Serious Sam 2 (PC)

Sam he is.

In this day and age of tactical shooters, games where you're running as part of a team that does all the hard work while you're standing around and occasionally allowed to do something when the game decides "ok, let's have you do this and see ALL THE HEAVENLY GLORY" (thank you Bruce Lee), it's nice to sometimes kick back, switch off the brain and let the reflexes take over as you, the one-man(or woman, let's not discriminate) army, takes the enemy down to ownage town and go overkill on anything that moves.

From standard, to fantasy, to shrunk/giant levels and beyond.

Doom 2 did it well, Duke Nukem too, though one game really brought it back to its roots of the one-man army shooter, was Serious Sam. While I'm reviewing that one today, I am however looking at the more overlooked sequel (one of many I should add, given the various versions on the Xbox original, GameCube and PS2), Serious Sam 2. Let's be clear here, this is not Serious Sam The Second Encounter. That's Serious Sam 1 part 2. This is the fully realised Serious Sam game and it's quite a bit different though not always in an better way.

That's right, the boss IS the building.

First of all, the game does not take itself seriously, at all. Within the first few moments you're talking to comically bad aliens about trying to find the various artefacts that will take down the evil overlord of the series, Mental. After a quick transition of things, Sam agrees to undertake a mission while taking a dig at the "Blondie Guy" that's taking "Forever" before the computer inside of the Sam's head begins speaking for the first time, to which this is lampooned immediately and explained by there being something called "A bigger budget", setting the tone of humour for the rest of the game.

Canyons and lava, there's a huge variation between each of the worlds, setting clear and distinct themes.

If this game was a household wares seller, it'd stock nothing but lampshades as it hangs them over almost everything within the game and First Person Shooters as a whole. Questions raised regarding who leaves the weapons around for people to find, weapons being bigger than in previous games, physics puzzles used once and ONCE only (Valve... Take note...), comical weapons ranging from parrots carrying bombs to large bombs with smiles on their faces that wipe out EVERYTHING (except bosses). The comedy in the game is paramount from start to finish though the jokes get a little thin towards the end when the levels get larger and longer. However bonus points given to the pre-fight conversation with a pink dragon that realised it doesn't want to have stolen a princess, that Sam doesn't want to rescue.

It might come as a bit of a shock, but games USED to be this colourful.

Your weapons range from the circular saw, to pistols, rotary barrel shotguns, sub machineguns, rocket launchers, cannons, laser blasters and beyond, while have grenades as an alternative fire that explode on impact with enemies, giving you a change to attack between rounds of the heavier fire powered weapons. As a result, you soon become a literal arsenal on legs, running and gunning everything from troops to tanks to monsters, giants and bigger. Taking on creatures of such enormity that almost defy the idea of what an engine for gaming can do. It's always an eye-opener when you're fighting human-ish sized enemies then something the size of Godzilla turns the corner and you're staring it right in the toenail, then blasting the monster repeatedly with a cannon while it hits back with lasers the size of buildings.

Arachnaphobics need not apply, they get bigger than this.

But that's this game in a nutshell, go bigger, go faster, go harder, go bigger again and then fight a skyscraper. Having said that, it takes a long time for the game to build up to the fun and chaos of the original games. The whole streams and swarms of armies aren't exactly in this game even though there's the potential as they show up in the final levels, but by then it serves to just pad out long levels and you really begin to feel the tactic dragging on, killing the enthusiasm you might have for the levels you would normally have had.

Sadly the action rarely lets up enough for you to fully enjoy the scenary.

Oddly, the bright colourisation and lively design of the game's levels come across as overly cartoony. However that's not because they're intentionally meant to be that buy rather the industry of gaming at this point doesn't use such a selection of colours within their design spectrums, opting for dulled colours and gritty, grainy browns. Seeing lush green grass and yellow dirt tracks, is such a shock on the senses that one can't help but feel the game is out of place, but it's not. Not when you realise that it simply NOT following the over-done realism bullshit of other mainstream games.

He LOOKS big, but he's the baby of the tank family. No I'm not joking.

The levels are rather linear, lamp-shaded again by the game itself with the amusing exchange "Let's take the main road there!" "Like there's any other roads to take" while amusing, doesn't deny the fact that the game will railroad you through many levels and the levels built around villages/towns can be a little jarring as it requires some actual exploration rather than trekking your way across a landscape and blowing up anything that shows an ugly face (or neck in some headless cases). Fans of the original games will be happy to see a return of old enemies (The Kleer... which I'm NOT happy to see given how infamous they are in the original. Love/Hate relationships...) while there's a lot of new enemies that don't seem to fit in with the original game but do fit in with the new art style and direction, it's a little jarring at first but you get used to it.

Run the gauntlet, before the clock zeroes out and so does your health.

