petpasta

Welp, it’s the last report of this year and decade. I’ve beaten 77 games this year (3 of them aren’t recognized, 1 of them isn’t from my library, 1 on my 3DS, 1 isn’t on Steam).

Report 19: Getting serious

    Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter

    Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter

    8/10
    14 hours playtime

    Wow, I really forgot how great the… second part of the first installment? was. It’s way more fun and exhilarating. Evem though the game can be boiled down to locking you up on arenas pretty much, it often spices things up by creating unique setups and forcing you to adapt quickly. This one just has more variety overall.
    Second Encounter still has a buttload of MP-only achievements, but it does have more of a SP ones.
    I’ve had fun replaying it.

    Serious Sam 2

    Serious Sam 2

    7/10
    12 hours playtime
    no achievements

    It’s a full-fledged sequel for SS: Encounters, and it’s a weird one.
    The tone has shifted dramatically, and it’s more comical than ever. In fact, I think it became way too cartoonish for my taste. And the humor… well, I know Serious Sam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of comedy before, but god, were most of these jokes awful and childish. Even if it’s intentionally stupid, it was painfully unbearable at times.
    But let’s talk about the good stuff. The levels were way more detailed and colourful. This game introduced turrets and driveable vehicles, which were pretty fun to use.
    The best part of SS - shooting things - is as fun as ever - deceivengly easy at the beginning, but can throw a curveball or two from time to time, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as it could’ve been.
    Overall, under the colourful surface, it’s still the same Serious Sam experience, even if it’s a bit easier than its’ predecessors.

    Serious Sam 3: BFE

    Serious Sam 3: BFE

    8/10
    17 hours playtime

    Plot-wise it’s a prequel for the franchise, and I didn’t expect it to be as good as it turned out to be, honestly.
    Game’s tone is almost an exact opposite of the previous one (thankfully). It looks more gritty and realistic, the humor has been toned down to the appropriate level. The weapons you use visibly maim your enemies, so the fighting feels way more impactful and close&personal than ever. That’s the reason I thought the game would cut the enemies numbers a bit, but whoo boy, was I wrong. Last levels threw hoards of enemies at me, as usual.
    The DLC, Jewel of the Nile, is pretty fun too so far.

images
7/10, 5 hours of playtime, 20/22 achievements (90%)
Another restricted game, woo.
It’s a pretty good zelda-like… dungeon crawler, I guess you can call it that?
It has a good share of puzzles (either enter-the-code or sokoban). I’ve beaten most of the game without knowing how to restart sokoban puzzles, though, and seeing that the dev had to go out of his way to make a pinned topic explaining the tutorial bit that I’ve missed, I wasn’t the only one.
There’s a pretty big cast of enemies, some of them can be extremely annoying at times.
Navigating through dungeons got surprisingly hard on the third and forth levels, the backtracking and “where the hell am I supposed to go” moments are off the charts sometimes.
The bosses are not that distinctive, but still done pretty well. I’ve glitched out and became immortal for some reason during the final boss fight, but thank god I did - it would be a massive pain the ass if I kept dying on him.
Speaking of asspain, the last two achievements are for speedrunning the game in 90 minutes (my terrible sense of direction makes it impossible) and not dying a single time (being me makes it impossible), so I won’t be doing them now and I doubt I’ll do them ever.
Overall, a surprisingly solid and short game for a few hours.

Backlog progress status: seriously lacking

12%
3%
9%
74%
2%
kubikill

I finished Serious Sam 2 recently too and I felt about it the same way as you. The humor was bad, it got a few heh’s out of me but that was pretty much it, but gameplay-wise it was still just as fun as the previous games.