The sniper rifle remains untouched from the last game, but the flamethrower is painfully absent. A chargeable energy pistol joins the starting Colts, homing plasma and beam weapons round out the exotic armaments, and there’s a suicide bomber parrot that can take out tough foes for you. Your arsenal has gotten a similarly colorful overhaul, but not without casualties. The over-reliance on some of the more annoying additions (looking at you, attack helicopters) can become grating, but the variety again helps keep things fresh. The fights themselves offer a wide variety of new enemies in some creative mixes, including unicycling exploding clowns, mutant football linebackers, and attack helicopters. Some of the vistas and structures are still plenty impressive, but the actual architecture leaves plenty to be desired, with an unexpected reliance on invisible walls and hemmed-in arenas. For one thing, you’ll simply never have fights of the same scale as the previous game, what with levels being far smaller than any prior. The combat is still the main attraction here, and again, it’s familiar fare but mixed in its evolutions from The Second Encounter. This variety is hit-or-miss in terms of fun, but I can’t deny it does a decent job of breaking up the gameplay in interesting ways. Some stages feature alternative challenges, like scavenger hunts to find coins or bananas, airship rides between floating islands, or timed sprints through dangerous territory. The stages are a lot of familiar Serious Sam fare, giving you a series of chambers or courtyards that fill with enemies, and expecting you to drain them of living opposition before progressing. Each leg of your journey is chopped into half a dozen or so short stages, leading to a boss fight with its own unique gimmick. What this means is five distinct chapters of shootouts, spanning jungles, swamps, festivals, wastelands, and fairytale kingdoms. Only then can he begin the assault on Sirius itself, and put an end to this universal threat. Sam’s new fan club can send him to the planets where the pieces lie, but he’ll need to do all the heavy lifting (and shooting) to get them back. Turns out that Mental can only be defeated using a medallion that saps his ill-defined powers, and that medallion has been broken into five pieces and scattered throughout the cosmos. However, his trip is interrupted by a group of all-powerful watchers who have a big job for a Serious hero. Sam Stone has at last escaped the surly bonds of Earth, striking out across the galaxy for Sirius, home of the dastardly Mental. I doubt it’s going to be the follow-up to The Second Encounter you’re looking for, though. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of kleer-smashing and cannonball bowling to be had. It’s just that it wasn’t over-the-top in the way that one would expect a Serious Sam game to be. Croteam had a brand new engine to show off here, and for the time they made a visually striking and completely over-the-top game. Serious Sam 2 builds on some of that, but ultimately feels like it takes more steps back than it does forward. Where do you go after The Second Encounter? There’s a clear line between the first two Serious Sam games, with more guns, more monsters, bigger levels, crazier encounters, and sillier secrets.
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