Gameplay

Size doesn’t matter

If you’ve played Serious Sam, then you have a good idea what The Second Encounter is like to play. In general the gameplay is your basic FPS formula: Get the key, open a door, and kill everything in between. But it’s not about the destination, it’s all about the journey! Croteam has mastered the art of scripting sequences where hoards of enemies swarm down upon you. It’s one thing to fill a room with a hundred creatures; anyone can do that. It’s a completely different story to have 50-foot tall mechanoids leap over buildings and start hurling rockets at you.

KFC

Gratuitous lens flare

There’s lots of grass

My favorite part of The Second Encounter: you walk into a room and the door closes behind you. You hear the familiar galloping sound in the distance and brace yourself for an attack. Then you notice the room is getting smaller… actually, it’s not getting smaller, the entire room is being engulfed by a wall of darkness. As the wall gets closer you hear the revving of chainsaws – you try to run but the door is sealed shut. Will the wall kill you? If not, the Pumpkin heads surely will. As you brace for the impact of the wall, you find that you pass right through it unharmed, but you can only see a few feet ahead of you. Now the Pumpkin heads are jumping out of the darkness at you just as the wall passes, to reveal a room full of skeletons and pumpkins running right towards you. That is spectacular level design. There are very few times when you’re in a room and enemies are just thrown at you. Most of the time they’ll come in a scripted sequence (you’ll trigger their arrival).

Croteam also pulled off the weapons in The Second Encounter well. The four new weapons (Chainsaw, Sniper Rifle, Flame Thrower, and Serious Bomb) add to the already fun weapons from the first game. You can obviously forget any aspect of realism – these weapons are purely for the sake of having a good time. It’s about seeing bodies fly as they’re bowled over by a giant cannon ball, or the satisfaction of gibbing a Harpy in mid air with a rocket, or shattering a skeleton from a mile away with the Sniper Rifle.

Sunset

The giant talking head!

This is a bad idea

Single vs. Multiplayer

The single player game in The Second Encounter is pretty good, but the true game is found in the Cooperative multiplayer. Blasting hundreds of monsters is way more fun when you’re doing it with friends (or complete strangers online). Sniping a skeleton in mid-air a foot away from a teammate, nailing a demon from all sides with rockets, and covering each other’s back as you enter a strange room are fun things you just can’t do by yourself.

The Serious Engine’s netcode is OK. For the most part, my experience with online games was positive. The only time the lag killed the game was when there were high numbers of enemies on the screen, multiple teammates shooting, and large open areas. This may sound like a common situation in this game, but the lag was infrequent. I do play on a cable modem and generally didn’t connect to servers with over 100 ping though – I don’t know what the modem performance is like. The best way to enjoy The Second Encounter’s multiplayer is at a LAN party. Screaming with your friends while you’re trashing monsters is always a social occasion. If you’re having a LAN party, definitely pick up a copy of The Second Encounter (one copy allows several computers on a LAN).