Seriously.

Heck yea, its time to get serious.

One-liners aside, both Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter meet all the requirements of a "no brainer" FPS shooter. And these are:

1. Shoot anything that moves;
2. Check for more moving things;
3. Shoot some more to check if it's really dead.

You must be asking "but dear Cosmico, aren't there a thousand other generic shooting games like this?". Yeah, there are. So what made this one so special, to stand out of the endless wave of FPS games for PC? Well, these did everything right.

To start off, your character is a Duke Nukem-clone called Serious Sam, Sammy for friends. Duke Nukem will always be the king, but this dude is just as cool, and he will make you laugh from time to time, either with his corny one-liners, or commenting the actual game and other stuff.

There's a memorable scene that actually criticizes most shooters (and a lot of other game genres as well). There's this room where this pumpkin-fat-chainsaw-guy shows up for the second time, and after you kill it, Sam will spout "Hey, didn't I kick your ass a few rooms back?". Obviously mentioning the fact that most enemies in games all look the same, this basically tells you this game will make you laugh, not aiming for a more generic "serious" tone, despite the game's title. I also literally laughed out loud when Sam started humming the Indiana Jones music while running away from a huge boulder. There needs to be more games like this.

And the actual gameplay is a blast to play. As I said, it's just shoot and run, but damn is it fun.

There will always be a huge amount of enemies in your screen to enjoy murdering. The game's engine is pretty optimized, allowing up to (if I remember) 150 enemies on-screen. That's a lot to kill. The enemies are also varied and fun to kill, going from mindless one-eyeball monster things to huge scorpions.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter beats the original game thanks to it's great level design, sporting huge arenas and some clever puzzles.

Then came Serious Sam 2. That's when things got ugly.

We know Serious Sam is supposed to be silly, but not this silly and random. Serious Sam 2 is childish as shit, it looks like a cartoon for 10 year olds. The jokes are stupid, Sam's one-liners are still corny, but an annoying type of corny, and oh my fucking god what the fuck did they do to the enemies.





What the fuck. No, just no. What were they thinking.






The game's engine isn't optimized. At all. It can barely handle 10 enemies on screen without lagging everywhere, no matter how much expensive or top of the line your pc is. The guns sound really weak and crappy, and you can snipe people with the shotgun. What.

It's still a good game, but it holds nothing to the great two first games. Serious Sam 3 is coming in the future, hopefully playing more along the lines of the originals - silly, but not that silly and stupid.