I had beaten SS2 once before but I think i mindlessly and haphazardly played through it and wrote a half assed review, barely remembering anyhting
I decided to play through it again , this time in co-op, to continue on in playing the whole franchise from scratch
The way co-op works in this game is a bit different than the previous, you have an arcade like Lives system where, by default, you spawn each map with 3 lives and killing enemies /picking up items gives you points, and every 10k points you get a Extra life. If you run out of lives, youre dead and just stare at the ground, until your patner gets an extra life then you can respawn. If you and your partner lose all lives, restart map. Its a pretty cool system , not much complaints there, the co-op by default also has enemies having 50% more health/damage which is fair. We played on Hard difficulty and overall the challenge was just about where it should be.
This game has a serious tone departure from previous games in the series. It's even more extreme cartoony, juvanile, fantastical almost like Disney movie at times. If you look at some of the cutscenes/characters in this game you'd think you're watching a Shrek movie or something, it's that weird. It's not nessesairly a bad thing, its just really strange. What happened? It almost seems like the Publisher was pressuring them to make a certain kind of game, not that Croteam themselves wanted to make it like this. Theres all sorts of jabs and Halo references like the fact that you have a Cortana style assistant that pops up on your HUD and talks to you, and also theres vehicle sections that rip the vehicle ideas straight out of the Halo franchise. It's this weird mishmash of wanting to be really cartoony toned down childish vibe+Halo, it's just a fucking bizarre game. What were they smoking?
I'll get a few technical complaints out of the way:
The first big one is that cutscenes DO NOT work in co-op.
We got around it, though.
We literally pulled up a synctube/cytube website where you can watch videos in sync at the same time with eachother, and we put a link with all SS2 cutscenes, and as we progressed the levels we ALT+TABBED and found which cutscene we should be at, and watched it in the browser. Really stupid that we have to do that, but we weren't gonna miss the cutscenes.
Because theres over 1 hour 30 minutes of cutscenes in this game, unlike previous games they really went heavy on the 'story' and cutscenes. At the beginning and end of every level is a cutscene, and there are some in the middle but more minor ones just showing the camera fly to a new location or something.
These new cutscenes and tone shift in the game is just insane. Its the most wacky shit imaginable. Space alien humanoids want Sam's help, the developers voicing a woman in the highest pitched voice, cutscenes of tribal villages that is supposed to be a parody of African villages or something but its like little blue smurfs, the cutscenes are just bat shit insane i dont know how to explain it. They're sorta entertaining, but also sort of really fucking stupid. The humour can be hit at miss, but most of the time its actually laugh out loud funny how stupid it is. Sam talks a lot and makes a lot of dry jokes, and most of them work and provide a laugh, but there are some moments where its so stupid you dont even know what to make of it. The humour is very "lol so random" or breaking the fourth wall, or just not giving a fuck. Overall, I dont mind the inclusion of this many cutscenes, but maybe there are just a bit too many.
The cutscenes arent the only thing thats completely overhauled - the entire tone, graphics, weapons, enemy roster is too. As I said before, the game has a very cartoony/disney/childlish look to it, which isn't awful but some of the models can make you be like what the fuck am I playing? Because there are now sometimes friendly AI that run around, give you items, fight with you etc. It's like they just wanted to copy features from other shooters at the time, again, like Halo, just to be able to advertise that they had these features; ex , vehicles, friendly AI, theres even a sort of plasma pistol thats completely useless that you start the game with, its almost like they put that in the game just to be able to screenshot it and compare it to the halo pistol.
The weapons and enemies...
The weapons all got a complete overhaul. Instead of the chaingun, now you have double uzis. Instead of pump action shotgun, its this stupid looking multi barrel thing. There are some new additions, like these plasma style guns but you barely get to use them, there is a homing-bird weapon thats like a rocket that homes in on the target and makes a goofy bird noise - pretty fun. But the worst thing about the weapons is how different they look. They dont look anything like the original game weapons, they look more like something out of Unreal Tournament (which was popular at the time). Theyre all big and bulky and futuristic looking. I don't like it too much, yeah theyre not awful to use, the double barrel shotgun in particular is way better than in the original game and looks alright, but overall the design of the guns leaves much to be desired.
The enemies are pretty much the main thing to talk about in this game.
That's because this game has the most enemy variety I think i've ever seen in a game. Seriously.
The first game had a decent selection of enemies, everyone had their place, everyone had their intended mechanic and way of dealing with them, there wasnt too many or too little.
