Nedávné recenze uživatele Audish

When I finished the campaign in Airborne Kingdom, I did something that I never do. I immediately started a new campaign. I know that’s a normal thing for a lot of people, but I’m very much a one-and-done gamer; usually when I beat a game, I’m fully satisfied to move on to something new. But not this time. Six hours in this game’s serene, storybook kingdoms simply wasn’t enough for me. I had to have more, had to build out a new flying city, and unite the world all over again. That’s what you want from the best building sims, that feeling that you cannot let go of the experience, and that is absolutely what is present here.

Long ago, a legendary kingdom in the sky traveled the world, imparting knowledge and aid to the many kingdoms of the land. Their efforts brought peace and prosperity to all, until they vanished. In the intervening years, kingdoms fell upon hard times, and retreated into isolationism. The golden age of the world ended, but now you have the chance to bring it all back. The original airborne kingdom left behind plans for a new flying city, and you are to command this reborn hope for the world. Striking out from the arid deserts, you must grow your aerial burg, locate the twelve scattered kingdoms, and bring them together in some semblance of the peace and prosperity they enjoyed so long ago. Only then, will you learn of the fate that befell those who traveled the skies before you.

Setting aside the absolutely fantastical optimism of a technologically-advanced society that DIDN’T use their powers for conquest, this is a marvelous premise for a game and fits extremely well with the serene atmosphere of the gameplay. Starting out, you have only the main building of your flying city. From there, you build paths, housing, workshops, and warehouses as you would with most resource-based builders. But given the unique nature of the game, you also have to place hangars for gatherers to launch expeditions from, mechanisms like wings and turbines to keep the city afloat, and different engines to help move the city across the world. Your chief concerns are food, water, and coal, and while you get options to use or process them more efficiently, you’ll always need to be replenishing your supply from the surface. Beyond that, you’ll need an assortment of other resources like wood, clay, and quartz to build your burg out. Some are renewable, some aren’t, but sourcing all of them will factor heavily into where you city goes and how it gets there.

Another key concern that really spices up the building is the tilt of your city. Not only do you need to generate enough lift to stay airborne, you need to balance it out so your citizens aren’t living their lives at a permanent Dutch angle. Your options for balancing tilt are wide open, too, because you can try to build things symmetrically, or you can cluster all your thrusters at one end and all your buildings on the other like some kind of mortal see-saw, or you can try all sorts of other configurations. Your population will have new demands as it grows as well (as new citizens can be recruited from terrestrial towns), including lit roads, sources of faith, health care, and more. The mood of your city determines how easy it is to recruit new folks, and you can research all kinds of buildings that mix and match satisfaction of different needs, like tea houses and spirit healers. You’ll need to research all your new toys for your town, after buying the tech from the old kingdoms using relics found in ruins dotted around the map.

I think this might be my favorite aspect of Airborne Kingdom, how smartly all of its systems are interconnected. Exploring the map is hugely important, since that’s how you’ll find the kingdoms you need to unite. But you’ll also find towns to expand your population, ruins that provide relics to trade for tech, secrets that allow you access to powerful wonders, and even workshops that give you new color customization options for your city. Certain regions have unique resources or, more importantly, lack certain staples like food or coal, so getting your kingdom ready for tougher journeys is part of the progression as well. It’s immensely satisfying to start out with a tiny, barely-functional village struggling with lift and stocking necessities, and eventually build up to a flying juggernaut that can survive comfortably for days without gathering expeditions.

Each kingdom you meet will have a main quest for you to complete to earn their trust, usually a simple task like building them a structure or locating a nearby ruin. Further-flung kingdoms have more complicated requests, but none of them are particularly taxing. Between the quests and exploring, there’s enough to do to keep you busy as you tool across the skies and build out your own kingdom. It took me about six hours to reach the ending, and then I immediately jumped into the New Game + mode which randomizes the map and offers you new city centers to choose from. There’s also Normal and Hard difficulties for any new game, though I didn’t notice a huge difference between them. Either way, you’ll have plenty of ways to enjoy this gorgeous, storybook builder as you explore and expand. I’ve gotten pickier about builders in my old age, and Airborne Kingdom absolutely hits the sweet spot for me of interesting systems and relaxing development.



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The period around Serious Sam 3 is really starting to feel like the Dark Ages of the Serious franchise. Hot on the heels of 3’s bizarrely grounded shift for the series, Croteam elected to return to The Second Encounter with DLC, of all things. This should be cause for celebration, with TSE being the current pinnacle of Samdom. But somehow, this DLC for the best of all the Sam games makes all the worst mistakes its contemporary does, now in a retro setting. I can’t fathom how Croteam misunderstood the assignment so badly, but Legend of the Beast barely feels like part of the series at all. Between the paltry arsenal, misbalanced encounters, and disappointing level design, I’m not sure I’ve ever had so little fun with Serious Sam.

