If you like Serious Sam, you will probably hate this game. Second Serious Sam is nothing like it's predecessor. It's not really open world, it's too cartoony and very restrictive (the graphics somehow looks even worse). I remember I bought this game a long time ago, I started playing and I was immediatelly disgusted by its cartoony and goofy graphics. And then there's the tower sequences, rolling around in hamster wheel and having funny looking sidekicks to help you along the way. I lasted about half an hour and I quit. Many many many years later I noticed they added achievements so I decided to play again. And if it wasn't for the achievements, I would have quit. Here is what's wrong with the game:
- (This is just a complaint, not really a negative): You now collect treasures and bags of money, for which you get point, for which you get extra lifes. Which are totally useless for SS players. I never once used them even when playing on Serious difficulty with 2x multiplier. This system make no sense when you cn simply save and load games.
- The game itself is not really difficult. Even if you play on the Serious difficulty, you won't have many issues. Now compared to first Serious Sam, where Serious difficulty was a real challenge and completing the game was huge satisfaction, here you don't get that.
- Turret sections: you just use it, press fire button and that's it... there is no fun in that. And there are quite a lot of them. The only exception are hovercrafts, which are fun to use... but they suffer on unever terrain where you simply shoot the ground. BUT you can also straight up drive through enemies and smash even the biggest creeps!
- There are invisible walls everywhere, literally
- The game is not really "open world" like the first game, it's divided into sections where, for example, you walk through the door or jump down and you can never go back (R.I.P. if you are looking for secrets, if you go through a zone that locks you out, you can never go back and find that secret)
- Finding secrets is often times as easy as going around the corner and there's the item, which is for some reason secret. Or walking into a hangar where you have to push a button to activate the elevator, but for some reason it's a secret area.
- The physics... oh yeah the physics... it's ok, but totally broken when you want to stack crates and jump higher. Then it goes crazy.
- Boss fights are laughable; 1st boss is literally you in a turret shooting creeps while big monkey ocassionally throws a thing on you. Shoot the thing, kill creeps and the little guys will kill the boss. You can't even hurt it by any other weapon. Another example of lazy boss is a big robot, that you just run away from in practically straight line, reaching the end with helicopter to shoot him down.
- There are still bugs, like when you save the game and load it, but something brakes and enemies won't spawn, so items won't spawn and doors won't open, so the whole level is broken; another bug is when
- The last few levels are the worst designed levels ever... you just run in a maze against a timer killing enemies along the way, jump through rings in a hamster wheel or run around arena collecting coins to get to another running zone... just horrible (after few minute of doing that you want to uninstall the game). At this point you feel like this game is going forever and it will never ever end. Oh yeah, and the final boss fight is so stupidly annoying and badly designed it REALLY makes you want to quit.
Some positives:
- It's long, so you feel like you get a lot of content for your money.
- You can dual wield any weapons!
- It grows on you so it's not so bad after all (but it's still not good).
