You really get the impression that Croteam is embarrassed about this one. There's never been an official HD remake, there are no Steam achievements, the bare minimum has been done for the game's Steam release, the game's considered non-canon, subsequent Serious Sams have gone out of their way to take place in alternate timelines or before the events of the first game, other experimental Serious Sam titles are clearly meant to be side-games... I suspect Croteam would just as soon pretend they never made this one, if only they hadn't made this a numbered sequel.
Which is a damn shame, because of what I've played, this is my favorite by a decent margin.
Yes, this is an idiotic, honestly kinda cringey farce of a game to look at. I have no idea what the hell's going on with all the squeaky, sing-song voices the player hears throughout the game. Some of the redesigns are really stupid, particularly the bomb guys being given singlets. Yyyyyyeah I don't like the that one planet that's populated by Chinese stereotypes and Yellow Peril-adjacent bad guys, not even gonna defend that one.
None of those matter to me (well, maybe the last one of those). What matters is this: because Serious Sam 2 is so bizarre, it actually ends up being a ton of fun with its level designs and challenges. There's an elevator level early on, which is a surprisingly great complement for Serious Sam's usual enemy-spamming. There are a lot of really fun level archetypes, including a "Honey I Shrunk The Kids"-esque giant patch of grass and an intergalactic game show. There's this one boss fight where you're bounding around in moon boots, firing ballistae at a dragon, and it's the distilled essence of this game's experience: really damn stupid, but a ton of fun all the same.
Perhaps a significant portion of my enjoyment for this game came from the fact that I ran through this in co-op. The game doesn't play cutscenes during co-op! This does make the experience of the game a lot more confusing, since there's no attempt to explain within the levels why you're going from world to world. At the same time, from what I've seen of the cutscenes, I think I would be way more irritated by this game if I did have to watch them. I'm perfectly content treating this game as a fantasia of weird set pieces, if that's what we're working with.
The game controversially features a lives system rather than infinite respawns, but if you're playing an online game, you can just set it so lives are infinite. Not something you have to worry about if you don't wanna.
Which is a damn shame, because of what I've played, this is my favorite by a decent margin.
Yes, this is an idiotic, honestly kinda cringey farce of a game to look at. I have no idea what the hell's going on with all the squeaky, sing-song voices the player hears throughout the game. Some of the redesigns are really stupid, particularly the bomb guys being given singlets. Yyyyyyeah I don't like the that one planet that's populated by Chinese stereotypes and Yellow Peril-adjacent bad guys, not even gonna defend that one.
None of those matter to me (well, maybe the last one of those). What matters is this: because Serious Sam 2 is so bizarre, it actually ends up being a ton of fun with its level designs and challenges. There's an elevator level early on, which is a surprisingly great complement for Serious Sam's usual enemy-spamming. There are a lot of really fun level archetypes, including a "Honey I Shrunk The Kids"-esque giant patch of grass and an intergalactic game show. There's this one boss fight where you're bounding around in moon boots, firing ballistae at a dragon, and it's the distilled essence of this game's experience: really damn stupid, but a ton of fun all the same.
Perhaps a significant portion of my enjoyment for this game came from the fact that I ran through this in co-op. The game doesn't play cutscenes during co-op! This does make the experience of the game a lot more confusing, since there's no attempt to explain within the levels why you're going from world to world. At the same time, from what I've seen of the cutscenes, I think I would be way more irritated by this game if I did have to watch them. I'm perfectly content treating this game as a fantasia of weird set pieces, if that's what we're working with.
The game controversially features a lives system rather than infinite respawns, but if you're playing an online game, you can just set it so lives are infinite. Not something you have to worry about if you don't wanna.