Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

Sam fighting Zorg Mercenaries using a flamethrower

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is a first-person shooter that expands upon the gameplay of its predecessor, Serious Sam: The First Encounter. As Sam "Serious" Stone, the player traverses twelve mostly linear levels across three thematic settings.[1][2][3] In each level, the player faces large waves of enemies. Some spaces are arenas that need to be cleared of enemies before the player can proceed.[4] The Second Encounter adds seven enemy variants to the cast of the original game, which similarly exhibit the behaviour of approaching or shooting at the player directly.[5][6] Unlike The First Encounter, the game features several stages with dynamic environments, such as rooms with multi-directional gravity, multiple arena floors, or slippery ice sections.[7] Additionally, The Second Encounter introduces platforming elements and adds more traps.[1][5] The end of each thematic setting features a boss.[2][6]

Sam's arsenal from The First Encounter is expanded by a chainsaw, flamethrower, and sniper rifle with a scope for up to eight times magnification.[8][9] The scarcely available Serious Bomb kills all enemies in range.[2] The game further adds four power-ups with temporary effects: Serious Speed, which increases the player's movement speed; Serious Damage, which strengthens Sam's weapons; Invulnerability, and Invisibility.[1][5] In multiplayer, The Second Encounter supports cooperative play on all single-player maps for up to sixteen players.[5][6] For the deathmatch modes, the game increased the number of levels to eight.[8][10] The game further includes the Seriously Warped Deathmatch mod, which comprises twenty deathmatch levels, additional weapons, and modes like capture the flag.[5][8]

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter begins with recounting the events of The First Encounter: In the 22nd century, alien forces commanded by Mental were attacking humanity, whose leaders sent the soldier Sam "Serious" Stone (voiced by John Dick) back in time to ancient Egypt using the Time-Lock. Seeking to uncover information about the ancient alien civilisation of the Sirians, the builders of the Time-Lock, he fought his way through Egypt and discovered the existence of a Sirian spaceship, the SSS Centerprice. At the Great Pyramid, he defeated Ugh-Zan III, entered the spaceship, and took off towards Sirius.

A group of onlookers follows and inadvertently collides with the Centerprice, causing the ship to fall back to Earth and crash into the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, near the Maya city of Palenque. Sam's Neurotronically Implanted Combat Situation Analyzer (NETRICSA), having obtained a trove of information from the Centerprice, informs Sam that the Sirians had prepared a backup vehicle in case the spaceship was destroyed. Sam must therefore find the Holy Grail, which is located 400 years away. As the Sirians had built a Time-Lock for each ancient civilisation, NETRICSA guides him to that of the Mayans in Teotihuacan. After passing through the legendary Xibalba underneath the city, he arrives at the Pyramid of the Sun and defeats the wind god Kukulkan, who was guarding the Time-Lock.

This transports Sam to a ziggurat in Babylonia. He heads into Persepolis to find the temple of Gilgamesh, palace of King Tilmun, and ultimately the Tower of Babel. Collecting the three Tablets of Wisdom in the surrounding gardens grants him entry to the tower, where he kills the Exotech Larva, Mental's purpose-designed guard for the Babylonian Time-Lock.

Sam arrives in the medieval Polish town of Krwawitze in 1138. NETRICSA informs him of the powerful Arc-Al-Magi guild of wizards and guides him to their Book of Wisdom, which reveals the location of the Holy Grail. The book leads Sam to the former Arc-Al-Magi hideout, where a magic portal in the fabled Lava Caves takes him to the Ice Castle with the Holy Grail. Inside, however, he finds the grail to have been removed. NETRICSA believes the Arc-Al-Magi were attacked by Mental's forces and hid the Holy Grail at their Church of Sacred Blood. Sam passes through the Corridor of Death to reach the cathedral, where he overcomes Mordekai the Summoner, one of Mental's longest servants, to obtain the Holy Grail. Finally, he uses the backup rocketship to continue his journey to Sirius.

The Croatian development studio Croteam began working on Serious Sam: The Second Encounter immediately after completing The First Encounter.[11] The original game had been so successful that the company acquired new hardware to use for further development.[12] Early on, Croteam hired level designer Ivan Mika and programmer Nikola Mosettig, bringing its headcount to twelve.[13] Other hires included programmer Darko Martinović and business assistant Helena Hunski, and more were brought on board as Croteam moved into significantly larger offices during the development.[12][13] The team built the game on an upgraded version of Serious Engine, which it had developed for The First Encounter.[14] Improvements to the engine's tools were developed with suggestions from the community, which provided daily feedback through emails and forums.[15] New features included skeletal animation, Ogg Vorbis audio compression, enhanced destruction effects, a procedural particle system, and support for DirectX.[14][16][17] While Mosetting was working on the particle system, he accidentally duplicated one line of code that caused everything to be rendered twice. When he noticed this and removed the line, the game's frame rate doubled.[13]