Sam’s back in ancient Egypt! Why? Because Croteam had three cut levels from The First Encounter laying around, and figured they’d be good for something! They were, of course, wrong, but we’ll get to that. The only plot you’ll get for Legend of the Beast is that there’s some legendary beast lurking in Egypt, and you’re in the neighborhood, so why not kill it if you happen across it? This bite-sized quest plays out over three levels of varying size and scope, with the first one being rather short and the other two sprawling practically out of control, culminating in an admittedly interesting boss for the series. Getting there is no cake walk, naturally, as Mental’s minions will be swarming over everything to ensure Sam never lives to see another sequel.

I actually started playing this one as a break from Serious Sam 3, to escape its grim early areas with some classic TSE action. The first level of Legend of the Beast starts you off with some good old-fashioned yard clearing, pitting you against headless footsoldiers, kamikazes, and scorpion gunners. They’re dense fights, with foes coming from all directions, just the kind of challenge you’d expect from mid-game Serious Sam.

Here, you’re expected to take this all on with your pistol.

Not pistols, pistol. Your reward for surviving dozens of charging enemies and hitscanning gunners is a second Colt, and an ambush of the same enemies. You don’t get a new weapon until the end of the level, and it’s the regular shotgun…you know, the one you never use because Serious Sam games are balanced around the coach gun. The second level has some protracted fights between you and your next new weapon…the chainsaw. Later in the level, they deign to grant you the double-barreled coach gun, and near the end, you finally get the tommy gun. Understand that all this time, you’re fending off dozens of kleers, kamikazes, and gnaar, while the challenges also ramp up with the big guys that launch rockets and green homing fireballs. All before you get the guns that the original games balanced these enemies around!

This is what I mean about Croteam misunderstanding the assignment. The Second Encounter gives you your pistols, the chainsaw, both shotguns, a rocket launcher, sniper rifle, AND flamethrower all within the first ten minutes. That’s the fun of Serious Sam, having a arsenal bursting with possibilities to blast through crazy battles with. They remembered the crazy battles here, but they forgot to give you the guns to get through them. Even the item pickups are anemic, with +10 health vials and +5 armor helmets being your reward for scouring areas. In the second level, there’s a side path that terminates in a shrine with a +25 armor pickup, the kind that TSE sprinkled all over like candy. Picking it up triggers a huge fight with gnaars, kleers, and kamikazes that will almost surely leave you poorer for engaging. The entire DLC is balanced like some kind of survival horror joint, keeping you low on weapons, ammo, and healing the whole way through.

Disappointing, frustrating combat is more than enough to damn any attempt at a Serious Sam game, but there’s more. The three levels, while interesting enough architecturally, don’t really offer anything memorable in terms of encounters, spectacles, or secrets. The goofy secrets of TSE in particular are conspicuously absent here, with most of your rewards just being some extra healing or armor. There are some uncomfortably narrow hallways, some arenas that aren’t big enough for the enemies dropped into them, and some horrendous backtracking in the middle level. With nothing notable beyond the unique boss at the end, there’s really no reason at all to even give this one a shot. Legend of the Beast is a gross misunderstanding of Serious Sam’s appeal, made all the more apparent by being bolted onto the best game in the series.



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In a world absolutely rife with remakes and reboots, what place do the originals serve? Most remakes exist for a clear reason, either to capitalize once more upon the successes of the first, or to correct mistakes that weren’t addressed in other releases. The HD versions of The First and Second Encounters are definitely the former, bringing the classic early 2000s excess of kleer-smashing and cannon-bowling to a new generation of boomer shooter fans. But how much does it improve on the original formula, really? I wasn’t really expecting to ever return to the Classic versions of early Serious Sam, but I see now there’s still some unique appeal that has aged just as well as the gameplay.

I won’t belabor the plot of Serious Sam again, because that’s really not why anyone’s here for these games. You’re in ancient Egypt, it’s full of wild-ass alien monsters, and you’ve got the guns and the guts to evacuate their guts onto the sand. The hallmark of Serious Sam is the proliferation of huge arena battles with (at the time) unthinkable numbers of enemies, and you’ll definitely get that here. I noted in my HD review that this one is a little more even-handed with its action than you might remember, with plenty of moody hallway hunts and exploration between the arena brawls. In the end, you’re getting an extremely solid throwback shooter with plenty of action and good pacing to keep you on your toes.