Musically there's a lot of ambient tracks with some of the boss fights and levels more along the lines of hard rocking, fast tempo, pulse-increasing beats and power chords which add to the excitement, especially in the "game show levels" (Sam got captured by a banana under a box before having to run gauntlets on a game show while the resistance tries to rescue him) where you're not only fighting wave after wave of enemies, but also against a fairly lapse time limit of instant death. It's a welcome change to the mix though happens so late in the game that it feels thrown in and could have been used a little more often for it.

Tree huggers welcome too!

It's a fun, mad silly mess of a chaotic game, marred by a few broken scripts if you're kill TOO well but then upgrade the difficulty to counteract that, blowing up everything with impunity while running the gauntlet with whoever that wants to be filled with lead. If you want something other than the usual tactical, cover-fire, chest high wall syndrome games, try this one.

Rampart

Graphically sterile, slight puzzling flavour.

Forts. What used to be a lovely game for kids to play involving both sides setting up a large amount of barricades, walls, plastic model soldiers and marines, perhaps some barracks and tanks, then throwing objects at your brother's stuff and knocking most of it down/apart while he cries at how mean you are. Think I got side-tracked a little there. Ramparts, is a game of that kind of play time. Where in you'll get the chance to build a castle, develop some defences and then have it pitted against an opponent that wants to break the walls down and ruin your little stint of creativity.

As opposed to using the blender to select a castle.

In what is a simple game, with a very simple concept comes a rather strategic element if you look beyond the simple idea of hammering someone with cannonballs. The premise is simple enough, you have several turns per round. In which you'll initially set up a castle in a land, you can have it far from the oceans/seas or near them. Bearing in mind that in singleplayer, ships will be your main enemy so do you want to be a long distance from boarding parties or near the waters to be able to hit the ships sooner, but they will damage you too in quick reply.

How? I was playing defensive the whole time!

Once you've chosen your castle you get to place cannons within the walls. You can only place cannons (which take up a 2x2 area) inside of a fully closed off wall. Incidentally if you've no closed off areas with a castle inside, you're out. Given that inside space is essential for getting MORE cannons and more firepower, you'll want to be fairly well organised with the space you're given otherwise you could lose out on putting in a lot more cannons. A 4x4 space will happily hold 4 cannons if placed next to each other but if you slap in a cannon in the dead centre of that space, you've lost 3 cannons worth of firepower you could have positioned.

Oh yeah, 3 cannons and 3 ships, this will be... painful.

Battle then commences, you'll be tasked with launching your cannonballs at the enemy. Either the moving ships in single player that are shooting back or if you're playing a multiplayer game, at your opponents walls and cannons. While blowing up a cannon takes CONSIDERABLE firepower and damage, they cannot be repaired and becomes dead space. Unusable and an obstruction for later rounds. Alternatively blow apart their walls and hammer them repeatedly to cause damage in the hope they'll not be able to rebuild, which is the next round.

Puzzle mode, borrowing from Tetris and playing "Go"

The action stops at this point and the game switches over to a sort of mix of Go and Tetris. You'll be given a short time span in which to place shapes (mostly tetrads, some bigger shapes too) to build more walls. There's no limit on the number of pieces you can have other than you HAVE to place it in order to get another but can rotate the shapes and place them as necessary. Building and expanding will gain you more points, more castles and ultimately more cannons. IF you manage to make a castle with a surrounding wall by the end, you'll have qualified for the next round and it's back to cannon placements and fighting again. Fail to keep your keep or castle inside a solid perimeter, you're out.

In multiplayer, that can also mean execution. Unless your friend is nice about it, usually they aren't.

So... How badly did you do? Note the incoming doom at the top-left.

Graphically the game is fairly unimpressive, particularly when you're laying cannons and walls but then the key focus is really in showing how much space things take up and not confusing the players with the pseudo 3d images of the walls when in combat mode. The ships look different enough that you can tell which are going to be faster, which will have land units that will become a big problem if they get to beach and invade, while the walls look at least slightly better than greyed out blocks and such that the game takes a visual wipe facelift between puzzle mode and combat mode, you'll ponder why they didn't just stick with it in the first place.

More exchange of firepower, ships destroyed but need those gaps plugged.

The audio is a bit of a mixed bag in that the game has synthesised speech samples of commands "Ready Aim Fire" and "Cease Fire" they even have the right inflection so that you would expect maybe to hear it said this way in the field of battle. The music is a rather lacklustre affair of low beeps and attempts at percussion, even for the NES. So what we have on one hand is impressive, is quickly dashed by the other hand.

I feel sorry for Fred Uxford Charles Kevin

The control system is considerably better on the NES than on the arcade, which used a trackball for most of the versions out there. It's more precise and gives you a faster and more reliable method of placing in walls and cannons while the arcade version was prone to letting you place walls in erronous and often fatal places rather than where you needed it. The real positive is that the game isn't just one game, it's effectively two with the puzzle element and action element (not seamlessly) switching and giving players a flavour of both. However the flavour is rather thin on both accounts which makes the whole experience rather dry and not very fulfilling overall.