Serious niggles?
Serious Sam 2 uses an unusual life system, whereby once you’ve lost all your lives, that’s it, game over. Of course, the autosave will only save at the beginning of each section, so quitting a level before you finish means you restart that level. You can manually save to avoid this, but if you forget, well tough, just do the whole level again. You might not think that would be a problem and this is where Serious Sam 2’s single player game hits the exact same snag its predecessors did.
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Click for larger imageYou see, much as I have enjoyed playing Serious Sam 2 on my own, that’s it… I’ve enjoyed playing it. Past tense. As in, I won’t be enjoying it again as I won’t be playing it again as a single player game. The reason is that what Sam has in the fun, run and gun stakes, it loses out in on the atmosphere and replay areas. Like I said, this is a just a 3D blaster.. for variation you get to occasionally drive one of four vehicles and blast people, or control turrets and, er, blast people… or find a new weapon and use it to, um, blast people. Once you’ve played through the single player campaign, which should take you a fair while on the harder difficulty settings, you’ll have then seen everything Sam has to offer. With no engaging storyline to speak of, there’s no pull to go back and play again.
Click for larger imageAt least, not on you’re own… Yes, where Serious Sam 2 redeems itself is in the excellent co-op mode, where you and your buddies can all get in the game together and then work your way through the levels. Over a LAN this is cracking fun and in general, it’s a laugh online too. The light-hearted nature of Serious Sam 2 lends itself nicely to being able to just drop-in and play online and with many servers running multi-pickup, you don’t have to worry about someone hogging all the power-ups. Of course, the difficulty ramps up somewhat as well, meaning you and your pals will have to fight off even more bad guys, but with a bit of co-ordination you can often catch them in a withering crossfire that cuts swathes of even the hardest demons into little meaty cubes.
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