The stand-out here is the “moody” part, especially when compared to the HD remake. While the action and mechanics are all identical between the two versions, I couldn’t help but note the atmosphere of the Classic version being more cohesive and effective. Despite the textures and lighting of the remake being more detailed, everything seems to gel together better in the original. Maybe it’s my own fondness for boomer shooters showing, or perhaps nostalgia from playing the original decades ago, but I got a more immersive feel from the older lighting and crisper textures than from the more realistic HD take. Regardless of which you might prefer, I do think there’s a more consistent look and feel to the Classic version over the HD, and that has to count for something.

That being said, I don’t think more cohesive atmosphere is enough to call this a superior version. The sound design in the HD remake is much improved, and the high-quality guns, enemies, and visual effects like blood spatters make a huge difference in punching up the combat. The UI of Classic is also pretty rough, with most of the graphical assets blown up and stretched out like a bad 2000s meme. Then again, you do get the original versions of some of the more creative arenas, which had to be removed from the HD version, so there’s even a little content here that you won’t get in the more modern treatment. I guess what I’m getting at here is, there’s no clear “best” version between Classic and HD. I would certainly recommend HD over this one just for the visual quality and overall touch-ups, but you absolutely can’t go wrong playing this version, either. It’s the one that launched a decades-long series of blood, gibs, and quips, after all.



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The Serious Sam series has plenty of opportunities to frustrate, but in my experience, rarely does. Even on the higher difficulties, encounters are tuned carefully around your movement and arsenal, ensuring that savvy players can weave through hordes and obliterate their foes with little to no attrition. It’s kind of a key point to these games, and something that The Random Encounter misses entirely. Don’t worry, though, because The Random Encounter misses a lot of other important design points too, so I don’t think it’ll take long for anyone to sour on this game. Seriously, if unavoidable damage, underpowered weapons, and tedious battles are a turn-off, you’d best look elsewhere for your Sam fix.

Somewhere between the original Encounters and Serious Sam 2, it seems Sam has decided he’s on the wrong track to take down Mental. An unnamed scientist gets the bright idea to send him to the future instead of the past, and Timelocks our boy straight to…desert ruins? Wherever Sam ends up, it looks suspiciously like The First Encounter’s environs, except for the retro RPG maps and the two sidekicks waiting to join up for the gibbing. With new partners in tow, Sam takes the battle to huge hordes and towering monsters in the search for Mental. Will he finally catch up to this villian? I dunno, ’cause this one pissed me off about 40 minutes in.

Here’s the thing. Serious Sam is a game about options in the face of overwhelming adversity. You never end up in a situation where you’re completely doomed, unless you put yourself there. You have superior mobility, superior firepower, and whatever flashy reflexes that you, the player, bring to the bloody, blasted table. None of this is the case in The Random Encounter. Here, battles are fought in a scrolling version of an old Final Fantasy encounter screen, with enemies charging in from the left, and Sam and his cohorts backpedaling away on the right. Every five seconds, you can issue new orders to your crew, which really just boil down to shoot, switch guns, or use an item. Between turns, your boys blast away while you maneuver them up and down in a futile effort to avoid enemies. Futile, because you’re playing a bullet hell with a party of three on a single control scheme, and enemies that get around you are guaranteed to hit you.

And enemies are most certainly going to get around you, because your weapons are a sad, pale facsimile of the guns in the real Sam games. The minigun and shotgun can do work, but the rocket launcher fires a tiny spread of three rockets per turn. The sniper rifle fires once every five seconds. The cannon requires two entire turns to fire a single, narrow shot. And the laser cannon has been reduced to little more than a flashlight, not even doing enough damage to reliably dispatch frogs and instead weakly pushing them back. You’ve got to aim them all, too, and your aim is locked in for the full five seconds, so ♥♥♥♥ you if you line up a sniper shot and the enemy decides to weave out of the way. This makes the grenade launcher completely useless, by the way, because you pick a small spot on the screen to launch the grenade, and then it takes nearly the entire turn to land and detonate.

Look, if you’ve ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the guns in a Serious Sam game, you’ve already lost. But this isn’t the only design crime The Random Encounter commits. Swapping weapons takes several valuable seconds out of a turn, meaning in most cases you won’t be able to respond to changing situations in time. Items take an entire turn to use, an entire turn where you cannot shoot, meaning anything besides a Serious Bomb or Serious Speed is probably going to be a waste. You have no ability to manage your party outside of battles either, so if you needed everyone on shotguns at the end of the last fight, you’re going to have to waste the beginning of the next to get them on more generally useful guns. Winning battles restores health and armor, but only based on how well you do. That means battles you just barely survive won’t reward you with anything you need to keep going. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear that the random encounter rate is tuned real high, meaning you’ll have a fight every three or four steps.

