User Reviews (1 - 11 of 48)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

A perennial favorite...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I love this game: good, clean design, few bugs (well, single player... online is another matter), and runs fine even on my aging Sony. The way that Croteam captured the concept of VOLUMES of baddies attacking at once is just fantastic. The weapons and characters are excellent, the puzzles are fun, the secrets are cool... it's just a lot of fun.

A Top Gun!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've played alot of video games but I can say straight off that this has been one of the best I have ever played.
Why do I say that?
Well the great graphics,sound,gameplay,intense immersion and challenge aside,this is one of the few games I own that I keep coming back to play again....and AGAIN!
Both of the incarnations of Serious Sam(1 & 2)are on the same high quality scale of the first person shooter genre and rate very high marks indeed.
Croteam the creators of the Serious Sam phenom were to release a third and final game to end the series but to date this unfortunately has not come to pass.
But I'll continue to keep my fingers crossed and on the trigger ready and waiting for that day when Mental and his minions challenge us once again to a battle to the death.
A game no true gamer should be without in his collection.

Great Environments - Good Gameplay

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played a lot of first person shooters, and quite a few platform games (like tomb raider), and I find that this game takes great qualities from them both.

For FPS fans, the gameplay is fierce. Tons of weapons, lots of ammo, and billions of enemies streaming at you from all sides. However, a bit of stealth and your sniper rifle will improve your chances of surviving a walk into the open.

The environments are huge, with great detail. No, not up to the 2004 releases like Doom3 or HalfLife2, but the textures are very detailed. While the textures are a bit repetitive, this allows for very fast gameplay. Your computer won't have any trouble drawing a vast valley with four massive pyramids and with dozens of enemies (some three times your size). The view distance is amazing, with only the detailed grass having an obvious draw distance (a very nice touch that allows you to feel completely surrounded by grass without having to draw all those polygons throughout the map).

The first world you navigate through is "Mayan". I actually work in Mexico and can tell you that the textures used for those maps are amazingly authentic. Some are actual photographs of famous Maya murals that make wonderful wall textures, making you feel like you're in a Maya palace.

Finally, the little puzzles and secrets that are found throughout the game give it a kind of "platform adventure" feel to it. This may be annoying to FPS fanatics who only want to walk down corridors and shoot whatever pops up. Serious Sam Second Encounter gives you all the action, with the added desire to explore every nook and cranny of the huge maps. The puzzles are not tricky, generally fun and sometimes skill-building.

I highly recommend this for some FPS fun on the lighter side of Doom3.

A great sequel to a great title

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Serious Sam 2 picks up where Serious Sam left off. The game essentially has the same engine with some improvements. It also contains new weapons, enemies and of course brand new levels. Serious Sam 2 is even more fun than the original and multiplayer cooperative matches are simply a blast!

Fun and difficult, but repetitive

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: May 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing "Serious Sam: The Second Encounter" for about a week and a half now; one of my sister's friends thought it would be fun and so loaned it to me to give it a shot--no pun intended.

I have mixed feelings about this game, which I will do my best to convey via a list of pros and cons. Here you go:

PROS:
1. Excellent graphics--muscles actually move in the werebull, for example.
2. A variety of interesting weapons. You get everything from the (useless) revolver to a portable cannon, and ammunition can sometimes be sparse; this forces you to be adaptable. You can even knock down trees or set things on fire.
3. There is a sentient computer that you carry around with you. Every time you kill something you haven't killed before, every time you get a weapon you haven't had before, and every time you come across something important in the gam,e this computer analyzes it for you to an exhaustive extent. It gives you hints into how to use your new weapons and how to kill new enemies. That's just really cool.

CONS:
1. The style of the gameplay gets really repetitive. You see, the reason this game is as difficult as it is is because the game has a habit of putting every single enemy against you, in large numbers, all at once. You don't just fight a few kleer skeletons; you fight about fifty kleer skeletons, two lava golems, about ten harpies, four major bio-mechanoids, ten minor bio-mechanoids, three juvenile arachnoids, two adult arachnoids, twenty beheaded kamikazes, ten beheaded bombers, and five werebulls.

All of that all at once. Every time you go around a corner, you don't fight one or two enemies, you fight about ten of everything the game's put against you so far. This is what makes the game a challenge, and it has helped me in those areas of other games where you fight a whole bunch of monsters, but it gets OLD. Seriously. It gets REALLY old, and it kind of bothers me that the game has to rely on that to make it difficult. Compare this to the comparatively difficult "Half-Life" by Sierra, which is far superior, with superior graphics, and it manages to be equally hard while still providing a variety in its gameplay and a mix of puzzles.

2. Come on. "Serious Sam"? How can you possibly take that seriously as the A-game that it is instead of some lame B-game spinoff of "Quake" or whatever? They could have done a much better job naming this thing.
3. Multiplayer is difficult to set up and it simply does not lend itself well to anything but deathmatch, even though it is possible to play the whole game multiplayer as in Blizzard's "Diablo II".

So. Three stars. Excellent graphics with beautiful scenery and a variety of weapons and enemies, but repetitive gameplay and sloppy multiplayer.

Should be More Serious

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: February 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Serious Sam: the Second Encounter (SSSE) is a very good game, but it's got one trait I had trouble with: It's not serious!

