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Platform: PC,
Xbox
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Serious
Sam 2
A
few years back, deathmatch was all the rage in the world of the first
person shooter. Thanks in
no small part to the success of games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal
Tournament, publishers were releasing similarly themed FPSes left and
right. Bucking the trend, however, was a small European developer
named CroTeam with their game, Serious Sam. Pushing
a back-to-basics mind-set, the game focused on a single player campaign,
as players ran around blasting up strange, mutated beings, having a
great time all the while. Now
CroTeam is back with Serious Sam 2, promising to once again focus
on the single player experience.
While
Serious Sam has always been about a one-man army facing off against
hordes of enemies, storyline has never been a fixture of the game,
instead presenting a stripped down, over the top premise, while letting
the action speak for itself.
This remains the same for Serious Sam 2, as Sam Stone will
this time be facing off against legions of time traveling aliens.
It won’t just be a rinky-dink mix of bad guys that need to be defeated, either. Sam will be facing off against very large numbers of enemies at any given time. The plan is to put the emphasis on a visceral experience in this sequel, getting players into a run-and-gun sort of |
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mood. Not only will Sam have more aliens to deal with, but he’ll
also have more ways available to him for disposing of them, thanks to
the addition of vehicles and mountable creatures in Serious Sam 2.
However, when a company is getting a sequel ready to ship out the door, there’s one thing that they just love to throw around: numbers, numbers, numbers. Big numbers. The sort of numbers that get people thinking, “Ooooo, that looks like a lot. It’s gotta be good!” That being said, here’s a quick procession of all the digits CroTeam is flashing for Serious Sam 2: |
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The game will have 40 levels, comprised of seven different environments,
some of which include the arctic, futuristic cities, swamps, jungles,
and volcanic landscapes.
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There will also be 45 newly designed enemies for this sequel.
Those that played the first Serious Sam will likely be quite
pleased to hear this, seeing as how that game had some especially
strange bad guys in it (the decapitated suicide bombers really creeped
the hell out of me). From
what has been revealed so far, CroTeam looks to be continuing with their
grotesque, yet oddly tongue-in-cheek aesthetic from the first Serious
Sam game, with characters that range from weird zombies, to a
giant-bomb-head-guy.
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For the graphics whores in the audience, the Serious Sam 2’s
developers are also promising to give the game quite a facelift with
prettier visuals, and a physics engine 100 times more powerful than that
found in its predecessor. Looking
at what has been shown thus far of the game, the order of the day seems
to be a cartoon-like presentation with a bright color palette, character
models akin to something one can find in a comic book, and a generally
light-hearted, albeit gory, sensibility.
Impressively
large, masturbatory numbers aside, it looks like CroTeam isn’t trying
to wander too far off the beaten path with this new Serious Sam, instead
taking a Spinal Tap-like approach to the game, and cranking everything
up to 11. Keeping things
simple, focusing on a stripped-down, core concept has worked once, now
it’s time to see if this developer can do it again.
Mr. Nash (September 7, 2005) |
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