It’s a real shame, and not just because bad Serious Sam games are tragedies in their own rights. I don’t think the concept itself is bad, but the execution definitely destroys whatever potential it had. The graphics are nice and retro, and the sound design is decent enough. I’m personally a fan of seeing games transcend their genres, and there’s surely a way to make a Sam RPG work. The Random Encounter ain’t it, though, and I wouldn’t recommend you waste your time giving it a chance to show you that, either. Poor balance, frustrating mechanics, and a lack of serious action make this one spin-off that didn’t need to happen.



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When you think of Serious Sam, no doubt you envision circle-strafing around hordes of galloping skeletons and headless screamers. But Sam’s had a number of 2D outings as well, thanks to Croteam licensing their boy out for some unorthodox adventures. Double D was the first of these, a side-scrolling romp that replicated the chaos of your average Sam game in rather unique ways. Decidedly indie, both in scope and production value, Double D nevertheless offers some serious action across a wide range of levels and modes, and even opens the door to co-op if you’ve got a frag-minded friend to bring along.

At some ill-defined point in the future, Sam “Serious” Stone has defeated Mental and now wanders space and time with his head-based AI Netrisca in search of action. He stumbles across Mental’s forces back in ancient Egypt, and does what he does best. Turns out an eclectic collection of baddies is up to no good across history again, so Sam sets out to make them all dead. From familiar Egypt, he’ll fling himself back to the time of the dinosaurs, and then back forward to the day Pompeii came down with a bad case of lava flows. In each of these eras, you’ll find aliens, monkeys, mutants, insects, and more to blast with a highly-customizable array of weapons that you almost never seem to run out of ammo for.

Let’s go ahead and talk about these guns, because this is by far the most distinctive part of the game. Double D has a surprisingly slim selection of firearms compared to other Sam games, with only eight for you to blast away with. However, and this is a legendarily huge however, you can stack these guns atop themselves to create a veritable wall of firepower. This is the gun stacking system, wherein you find copies of guns and connectors and attach up to six weapons together, making a mixed-purpose supergun. You could stitch three shotguns and three machine guns together, throw a chainsaw or flamethrower in there for close-range action, or stick nearly one of everything together to make a bullet-spewing, flame-belching, rocket-launching, laser-blasting stack of doom.

But wait, we’re not done here! Each individual gun has four possible upgrades that can give it entirely new capabilities. These can be destructive, like split shots, poison, or ricochets; utilitarian, like propelling you through the air or producing a shield; or just completely out there, like launching pats of butter or bees. Upgrades are bought from a charming monster-man, with the currency being some kind of mind-control boxes that drop from enemies. It’s a fairly generous economy, allowing you upgrades for pretty much every gun you find, especially if you’re scouring levels for secrets and killing foes down to the last. You need to be searching high and low anyway, because you certainly want as many guns and connectors as you can to round out your monstrous arsenal.

Your gun-bominations should make short work of Sam’s 2D foes here, which is good because they can show up in similarly overwhelming numbers as the 3D games. Most levels have a fair bit of exploration and platforming, aided by a very clever and super fun jump pad you can throw out wherever you want. But the last leg of each level is usually a big brawl with a healthy mix of titanic foes and filler fiends. Several of the old stand-bys are here, from gnaars to kleers, and foot soldiers to headless kamikazis. But there are newcomers as well, and they are just as all over the place as your arsenal. We’re talking jetpacking monkeys, mind-controlled dinos, pogo-sticking lava dudes, and (I swear I am not making this up) stacks of pancakes playing vuvuzelas. And if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the big bosses are probably as weird as this series ever gets, Serious Sam 2 included.

I suppose that’s the only thing that might put someone off this rollicking little platformer, the style. Double D is animated in that classic online style that I really should learn the name of, where 2D characters have all their joints rigged to provide smooth animation, even if the individual parts are stiff. The enemies themselves, then, are highly-detailed renders in bright, garish colors that can only really be described as grotesque. Seriously, when you see some of the giant bug monsters, you’re likely to recoil from the screen. It feels weird, coming from the cartoonish models of Serious Sam 2 to this sort of faux-realism, and the dialogues during short cutscenes aren’t going to do anything to set you at ease.

