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