Serious humour?
Visually, Serious Sam 2 can quite proudly stand alongside any game currently on the market, and perhaps even knock a few new releases into the shadows. The graphics are pretty damn good, even by today’s standards. Employing Shader Model 3.0 to handle some of the graphical tricks such as the heat and explosions shimmers, along with reflection mapping and bump mapping, the Serious Engine 2 give s mighty fine looking game that runs incredibly smoothly, even with loads going on in the game.
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Click for larger imageDon’t forget, Serious Sam 2 will throw loads of enemies at you in one go, so somehow Croteam have managed to keep a decent framerate going whilst getting their engine to handle loads of bad guys, numerous explosions, lighting, bump mapping and heat effects as well as doing this in large open areas with a fair bit of architecture knocking around to boot too. Some of the levels are far. Far better than others though, with the woodland levels looking and feeling the most bland, closely followed by the last few levels on the plains before Mental’s HQ. But the GiantLand levels are worth playing through just for those, while the level design may still lack a certain finesse, the levels themselves are brilliantly realised as you’re shrunken to the size of an ant… so blades of grass become tree trunks, spanners are bridges and those thick stumpy things you thought were trees are actually giant chair legs.
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Click for larger imageAnd if that doesn’t impress you, they’ve also worked in some rudimentary physics too… I say rudimentary as the Croteam physics model in Serious Sam 2 is far less convincing than that of Half Life 2… objects don’t behave quite right, but there’s obviously been some effort on this front. If you can manage to kill a bad guy without turning him into dog chow-chow, you’ll even get to see some ragdolling going on. In fact, Croteam again superbly send themselves and the industry in general up with an inter-mission cutscene showing Sam ragdolling down a vertical shaft bouncing off pipework as he goes, limbs flailing all over the place.
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Click for larger imageSonics are good too, with a decent enough set of incidental music tracks, which are often a great help in knowing when trouble is on the way. The music itself has a different theme for each new area and a jazzy upbeat techno style tune kicks in when the bad guys are near, which is very handy as often they’ll come from where you least expect it. Fans of the series will remember the Kamikaze bombhead guys and they’re back again and yes the wonderful Doppler effect we enjoyed so much in the first games is still kicking in here and having you wondering just exactly where the baddies are coming from.
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Click for larger imageA highlight of the sound has to be Sam and his banter with his onboard computer, Nettie, who keeps him updated with mission objectives. Right at the start these two start wisecracking off against and its an amusing little aside from the main aim of shooting stuff to listen to them having a bicker over something Sam has done earlier on. In fact, apart from the dialogue not quite cutting in quick enough when it starts, meaning you miss the first half of the first word each time, it’s actually quite fun to listen to what the characters have to say for once. It won’t win any Oscars and I think Shakespeare can rest easy, but some of the voice acting has been done in with the actors very firmly having their tongues in their cheeks… which sounds like it’d make it impossible to talk without injuring yourself… which is probably what they did to get these stupid accents in the first place…
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