Serious Sam: Next Encounter Review (NGC)
Aug 31, 2016 22:50:23 GMT
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Post by Guilion on Aug 31, 2016 22:50:23 GMT
Full disclosure: I played this in an emulator because it's one of those games that although not expensive are almost impossible to find.
Serious Sam: Next encounter is perhaps one of the least spoken games in the franchise; if not FPS games in general. It's weird, trying to look up any sort of information for this game will often result in very small paragraph long articles with generally mixed scores and YouTube videos with very little views. t honestly baffles me as I think this may be one of the most underrated console adaptations ever made.
For those unfamiliar with the Serious Sam series, they’re deceptively simple Arena First Person Shooters. You are a single man against unending hordes of enemies that shoot slow moving projectiles or try to get close and personal with you using their bare hands. There are a couple of catches to this, however.
The first catch is that not every weapon will be as effective with all the enemies; you have up to fifteen weapons at your disposal and each of them has a very specific purpose. For instance:
Examples like these can be found through the series and that's not even mentioning the rock-paper-scissors mechanic that every enemy has built into it (The coach gun does the same amount of damage than the sniper rifle and yet a football players will die from a single sniper shot as compared to two shots from the coach gun for instance).
And the second catch is the staggering amount of enemies that rush your way. The first levels are usually "Easy" with less than 200 enemies each and a limited amount of weapons, meanwhile the last levels usually have waves of up to 200 enemies EACH and although you have an entire arsenal at your disposal and sometimes even power ups you will still struggle due to the sheer variety of enemies trying to get a piece of you. After all, dodging a slow moving rocket or an enemy charging at you is easy, dodging 50 slow moving rockets while 50 enemies are lunging themselves at you? Not so much.
Serious Sam: Next Encounter follows the same formula as any other game before it with a couple of twists to make it a fitting game for consoles among which are:
The story
The story is so simple I don't think it's even worth mentioning. Mental, the main antagonist of the series, has made an evil clone of Sam and after going out to shop groceries (No, really) the clone uses Metal’s time lock to teleport himself to the past and cause as much mayhem as he can in different time periods by teleporting in Metal’s forces. Meanwhile somewhere in the future the time anomalies are detected and Sam is requested to go back in time to correct them. The end.
The story was done deliberately simple in comparison to say... Serious Sam 2 to save disc space, and this is much more evident in the game cut scenes as putting them all together generates a 7 minute long video. This however led to a good thing as this is the SS game with the most levels in it which leads me to my second point.
Level/Enemy design
This was by far the aspect that impressed me the most about the game, I went in expecting a Serious Sam game played with a gamepad, which sounded absolutely atrocious due to the variety of enemies and levels with huge skyboxes full of flying enemies. What I got instead was new type of enemies’ designs specifically to fit in a console (Low poly count and fixed horizontal attack patterns) and levels more reminiscent of Doom; Low ceilings and all the enemies nicely laid out in front of you.
The levels can also be extremely long at times, I had no idea the neither the GameCube or PS2 could render all this content with very little loading times, not to mention the amount being able to render the stages+ the enemies + the insane amount of projectiles and un to two character models ALL at the same time without any frame rate loss. It's absolutely maddening to see. Aside from long and complex the levels are also laid out much like a retro shooter, full of keys, puzzles and secrets.
While we're on the subject of the level design I think it's worth talking about the new huge addition to the game; scores. In the past Serious Sam games have had scores before however NE takes it to the next level. You see every SS game features secrets just like any FPS of old; this includes weapons, cutscenes, health, armor, easter eggs, armor and even entire levels. In Serious Sam NE secrets are present, however if you want to play the secret levels you must first get a gold medal in a certain amount of chapters and the game doesn't have a couple of secret levels like the other ones, oh no a third of all the levels in the game are hidden and can't be unlocked until you get a perfect score in the previous levels . This is easier said than done, as in other Serious Sam games when you die you are just forced to restart the checkpoint, in NE if you die you have to restart from the last checkpoint AND you lose a huge amount of points. On top of it the score is mainly derived from combos, not from individual kills meaning if you want a good score you must: Do the levels incredibly fast (As time also holds score value) Chain enemies in quick succession and on top of it you must try not to die making the game a REAL challenge for completionists.