In this game, almost every single level throws new enemey designs at you. Theres 42(!) levels. It's A LOT of 'unique' enemies. Unfortunately not all of them add much to the game, and many of them are downright stupid and annoying. It very much feels like everything in this game is going for quantity over quality. The 42 levels, the gigantic roster of enemies. It both has pro's and cons. The upside of having such a huge variety of enemies, is that theres always something new to see, the game doesn't feel too boring - the downside is that you lack that consistent, quality, addictive gameplay of having all the enemies mapped out and strategies to deal with them similar to Doom. In this game, its frequently just a clusterfuck. Another downside is visually. Rarely does the enemy variety even mesh together well aesthetically. You'll have a location in like some city street, and youll be fighting Clowns, Witches, Football goblins, Demons from hell, Kungfu people, Giant metal balls, Dinosaur robots, its like what the fuck? Whats the central theme here? Its just a massive clusterfuck. Maybe thats what they were going for (obviously) but its just stupid to look at, and even worse doesn't always play very good.
Ontop of that, they really increased the amount of airborn enemies in this game. In the first game, you really only had the Harpy angel thing to deal with in the air. Now in this game, its like 50% of enemies or more are flying around above your fuckin head, helicoptors, airplanes, jets, witches, all sorts of fucking wacky air creatures. That's not nessesarily a bad thing either, but sometimes it can just be super annoying and tedious waiting for some airplane to fly back and forth across the screen while you wittle it down slowly. It's also kind of annoying having to constantly look up and down up and down shoot the ground enemies shoot the air enemies over and over. Like I said, game frequently just feels like a clusterfuck of ideas without much consistent theme or idea.
There's all sorts of level variety, well there better be with 42 levels. You start off going through jungle and tribal villages, theres this thing where you have to collect 5 Medallions and each one is a different enviornment, kinda like episodes. So you have jungles, winter areas, aztec indoors pyramid areas like first game, theres a couple levels in episode two where you go through a flat swamp which was pretty boring, theres this really strange level in the middle of the game where its like youre shrunk going through a garden of giant insects and objects which is just bizarre and it plays goofy clown music the whole time, like what the fuck am I playin? what were they smoking?? later on you go to a Hell area which was pretty cool but has wonky platforming sections , then you go to a china section which was pretty meh , later on in the game you go to some crazy metropolis place with really high skyscrapers that looks really impressive, but the gameplay here is trash because the enemies spawn so slowly you just stand around at the end of gates waiting for them to open.
SO yes, theres a lot of level variety, and THANKFULLY unlike The Second Encounter it barely has any weird gimmicky/novelty trap/platforming sections. Yes, there are some, but theyre few and far between and nowhere near as aggregious as the previous game. You do have a few gimmicky rooms where you have to platform as the level changes around you, and trap stuff, but its not that bad at all.
What is bad is all the vehicle sections. I don't really mind the vehicle sections, its just that theres so many of them. If the game is 10 hours long, maybe 4 hours is spent in vehicles. Just why? I never played a Serious Sam game and thought "you know what, this would be better with vehicle sections". And I think this is the only game in the franchise that uses them too, so its just weird. Again, its like they were just trying to compete with games like Halo and Unreal Tournament at the time. It's fun the first few times you do it, but after the 20th forced vehicle section that drags and drags and drags on you're like why the fuck am I doing this again.
Theres a few boss fights, and usually it works like they keep regenerating health until you find the object in the enviornment to destroy to prevent it. Not too bad, nothing amazing. Theres one boss in particular that just sucks balls, its this flying dragon and you get jump boots and have to jump around the enviornment looking for rockets for a turret to kill the dragon and it just takes forever to kill him. Another boss is like a giant mech robot thing that it turns out you shouldnt try shooting because he just breaks away and runs to a certain spot, and you have to run to a helicoptor vehicle to beat him. That one was bad, because it took awhile to figure out youre not even supposed to shoot him.
The game does have some really impressive graphics, even for 2005, some levels in the mid part of the game are gigantic outdoors areas with awesome draw distances and stuff. Atleast the game is really colorful, too.
The music is mostly just annoying and stupid, its a lot of wacky clown carnival music. Yeah maybe its funny and suitable for 15 minutes, but hearing the same wacky clown music for hours on end is just fucking grating.
I'll wrap up the review by saying it's not a terrible game, but its got some big flaws. The biggest one is that while the levels are thankfully really short, which helps the pacing, some of them just do drag on and on with bad spawn placements and sections that last too long where you just wait for them to spawn. Also, it's like half of the levels are just meh, and half of them are pretty good. Out of 42 levels I'd say only 20 are actually something id be like "Oh yeah, that level was good"
A lot of the levels have too many vehicle sections, that drag on for a long time. The enemies while really varied, have the downside of making the game less consistent in quality. The levels while tons of then, have the downside that a lot of them are just meh or bad / boring. The artstyle and cutscenes, while sometimes hilarious, and colorful to look at, do eventually make the game really unappealing and like "what the fuck am I playing?" makes you feel childish to even play it. Atleast it doesnt have as many stupid novelty puzzles like TSE. It's almost like for every positive thing I can say about the game, I can say something equally as negative.
6/10
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