Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is the follow-up to The First Encounter, but not to be confused with Serious Sam 2 which is actually the third game in the series. Sam, a Duke Nukem-like character, has been sent back in time to prevent the threat to humanity. This time, Sam makes his way through Mayan, Persian and Medieval Eastern European environments.
The levels are mainly presented as a series of arenas rather than the standard narrow pathways you find in modern FPS games. There's an insane amount of enemies in the game and you usually have to kill all of them to move on. The game keeps track of your kill count which eventually reached 5550 kills! To survive, you need to keep your eyes and ears open and constantly strafe, switching weapons depending on the situation.
The difficulty is high, but luckily you can save anywhere at the touch of a button. Even though you may constantly die, you do have that 'one-more-go' attitude. There's plenty of occasions where you will shout “this is insane”, or “this is impossible”, but after many tries, you will progress, sometimes just to find tougher and more numerous enemies in the next section! Compared to its predecessor, the system feels more fair since enemies rarely spawn behind you which was a major problem in the first game.
You may expect to constantly run out of ammunition, but there's plenty of guns in your arsenal and power-ups are well placed. After tough arenas, there's always a large amount of pick-ups to get you back to full health, full shields, and full stocks of ammunition. There's plenty of secret areas, some of which can spawn extra monsters, but the negative ones seem less frequent than in the first game.
The guns vary from being standard FPS weapons, such as pistols, shotguns, machine gun, to not so standard weapons like the canon and laser gun. The guns do have their strengths and weaknesses, so you will be switching them out based on the current threats in the area. You don't need to worry about reloading since most of them aren't reloadable anyway, or you will just switch to a different weapon. There are some new weapons like the chainsaw, flame-thrower, sniper rifle and the very rare Serious Bomb which destroys all on-screen enemies. The weapon selection can be a pain because they are mapped to the number keys but you have to consign them to memory; they aren't numbered. A better idea could have been more of a radial menu that could be navigated with ease with the mouse.
The enemies that you are up against are pretty relentless, especially when teamed together. There's suicide bombers, bulls, skeleton horse type enemies that come charging at you. Shock troops, mechanical walkers and scorpion-like creatures fire guns or missiles from afar. There's a few new monsters too. All of which can quickly deplete your health so it's always good to listen out for audio cues when enemies spawn. A klaxon sounds when a new batch of enemies are coming, and each enemy makes a distinctive sound. The suicide bombers scream as they run, with skeletons you hear the galloping of hooves, the bulls stampede, the scorpions hiss. As long as you listen out, you should be able to prepare and switch to your weapon of choice.
The level design seems more open than its predecessor. You will still travel through indoor sections but this game has less of them. There's some small gimmicky sections to some areas but they are infrequent and short in length. In one area, Sam will need to use wind currents to jump across platforms, in another, wind will try to blow him off the map. There's a couple of rooms which feature bouncy floors, or winds to blow you and the enemies to the far wall. Each of these sections seems a bit silly and not as enjoyable as the normal sections, but thankfully, they are brief.
Graphically, the game is much improved on the first version, with much more detail shown in the enemies. The environment is improved too, trees shake when hit and can be totally destroyed. The frame-rate is great considering the amount of enemies it has on-screen at once. The audio still sounds pretty retro though.
If I remember correctly, there are many more difficulty modes than the first game. Overall, the normal difficulty seemed easier than the first game, but there's still many sections that require several retries, and just like the first game it is surprisingly addictive and you can't help but give it another go, even when you do think it seems impossible.
Serious Sam is a great game to play if you simply want to shoot things and don't care about the story or any variety in game-play. This game is simply about shooting things, and there's definitely plenty to shoot with a wide range of weapons.