unchallenging games and I can't help but feel things are significantly worse off as a result.

Most people who hold this kind of opinion of older games are accused of having rose tinted nostalgia goggles but this is one of those cases where those games were just better.  I've recently been playing Serious Sam HD: First Encounter off Steam and I'm having so much more fun with this than I have with any other modern FPS title.  I can have more than two weapons, my health doesn't regenerate for free, equipment and enemies are colourful and interesting, there are secrets everywhere and so much more.  I felt a similar thing when playing Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition a few months ago too.

Even multiplayer FPS was better back then.  It used to be all about speed, skill, knowledge of the map both for layouts and pick ups and that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Things like Quake which used a lot of rocket jumping had all sorts of weird shit in play that I can't even begin to wrap my head around.  Granted things are a lot more accessible now but it's a damn shame that the games just aren't quite as fun.

Still, this is just me and I don't want to completely disregard modern FPS games just because I feel the old ones are more fun.  I have a lot of fond memories playing Modern Warfare 1 and 2 online with buddies and sometimes I find myself getting tempted to try out  the latest version of Call of Duty.  Let's not forget the new Star Wars Battlefront which looks cool as shit.  That said, I'd much rather play some Doom, Serious Sam or Quake than CoD or Battlefield.  Luckily the genre isn't completely devoid of old style games and things like Painkiller and that new Rise of the Triad game are keeping things geared more towards fun than realism and prestige bragging.