Still, as long as the look and feel aren’t too alien to you, this is a wonderful Sam-style platforming romp. There are enough stages across the three time periods to last you a good four hours, and you’ll unlock a mess of challenge arena and head-to-head multiplayer stages along the way. You even get a sort of New Game + mode after you beat it once, where you keep all your guns and upgrades to challenge higher difficulties with. But even without all that content, it’s just a really fun, clever approximation of Serious Sam’s chaotic action. The gun stacking system and new foes bring a lot of life to Double D, and Serious fans looking for a change of pace need look no further.



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Where do you go after The Second Encounter? There’s a clear line between the first two Serious Sam games, with more guns, more monsters, bigger levels, crazier encounters, and sillier secrets. Serious Sam 2 builds on some of that, but ultimately feels like it takes more steps back than it does forward. Croteam had a brand new engine to show off here, and for the time they made a visually striking and completely over-the-top game. It’s just that it wasn’t over-the-top in the way that one would expect a Serious Sam game to be. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of kleer-smashing and cannonball bowling to be had. I doubt it’s going to be the follow-up to The Second Encounter you’re looking for, though.

Sam Stone has at last escaped the surly bonds of Earth, striking out across the galaxy for Sirius, home of the dastardly Mental. However, his trip is interrupted by a group of all-powerful watchers who have a big job for a Serious hero. Turns out that Mental can only be defeated using a medallion that saps his ill-defined powers, and that medallion has been broken into five pieces and scattered throughout the cosmos. Sam’s new fan club can send him to the planets where the pieces lie, but he’ll need to do all the heavy lifting (and shooting) to get them back. Only then can he begin the assault on Sirius itself, and put an end to this universal threat.

What this means is five distinct chapters of shootouts, spanning jungles, swamps, festivals, wastelands, and fairytale kingdoms. Each leg of your journey is chopped into half a dozen or so short stages, leading to a boss fight with its own unique gimmick. The stages are a lot of familiar Serious Sam fare, giving you a series of chambers or courtyards that fill with enemies, and expecting you to drain them of living opposition before progressing. Some stages feature alternative challenges, like scavenger hunts to find coins or bananas, airship rides between floating islands, or timed sprints through dangerous territory. This variety is hit-or-miss in terms of fun, but I can’t deny it does a decent job of breaking up the gameplay in interesting ways.

The combat is still the main attraction here, and again, it’s familiar fare but mixed in its evolutions from The Second Encounter. For one thing, you’ll simply never have fights of the same scale as the previous game, what with levels being far smaller than any prior. Some of the vistas and structures are still plenty impressive, but the actual architecture leaves plenty to be desired, with an unexpected reliance on invisible walls and hemmed-in arenas. The fights themselves offer a wide variety of new enemies in some creative mixes, including unicycling exploding clowns, mutant football linebackers, and attack helicopters. The over-reliance on some of the more annoying additions (looking at you, attack helicopters) can become grating, but the variety again helps keep things fresh.

Your arsenal has gotten a similarly colorful overhaul, but not without casualties. A chargeable energy pistol joins the starting Colts, homing plasma and beam weapons round out the exotic armaments, and there’s a suicide bomber parrot that can take out tough foes for you. The sniper rifle remains untouched from the last game, but the flamethrower is painfully absent. Everything has gotten bright, creative visual upgrades that really make the guns pop, but the sound design and impact are weaker than ever. Serious Sam games never had the most impactful weapons, but the rocket launcher in this one sounds like you’re just releasing missiles to blow away in the breeze. Most importantly, your arsenal resets on every planet (and sometimes for story beats), and you almost never get the full lineup to play with. This makes certain guns like the plasma cannon and minigun far more useful than others when your options for dealing with hordes are limited.

One of the stranger aspects of Serious Sam 2 is how much closer it feels to other FPSes of the time. The First and Second Encounters always felt like they were thumbing their noses at their contemporaries, eschewing complex encounters and architecture for big boxes or wide-open spaces filled with a million dudes to kill. In comparison, this one features much smaller levels of only a few sections each, and while some of the battles and arenas are quite large, the segmented nature of the levels makes the overall game feel smaller in scope. Odder still is the heavy reliance on vehicle and turret sequences. In more conventional shooters, these were the parts that were meant to feel LIKE a Serious Sam game, a chance to gun down 50 dudes instead of tactically engaging four or five. In a Serious Sam game, a turret sequence is just…more Serious Sam, except you can’t move.