And finally the last implemented feature of this game to fit inside the console
Co-op and multiplayer
Co-op is a prevalent feature in Serious Sam games and it makes a return in this one, I already mentioned that the game can run co-op without issues however what I haven't mentioned is that the game also features a pretty decent 4 screen multiplayer deathmatch.
Of course the game isn't perfect. For instance, there's the vehicle sections and let me be crystal clear here, these are some of the worst vehicle sections I've played in my entire life, they were obviously shoehorned in to compete with the biggest game at the time, that game at that time obviously being Halo. Then there is the spawn points of enemies, you see enemies don't exactly spawn in front of you all the time, they can spawn in any of the 4 cardinal points at any given time and this really becomes an issue in the last levels as they tend to spawn extremely powerful enemies behind you and you can die in a single hit never knowing what hit you. Finally due to hardware limitations I feel as if the level of enemies on screen at any given time never reaches the amounts in other games which makes the game feel kind of easy at times and extremely challenging other times thanks to entire waves of nothing but large enemies at times.
So finally we arrive to the question.
Can I recommend Serious Sam Next Encounter?
Yes, absolutely. Don't go in expecting a traditional Serious Sam game; go in expecting an old-school FPS game with a large variety of enemies and huge variated environments. I don't think this is the best game for newcomers either (The Steam version of The Second Encounter is still the best one in my opinion) however I still believe it to be a good game in the series, better than Serious Sam 2 and waaaaaay better than Serious Sam Advance. I believe it to be a victim of its' times, a retro-style shooter released in an era when people didn't care about retro shooters (Especially for consoles), a game developed by a third party studio that produced major hits such as "MotoGP 2", a game that had very little publicity behind it and nobody paid attention to. But overall, a good game.
Serious Sam: Next encounter is perhaps one of the least spoken games in the franchise; if not FPS games in general. It's weird, trying to look up any sort of information for this game will often result in very small paragraph long articles with generally mixed scores and YouTube videos with very little views. t honestly baffles me as I think this may be one of the most underrated console adaptations ever made.
For those unfamiliar with the Serious Sam series, they’re deceptively simple Arena First Person Shooters. You are a single man against unending hordes of enemies that shoot slow moving projectiles or try to get close and personal with you using their bare hands. There are a couple of catches to this, however.
The first catch is that not every weapon will be as effective with all the enemies; you have up to fifteen weapons at your disposal and each of them has a very specific purpose. For instance:
- The minigun is the best weapon for crowd control (Thus making it the best weapon in the game) thanks to its hitscan bullets, its DPS and near infinite range and accuracy. However it suffers from poor performance at short range due to the bullets coming out of a focal point and lack of spread.
- The rocket and grenade launcher are ideal to clear large enemies and to kill enemies hiding around corners. Yet both of them cause huge amounts of damage when fired point blank and the rocket launcher suffers from slow moving projectiles while the grenade launcher suffers from slow fire rate and limited fire range, making both of them useless at close or long range.
- The flamethrower and coach gun are ideal for close range, yet they're useless at medium range and the coach gun suffers from slow fire rate.
- The sniper rifle is ideal for clearing airborne and far away enemies yet it's completely useless without scoping in first making it a poor choice at short to medium range.
- etc
Examples like these can be found through the series and that's not even mentioning the rock-paper-scissors mechanic that every enemy has built into it (The coach gun does the same amount of damage than the sniper rifle and yet a football players will die from a single sniper shot as compared to two shots from the coach gun for instance).
And the second catch is the staggering amount of enemies that rush your way. The first levels are usually "Easy" with less than 200 enemies each and a limited amount of weapons, meanwhile the last levels usually have waves of up to 200 enemies EACH and although you have an entire arsenal at your disposal and sometimes even power ups you will still struggle due to the sheer variety of enemies trying to get a piece of you. After all, dodging a slow moving rocket or an enemy charging at you is easy, dodging 50 slow moving rockets while 50 enemies are lunging themselves at you? Not so much.