Oh but the graphics are great! Croteam really deserves credit for a job well done. Sunlight, rain, and special effects are rendered very nicely in this game, and amazingly it ran smoothly even on my Pentium III system.

The weapons are good too. SSSE brings back all the weapons from Serious Sam but also includes a great flame thrower that can set a tree on fire.

But as I mentioned, this game isn't serious, and I found that annoying. Shooters and lame jokes just don't mix. When I travel to an alien planet to battle hordes of scarey monsters, I want to have white knuckles and a feeling of awe. The humor in SSSE just seems misplaced. I guess it's like laughing at a funeral.

Don't let that stop you from buying this game, however. It's well worth the price, and it'll hold its own with any shooter out there.

One of the best FPS ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: November 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Buy this game now. All I have to say. Highly recommended.

Seriously Fun and Difficult but married by thin performance!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Serious Sam the Second Encounter has no story, just oldskool gameplay. The graphics are nothing special, pretty neat effects, but nothing that raises the bar past unreal or quake. The sound system is pretty unique and realistic, and the music eyecandy is cool. The gameplay is fun and tough, literally hundereds of freaky and hard big enemies and you using big guns and armor at the same time in huge interesting levels with great arcitecture. At maxed settings at high resolutions, the game performs pretty disapointing on low and med-end system setups, but on hi-end system setups the game performs decent.The game is seriously meant for multiplayer. Poly counts are kind of low. Its' a great game overall but not the best.

Seriously Difficult

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: April 30, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have owned Serious Sam: Second Encounter for more than a year now, but I never play it. But just today I thought I'd give it another go. After my experience, I decided to write a review.

To begin with, Serious Sam: Second Encounter is a gorgeous game. The graphics are amazing, and the music is awesome and really gets your heart pumping. On those qualities alone, I would give it 5 stars. This was actually my first first-person shooter since my days of playing Doom. Naturally, I was amazed at the difference in graphics and gameplay. Serious Sam was way more advanced than Doom. However, I have played many first-person shooters since my purchase of this game a year ago (most notably, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and No One Lives Forever 1 and 2) and I have to say, as nice as this game was when I first bought it, there are a lot better games out there.

I had purchased both the first Serious Sam and Second Encounter at the same time. About half-way through the first one, I gave up and found cheats for it on the internet. Why? Because this game is virtually unbeatable. There are no difficulty levels to choose from, which is insane, since the whole game seems to play out in what would be one of the highest difficulty levels, if it had any. At any time in the game, you have about what seems like 20 different species of enemies coming at you in groups of a dozen each. This hardly seems fair. I know, I know. Games aren't supposed to be easy, but this one is just downright frustrating. You have things coming at you from the front, the back, the sides, up in the air and sometimes up from the ground. There is no way you can keep track of and eliminate all of these threats, especially since they all seem to keep multiplying. So in other words, unless you are in God mode, you just keep dying...and dying...and dying...

So in other words, Serious Sam: Second Encounter is for serious players. Anyone looking for a challenge will sure find it here. But for anyone who wants any sort of a chance to win a game (without first suffering from a stroke), I suggest staying away from this one. Like I said, the game looks great. But you know the old saying. Looks aren't everything.

This game is Serious fun.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Sam's story? Somewhere out there in the nether regions, but it's solid in the same way that DOOM's was (though there are lenghty writeups for the story, history, and characters that inhabit the game world at Croteam's website, if you're so inclined to spend half an hour) with a minimally invasive plotline.

Sounds? More than auditory filler; enjoyable to listen to indeed. The sound effects are pretty awesome: grabbing a +100 life heart fills the air with an onimous (yet comical, in its own way) fading noise that works exceptionally well in conjunction with the doors closing about you and the light fading.

Sam's scenery and sights are wonderfully scenic and impressive both due to and in spite of their huge size and low polygon count: Croteam sure knows architecture. In this title they've even thrown in a large number of plants that may prove to be deadly in one form or another. Even without the non-stop show special effects seen in the original Serious Sam demo, the game seems more impressive than more densely built, smoother looking FPS titles thanks to its sense of scale and the frenzied pace of its battles.

Sam arguably outdoes Rise of the Triad in terms of plain fun and wackiness--but here it's not just buried in deathmatch or cheats and command line parameters. Sam is crazy ALL the time. Lots of stuff done here has been seen before in Duke Nukem--from the ubiquitous voice-overs to the movie set in a room, but here it meshes into the product and is quite a bit more easygoing. It's a telling point that where 3D Realms would make a gigantic alien with rockets, Croteam would build a mechanical, hugely stereoid dependent chicken of roughly the same size--and then throw 5 of them at you in a field, along with a hundred lesser enemies.

Play this game co-op, turn on Infinite Ammo if you're so inclined, Extra enemies, and of course diallow clients pausing the game. While I do have issues with the complexity of the administrative control, co-op is often a very smooth affair on a good connection. Competitiveness in Serious Co-op is simply everybody running around showing each other where the secrets are while trying to bag more than their share of the monsters, and this experience should not be missed by any. There aren't campers, PKs, item thieves or smacktards in Serious Sam. The game's general tone, as it works out, is less like two birds at the same feeder than DOOM and more rewarding for people to come to another's aid--since you have to go that way in any case.

Serious Sam should not be missed.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 Next 

Actions