Remember how good Serious Sam was? How tense the comabt was, how frantic, how perfectly paced the whole experience was between tension and "OH HELL YES" with occasional "OH NO" moments?

That's not what you get in Serious Sam 2.

I've never been able to explain it, and I still can't, but Serious Sam 2 just doesn't work. Where Sam was fast and furious, 2 is cheesy and repetitive. The enemies rarely feel unique and they never feel threatening; just powerless rehashes of what you loved before. The game's town is goofy in a distinctly unfun way that fails to match the tone of the original, and the humor felt out of date and even uncomfortably racist even in 2005 (in that classic European "ha ha! Africans and Asians are so weird looking" way).

Vehicle sections and turret sections don't help, nor does the lives system. In reality, they sum up that the game just doesn't work as well as its predecessor, creating an alternative to just having a startlingly well balanced FPS where players can take on absurd enemies with just a revolver. It seems like rather than focus on fixing the weapons and flaws with enemies to make them memorable and fun, the solution was just "add more to the arena. No, wait, that's too many. Put a vehicle in. Okay, it's too easy now, add something huge that you'd previously fight on foot but now we have to balance it to fight a vehicle with 500 HP and the capacity to kill normal enemies in one shot."

It's not that it's a bad game, honestly, it's just good - espeicially as a sequel to a genuine throwback FPS masterpiece.

Remember how good Serious Sam was? How tense the comabt was, how frantic, how perfectly paced the whole experience was between tension and "OH HELL YES" with occasional "OH NO" moments? That's not what you get in Serious Sam 2. I've never been able to explain it, and I still can't, but Serious Sam 2 just doesn't work. Where Sam was fast and furious, 2 is cheesy and repetitive. The enemies rarely feel unique and they never feel threatening; just powerless rehashes of what you loved before. The game's town is goofy in a distinctly unfun way that fails to match the tone of the original, and the humor felt out of date and even uncomfortably racist even in 2005 (in that classic European "ha ha! Africans and Asians are so weird looking" way). Vehicle sections and turret sections don't help, nor does the lives system. In reality, they sum up that the game just doesn't work as well as its predecessor, creating an alternative to just having a startlingly well balanced FPS where players can take on absurd enemies with just a revolver. It seems like rather than focus on fixing the weapons and flaws with enemies to make them memorable and fun, the solution was just "add more to the arena. No, wait, that's too many. Put a vehicle in. Okay, it's too easy now, add something huge that you'd previously fight on foot but now we have to balance it to fight a vehicle with 500 HP and the capacity to kill normal enemies in one shot." It's not that it's a bad game, honestly, it's just good - espeicially as a sequel to a genuine throwback FPS masterpiece.