Serious Sam: Next Encounter follows the same formula as any other game before it with a couple of twists to make it a fitting game for consoles among which are:
The story
The story is so simple I don't think it's even worth mentioning. Mental, the main antagonist of the series, has made an evil clone of Sam and after going out to shop groceries (No, really) the clone uses Metal’s time lock to teleport himself to the past and cause as much mayhem as he can in different time periods by teleporting in Metal’s forces. Meanwhile somewhere in the future the time anomalies are detected and Sam is requested to go back in time to correct them. The end.
The story was done deliberately simple in comparison to say... Serious Sam 2 to save disc space, and this is much more evident in the game cut scenes as putting them all together generates a 7 minute long video. This however led to a good thing as this is the SS game with the most levels in it which leads me to my second point.
Level/Enemy design
This was by far the aspect that impressed me the most about the game, I went in expecting a Serious Sam game played with a gamepad, which sounded absolutely atrocious due to the variety of enemies and levels with huge skyboxes full of flying enemies. What I got instead was new type of enemies’ designs specifically to fit in a console (Low poly count and fixed horizontal attack patterns) and levels more reminiscent of Doom; Low ceilings and all the enemies nicely laid out in front of you.
The levels can also be extremely long at times, I had no idea the neither the GameCube or PS2 could render all this content with very little loading times, not to mention the amount being able to render the stages+ the enemies + the insane amount of projectiles and un to two character models ALL at the same time without any frame rate loss. It's absolutely maddening to see. Aside from long and complex the levels are also laid out much like a retro shooter, full of keys, puzzles and secrets.
While we're on the subject of the level design I think it's worth talking about the new huge addition to the game; scores. In the past Serious Sam games have had scores before however NE takes it to the next level. You see every SS game features secrets just like any FPS of old; this includes weapons, cutscenes, health, armor, easter eggs, armor and even entire levels. In Serious Sam NE secrets are present, however if you want to play the secret levels you must first get a gold medal in a certain amount of chapters and the game doesn't have a couple of secret levels like the other ones, oh no a third of all the levels in the game are hidden and can't be unlocked until you get a perfect score in the previous levels . This is easier said than done, as in other Serious Sam games when you die you are just forced to restart the checkpoint, in NE if you die you have to restart from the last checkpoint AND you lose a huge amount of points. On top of it the score is mainly derived from combos, not from individual kills meaning if you want a good score you must: Do the levels incredibly fast (As time also holds score value) Chain enemies in quick succession and on top of it you must try not to die making the game a REAL challenge for completionists.
And finally the last implemented feature of this game to fit inside the console
Co-op and multiplayer
Co-op is a prevalent feature in Serious Sam games and it makes a return in this one, I already mentioned that the game can run co-op without issues however what I haven't mentioned is that the game also features a pretty decent 4 screen multiplayer deathmatch.
Of course the game isn't perfect. For instance, there's the vehicle sections and let me be crystal clear here, these are some of the worst vehicle sections I've played in my entire life, they were obviously shoehorned in to compete with the biggest game at the time, that game at that time obviously being Halo. Then there is the spawn points of enemies, you see enemies don't exactly spawn in front of you all the time, they can spawn in any of the 4 cardinal points at any given time and this really becomes an issue in the last levels as they tend to spawn extremely powerful enemies behind you and you can die in a single hit never knowing what hit you. Finally due to hardware limitations I feel as if the level of enemies on screen at any given time never reaches the amounts in other games which makes the game feel kind of easy at times and extremely challenging other times thanks to entire waves of nothing but large enemies at times.
So finally we arrive to the question.
Can I recommend Serious Sam Next Encounter?
Yes, absolutely. Don't go in expecting a traditional Serious Sam game; go in expecting an old-school FPS game with a large variety of enemies and huge variated environments. I don't think this is the best game for newcomers either (The Steam version of The Second Encounter is still the best one in my opinion) however I still believe it to be a good game in the series, better than Serious Sam 2 and waaaaaay better than Serious Sam Advance. I believe it to be a victim of its' times, a retro-style shooter released in an era when people didn't care about retro shooters (Especially for consoles), a game developed by a third party studio that produced major hits such as "MotoGP 2", a game that had very little publicity behind it and nobody paid attention to. But overall, a good game.
