Serious Sam Gold is a combination set of Serious Sam, and its sequel, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. I enjoyed revisiting the original Serious Sam for this review, and the sequel, well, we will get to that in a bit. Let's talk about the original game to start off.
Serious Sam in genuinely fun. The guys at Croteam took the best elements of classic games such as Doom, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein, and put them together into an unbelievably fun first person shooter. You get a lot of the standard fps weapons such as the pistol, shotgun, bigger shotgun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and of course, the trusty knife (which I never used). You also get some slightly oddball weapons through the course of the game. First you get the XL2 Laser cannon, which slightly resembles the turret from the Millennium Falcon, with a convenient carrying handle. Then you get the SBC Cannon, which is, well, a large black cannon. This turned into one of my favorites, since when you fire, it shoots a big cannonball which rolls along the ground, smashing through lower powered enemies, and exploding on impact with larger foes, doing an amazing amount of damage.
Game play is very straightforward. You kill endless waves of monsters and advance slowly towards your goal. What is your goal you ask? I think you've been sent back in time to stop some kind of alien plot to destroy mankind. You know, first person shooter plot #3 (out of a possible 4). Anyway, who needs a plot! There is a pda style interface that give you periodic updates on your mission progress, and what you should be doing at that point. It also give you information about the new weapons you receive, and the monsters you kill. This starts out being a nice addition, but towards the end of the game, I started ignoring the information updates completely. The levels themselves were decent, a lot of push the button to open the door type missions later in the game, which did become repetitive. Overall, I finished the campaign in about 10 hours, so its not a long game, but definitely worth the $19.99 purchase price.
The enemies are unique. You have the Beheaded Rocketeer, Bomber, Firecracker, and Kamikaze. These are soldiers who were beheaded and brought back to life to fight against you. The first three walk around carrying their heads in one hand, and their weapon in the other. The Kamikaze on the other hand has traded in his head so he can run full tilt at you with a bomb in either hand. I hated these guys simply because they scream the entire time they are running towards you and they explode when they get close. Although, I would probably be pretty crabby too if someone killed me, brought me back to life, gave me two bombs, and said “See that guy over there, go blow him up, and you can go back to being dead.” The other oddball of note (not that every single creature wasn't odd, but these stand out to me), were the Gnarrs. These things looked like the Rudolph/Gossamer from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, except for the lack of tennis shoes, and a little more subdued color. These are the only ones I will bring up here, simply because there are too many to mention!
Now, on to Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. This game, which came out about four years after the original, is something of a disappointment to me. You pick up where you left off in the first game, on a ship heading to Sirius, the home of Mental (the bad aliens). On the way out of Earth's orbit, your ship is run into by what appears to be a group of Sam Stone Groupies. Your ship crashes back to Earth, and you find yourself back in Egypt for the second time. And again, you are faced with wave after wave of monsters, all wanting to be the one to slay the legendary Sam “Serious” Stone.
The graphics were improved in the sequel, although not as much as you might think for a game that came out in 2005. They added several new monsters, and gave you several cool new weapons, one of which is a chainsaw (very fun). The environments were larger, and you can have about 100 monsters on the screen at once (and there were a few times I think I did). So, what was my problem with the sequel? I hate puzzles that make me jump from platform to platform, and that make me dodge ceiling blocks in this type of game. If I am playing a fps, I want to kill stuff, and maybe have to find a way to open a door occasionally, not feel like I'm playing Super Mario Bros. If I wanted to jump around, I'd be playing the Prince Of Persia (which I own and enjoy). I hate it when a developer decides to add stuff like this in to try and give you a “new game play experience.” If I wanted a totally new game play experience, I wouldn't be playing a SEQUEL! Anyway, enough of that.
I think that Serious Sam Gold is definitely worth a look if you have never played the series. And for those of you who have, you might like the second encounter more then I did, a lot of my dislike for it stemmed from the puzzle aspect, not from the overall game play. Give the game a shot, seriously!