The Second Encounter moved away from the ancient Egyptian setting of The First Encounter.[14] Croteam's chief executive officer, Roman Ribarić, believed that creating three new environments was sufficient to engage players of The First Encounter to also play The Second Encounter.[18] Within the new settings, Mika designed his first level around Teotihuacan. Excited, he became so immersed in his work that the resulting level had to be split into three, accounting for a quarter of the entire game.[13] Although the game has fewer levels than The First Encounter, Croteam aimed at it having a longer play time by making individual levels larger, and they added more interactive elements to vary gameplay. As the original arsenal "had enough weapons", the three new weapons were added solely for their profound impact on the gameplay. Some weapon plans, including a mortar strapped to Sam's back, were scrapped.[12] By mid-September 2001, the game was "almost complete" in an alpha state, with Croteam targeting a release in December 2001.[19]

The Second Encounter was initially handled as a mission pack until Ribarić and Gathering of Developers, the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary that had published The First Encounter, agreed to make it a standalone product.[20] At Ribarić's request, the four-person mod team A Few Screws Loose (Nick "Xavier" Macron, Chris "LanThief" Kreager, Ben "Vinz" Frech, and Sean "mwadaibe" Center) worked with Croteam to produce an updated version of their Seriously Warped Deathmatch mod to be packaged with the game.[21] The publisher formally announced The Second Encounter in September 2001 and scheduled it for November.[22] Although marketed as a sequel, Ribarić stated that The Second Encounter "is neither a mission pack nor a sequel; it is simply the next episode".[23] The game entered alpha testing in early October and was content-complete in beta three weeks later.[24][25] While a second stage of beta testing occurred at TalonSoft at the end of the month, Croteam had begun working on the game's voice acting and manual.[26]

In early November, The Second Encounter was delayed into early 2002, eventually dated 15 January, while Croteam was resolving bugs.[27] By 10 December, it was a "gold candidate" awaiting approval for release from Take-Two.[28] Croteam had completed a demo for the game by this time, which it released the following day.[28][29] It was hosted on several mirror sites.[30] When reviewing the tentative box art from Gathering of Developers, Croteam requested several changes, most of which were not implemented due to time constraints.[13] Take-Two announced that The Second Encounter had gone gold on 4 January 2002.[31] Gathering of Developers released it on 5 February 2002.[32][33] Some retailers in the United Kingdom had broken the street date two weeks early.[13] To promote the game, it was exhibited at thirty iGaming LAN gaming centres during the week after the release, with some of them providing a preview on 3 February.[34] The publisher also launched the "Disco Inferno" contest that gave away a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card to the designer of the best "disco cathedral" deathmatch map.[35]

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator website Metacritic, which calculated a weighted average rating of 85/100 based on twenty-two critic reviews.[36] Several outlets directly compared the game to The First Encounter. IGN's Ivan Sulic said that it had been expanded upon "in all the right ways" when regarded as an expansion rather than a sequel.[40] Brett Todd of Computer Games Magazine likened it to how The Godfather Part II improved upon The Godfather, while Elliott Chin of Computer Gaming World considered it to be to The First Encounter what Doom II was to Doom.[10][38] Jeremy Williams wrote for PC Gamer that The Second Encounter was "better than the original in almost every respect".[6]

However, Chin cited a lack of innovation in the sparse addition of new weapons and enemies led to few new gameplay twists, which in turn made the game tedious after some time.[10] Sal Accardo of GameSpy considered lengthy arena sections particularly tiresome.[39] On Extended Play, Adam Sessler weighed this as the game's greatest shortcoming, which, interlaced with "uninteresting" platforming, made the game less enjoyable than The First Encounter.[41] Mike Anderiesz wrote for The Guardian that the game's structure had become predictable since The First Encounter, akin to a "one-trick pony".[43]

Contrarily, Greg Kasavin exclaimed that the action gameplay "is some of the best you'll find in any shooter to date", with level designs and production values excelling those of The First Encounter.[8] GameZone's Chuck "Ovaldog" exclaimed that the new weapons, enemies, and power-ups had the game "come to life".[5] Todd observed that enemy waves had become more varied, while the added traps interactive environment segments broke the monotony.[38] Gary Downs from Games Domain felt the new weapons correct a gameplay imbalance he had observed in the original.[4] While Accardo considered the game's bosses less impressive than that of The First Encounter, Williams said he found them entertaining.[6][39] Uros Jojic of Voodoo Extreme noted an increased difficulty.[42]

Downs and Sulic lauded the game's foliage, texture detail, lighting, and environments.[4][40] This was echoed by Mark Hoogland of AllGame, who praised the level designs for their variety and presentation, as well as the strategy one had to master to beat each enemy wave.[37] Todd similarly commended the setting variations, as well as their aptly designed environments and soundtrack.[38] Kasavin also expressed that the "excellent, effective score" ideally fits the theme and pacing.[8] While he bemoaned the game's bad puns, Eurogamer's John Bye enjoyed the self-deprecating humour.[1][37] In a 2016 report, the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Turkey accused the game of Islamophobia for depicting fights near scenery resembling the tomb of Ali.[44]

Unlike its predecessor, The Second Encounter was priced at £20 in the United Kingdom and did not face an increased list price after reviewers had recommended it for its price–performance ratio.[45] Consequently, the game was recommended for its budget price.[1][6][8] According to NPD Techworld, the game was the eight-best-selling game of its week of release, and the third-best the following week.[46][47]

• Official website