The biggest issue by far, though, is the tone of the game. Serious Sam 2 is the series at its most cartoonish, practically a Saturday morning parody of itself. It’s more than just the bright colors and whimsical designs (which were honestly a welcome respite from the mud-brown shooters of the era), it’s the unpleasant extremes the humor is taken to. The original Sam games had tongue-in-cheek moments, goofy secrets, and even some fourth-wall-breaking in The Second Encounter, but the heart of the struggle against Mental was still played mostly straight. Here, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is a joke. Every single one of the 42 levels opens and closes with a cutscene, and not one of them is lacking for a movie parody, ancient meme, or terrible joke. This is early 2000s monkey cheese humor too, which has aged about as well as actual cheese from the early 2000s would. In particular, the parts of the game around Kingsburg are incredibly cringe-worthy, centering on Sam’s sexual exploits and shaming the outlandishly unattractive princess.

What you’re left with is a game that plays like the Serious Sam you know and love from the original releases, but only in select encounters. The rest of the time, you’re going to be mindlessly mowing down foes with vehicles, groaning at terrible, outdated jokes, or wondering where all the neat secrets went. The guns look better than ever and yet feel worse than before, and you’ll be using them to blow up cartoon characters instead of the slavering beasts you’re accustomed to. This is an unexpected and not entirely welcome shift for the series, but it's saved by the variety it offers compared to other Serious Sam titles. Yes, it might be a weak Serious Sam, but it’s also a unique Serious Sam, and it maintains enough of the old gibbing magic that I wouldn’t want to write it off completely.



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Honestly, I could never remember if it’s 6 Vs or 7. There were plenty of other things I forgot about this little platforming gem in the decade since I last played it, but the name is definitely the hardest part to stick. I can’t overstate how glad I am I revisited it, though, because VVVVVV is one of the best balances of challenge and chill you can get from indie platformers. It can confound and mystify without frustrating, and always offers you something new to do if you’ve come across a particularly tricky section. And even if you do find yourself starting to fume, the thick layer of charm laid on by the adorable characters and retro stylings is sure to put you back in your comfort zone.

It’s a disaster…IN SPAAAAAACE! Captain Viridian’s ship has crashed in an unknown sector of the universe, and his crew has been scattered by a mysterious disruption. It’s up to him to reunite the team and figure out what the heck happened to the ship, and fortunately, he’s the perfect person to do it. Not only does he have a winning smile and a can-do attitude, he can also flip his personal gravity at will. That’ll prove invaluable when facing the twisting corridors and yawning voids of this enigmatic place. Each new challenge will push him in different and unexpected ways, and ultimately lead to some big revelations about where his ship ended up, and where it’s going.

VVVVVV has a perfectly serviceable story for the kind of game it is, a framework to hang fantastical platforming and exploration upon. There are terminals dotted about that give a little more context to the story beats that happen from time to time, but again, plumbing the depths of this strange space is the real attraction here. The map is wide open, with a vast Super Metroid-esque landscape sprawling in all directions just outside your ship. From here, tunnels and passageways lead to more discrete sections that present thematic challenges like moving platforms, edge-wrapping mazes, and a particularly harrowing tower ascent. Your crew tends to be tucked away at the ass-ends of each of these areas, and each adds their own little colorful observations about the predicament you find yourself in.

The platforming is the real star of the show here, because it takes a wonderfully Bionic Commando approach to powerful yet limited mobility. All you can do is run left, run right, or reverse your own gravity while on solid ground. With no discrete ability to jump, a single-tile obstruction can be a greater obstacle than a yawning laser-filled chasm if there’s no clear way to gravity-flip over it. And trust me, the game makes incredible use of this dynamic in all of its areas. Platforming takes on a whole new dimension here, with ceilings becoming just as important as floors and nominally simple jumps turning into an entire process when you can only flip around the extremes of the problem. Some of the challenges are infamous, such as a multi-screen ascent and descent through a spiked gauntlet just to clear a tiny ankle-high wall.

Most importantly, though, is that nothing here is particularly stressful. Aided by the simple, charming art style, VVVVVV is ultimately a very inviting game, even when facing you with a twisting passage of death. Checkpoints are dotted practically every other screen, and retries are instantaneous, meaning you can fling yourself to your doom as much as you want and waste very little time doing it. The hardest challenges are also reserved for the optional collectibles scattered across the world, and even then don’t reach the same heights as some modern metroidvanias in difficulty. A wealth of fast-travel teleporters on top of all this makes it clear that this game can be taken at your pace, as far as you want, as long as you’re having fun with it.

