hile QuakeCon is usually all about id Software titles, we got our hands on an updated build of Croteam’s Serious Sam II. Most first person shooters these days have much more strategic portions or team based elements, but Croteam has stuck with what’s worked well for them in the past – shoot everything and blow loads of sh** up.
Serious Sam has always been about tons of weapons, and a ridiculous amount of enemies on screen at once, and Sam II just builds onto what you know and love. When I played the levels, the PR representative from 2K games had god mode on for a portion of my preview, and after a while I decided to have him take it off. Let me tell you, with as many baddies as Croteam throws at you, you’re going to want to have God Mode on as well. Wave after wave of enemy will be around every nook and cranny of the 40+ levels. There’s well over 45 new enemies to blast away at, and while you’ll think some of the large enemies you’ll see in our movies are bosses, like the towering spider, those are actually regular sized enemies. Bosses, we’ve been told, will be even larger.
Fortunately for Sam, he’ll be packing quite a bit of interesting weaponry to disperse foes with. Since we had god mode rolling, we had access to all of Sam’s toys including the auto shotgun, cannon, circular saw, dual colts, double shotgun, grenade launcher, minigun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and zap gun. Two of our favorites are the returning Serious Bomb of Death which is basically a smartbomb that destroys everything, and the Klodovik Bird, which is a parrot who flies a bomb to an unhappy destination. Needless to say, there’s going to be enough there to mow down enemies in spades. Add stationary weapons like turrets and vehicles that range from the standard to what-the-heck-were-they-thinking, and Sam’s got some help on his side.
The second generation Serious Engine looks fantastic, and framerates seemed rather quick regardless of how many enemies were on screen. Granted, we were using new top-of-the-line Dell’s to play the game, but for those with a PC that’s a bit older, the game is promised to be quite scalable. But overall, the visuals are impressive, character models are fluid, and environments much improved over previous installments.
As we announced last week, Croteam is taking multiplayer cooperative to the next level. On the PC side, you’ll be able to play through the entire game cooperatively with up to 16 people, and on the Xbox, four players can play cooperatively via system link or Xbox Live. With up to 16 people, that’s going to be a crap-ton of carnage. All that is shipping with the game is cooperative mode, but Croteam will have your normal multiplayer Deathmatch in a future patch for PC gamers, but that's all that's planned. The mod community will be charged with the task of creating Capture the Flag and other mods. Unfortunately, Xbox gamers will not have normal multiplayer modes so it’ll just be cooperative if you’re playing multiplayer on the Xbox.
Overall, we’re looking forward to getting our hands on a final version of Serious Sam II. Sure, it’s fun to get scared while playing Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 it’s neat to play with physics, but sometimes you just want to just kill a lot of crap. Thank God for Croteam, because Serious Sam II looks like it’s just what the doctor ordered.
We’ll have more on Serious Sam II in the future, but for now peruse over 20 minutes of direct feed movies.