That was the biggest feeling that flooded back to me when I replayed VVVVVV recently, just how outright fun the whole thing is. I never got stuck anywhere, never raged at any of the challenges, and always had a huge smile on my face when I rescued one of my wayward crewmates. I don’t want to hear any complaints about the pixel art, because the clean lines and stark colors really help emphasize the platforming. The sound design is a perfect match to the retro feel, with big boops and beeps that I love (and I cannot lie). VVVVVV is regarded as a classic for good reason, offering timeless challenge and exploration without ever really pushing you out of that cozy, comfortable space.



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What do you think of when you hear the name Serious Sam? Probably vast fields of screaming monsters, miniguns revved to the max, and forever running backwards. I would bet money that whatever you’re envisioning in that game-addled brain of yours was pulled from The Second Encounter, because that’s certainly the case for me. The First Encounter may have set the stage for what Serious Sam is all about, but The Second Encounter is where those concepts blossomed into the hilarious chaos of bones and bombs that we all know and love. This, to me, is the quintessential Serious Sam experience, with bigger, wilder fights and a better balance of weapons than anything that came before or after. If you’re serious about this series, this is where you want to be.

Our boy Sam may have killed his way across Egypt and onto a flashy alien ship, but Mental isn’t about to let him get away that easy. Villainous minions bring the ship down in the mountains of ancient South America, conveniently within walking distance of the Mayan empire. Turns out if Sam wants to get spaceborne again, he’s going to need to track down the Holy Grail, a full continent and aeon away. Thus begins The Second Encounter, a bloody odyssey across South America, Persia, and Europe, in search of magical doohickeys that spirit Sam away to the next big battle on the list. Along the way he’ll find plenty of weapons and items, many of them new to this instalment, to help him fend off the literal thousands of foes standing in his path.

At its very core, this is the same Serious Sam gameplay pioneered by The First Encounter. There is a big room, it fills with enemies, you shoot them all, then door opens to next big room. But while the previous game took something of an even-handed approach to this with a mix of tight corridors and arenas, this one goes all-out with field after yard of swarming foes. The very first level sprawls across a lush valley, and taking only a few steps summons a charging horde. That’s perhaps one of the most striking elements of the combat in The Second Encounter, the diversity in encounters. Not content to simply unleash hundreds of Kleer skeletons or mechs, almost every fight is a clever mix of snipers, brawlers, chargers, and more. I found myself switching weapons mid-fight much more often, and not because I was running out of ammo, but because the challenges bearing down on me called for different tactics all at once.

Sam’s arsenal is another notable upgrade in this outing. As I plowed through The First Encounter, it became apparent that there were certain weaknesses in the firepower I could bring to bear, leading me to lean on the minigun and laser gun far too much. Those weaknesses have been thoroughly allayed here by the inclusion of the sniper rifle and flamethrower, both immensely useful for dispatching powerful, distant foes and particularly voluminous hordes, in turn. There’s also the Serious Bomb, an arena-clearing weapon of last resort that really helps save your skin when a battle gets out of hand. The ubiquitous FPS chainsaw makes an appearance, but I didn’t often turn to it unless I had one of the powerful new pickups like Invincibility or Serious Damage to turn it into a true death-dealer. These pickups in particular helped mix up fights, as well as save time with useful abilities like super speed to cross massive expanses.

And boy, are these expanses massive. You really need to understand that everything is bigger in The Second Encounter, from the scale of the fights to the arenas they take place in to the scope of the levels themselves. There are only twelve levels here, compared to the fifteen of the previous game, but every single one of these is absolutely huge. One level is a journey through a jungle, a trap-filled tunnel network, a fire cavern, an enormous valley, and several temples. It can easily take over an hour to clear a single level, especially if you’re seeking out the dozens upon dozens of secrets scattered throughout. There are no separate secret levels, but some of these goofy easter eggs are so detailed that they feel like levels unto themselves.

That’s another big difference with this game, the tone. Serious Sam has always been a tongue-in-cheek series, but this one goes full on fourth-wall-breaking clownshoes with its writing. Insane secrets aside, even the mission briefings from Netrisca are full of jokes about game design and player expectations. A later snowy level has Santa Claus running around and Christmas songs playing during battles. It’s absolutely goofy, and honestly one of the best balances of serious action and comedy the series has seen. I don’t need Sam treating his quest with any kind of gravity, and I don’t need deep lore for why we’re blowing up pumpkin-headed chainsaw maniacs in the bathhouses of ancient Persia. Having a laugh at the game for being itself is just the thing after an intense thousand-enemy massacre.

When it all comes together, I’m prepared to say this is the pinnacle of the Serious Sam series. Everything that should be bigger is bigger, and everything that should be sillier is sillier. It takes all the strengths of the previous game and expands upon them, along with some welcome additions that spice things up. I wouldn’t say it’s any harder or mechanically deeper than the game that came before it, or even the ones that came after it. But again, that’s not what a Serious Sam game needs to be. You need huge guns, huge arenas, and huge quantities of foes to gib, and this has all that and more. Let Serious Sam: The Second Encounter stand as a cornerstone of this FPS niche, one of the pinnacles of insane action to aspire to, and let’s hope more Sam games like this can exist in the future.



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Do you remember how the world was before Serious Sam? Don’t answer that; at this point, your reply is likely to make my ancient form crumble to dust and blow away in the wind. But there did exist a time before horde modes, before Painkiller, before nuts.wad, before the very concept of just giving players a giant gun and a room stuffed full of meaty enemies. Serious Sam was the quippy bastard that ushered us into a golden age of endless gibs, starting with a blood-and-buckshot-fueled romp through ancient Egypt. There have been several remakes of The First Encounter over the years, and HD has always been my weapon of choice for revisiting the genesis of the series. Fortunately, both the gameplay and the remake itself have aged plenty gracefully enough for the modern generation to get their fill of chaingun strafing and headless screaming.

Did you know these mad murderfests have a story? It’s true! In the far-flung future, Earth is on its last legs following an alien invasion spearheaded by the villainous Mental. Sam “Serious” Stone is the last protagonist left standing and the cornerstone of the Earth Defense Force, and they’ve got a plan for underdogging this war by sending Sam back in time to ancient Egypt. There, he’ll have to uncover the connections between the Egyptians and ancient aliens (yes, obviously, it was aliens) to summon a weapon that can change the course of history. Mental, however, is not about to let his conquest get re-written, and sends his massive, motley forces back to overrun the past. Good thing Sam is an expert in killing everything, everywhere, at all times, or that might be a problem!

This is one of those wonderful cases where someone had to write a ridiculously tenuous plot to connect an alien army, Egypt, and a guy running around in All Stars with a rocket launcher, and pulled it off to be built upon for decades. The meat of the game, of course, is turning ludicrous quantities of enemies into meaty chunks, and it does not fail to deliver. The classic Serious Sam experience is triggering a flood of enemies, then running backwards or wildly strafing while blazing away with lasers, bullets, and bombs until only you remain standing. The eclectic mix of foes keeps this interesting, as galloping skeletons, towering mechs, screeching harpies, and the now-ubiquitous screaming headless suicide bombers swarm Sam in varying volumes and formations.

What might surprise you, if you’re new to the series or coming to this one after future games, is how even-handed the earlier levels are. The front half of The First Encounter could almost be mistaken for a normal FPS, with reasonable enemy placements and moderate body counts. The scope of the levels, sprawling into the distant desert sands, still set it apart, and there are a few memorable setpiece battles that remind you what series it is you’re playing. But it’s clear that Serious Sam started as more of a balance between massive brawls and shorter encounters, something that later games moved away from as they fully embraced the madness that made Sam the man he is. The First Encounter is definitely more straight-forward, even in its big climactic late-game battles, than The Second Encounter is in its opening hour.

As for the remake itself, it’s certainly a faithful rendition of the absurd sorties and secrets that made up the original release. The (relatively) modern engine gives the game some much-needed fidelity that holds up great even now, though some of the building textures and geometry might give you pause if you stop to admire your surroundings too long. The UI is clean and the weapons look great, especially as they tear through hordes of enemies. This particular edition of The First Encounter loses a few of the more creative gravity-based rooms from the original, which is a definite shame, but does offer a few extra secrets in some levels that really benefit from them. Speaking of secrets, this is a series that really must be respected for both the hilarity and sheer volume of secrets it manages to cram in between arenas.

A full romp through ancient Egypt (the two secret levels included) will run you about six hours, which is a perfectly reasonable length of time to enjoy some Serious Sam. Anything longer than that, and you definitely risk burnout on Sam’s particular brand of FPS action. It’s honestly hard to argue that The First Encounter hasn’t aged gracefully, as it delivers on the promise of massive mayhem against previously unthinkable volumes of foes. A fair number of games have topped this one in size and spectacle (most of them subsequent Serious Sam games), but I find it comforting that the original, the game that showed us how much fun truly massive shootouts can be, is still as entertaining as it ever was.



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Review copy provided by publisher

I’ll tell you up front, I’m coming at this one from a weird angle. I am a Serious Sam enjoyer from the distant past, having spent plenty of time in the First and Second Encounters. I even knocked around in Serious Sam 2, the black sheep of the series, but that was the last one I played before Siberian Encounter. With that in mind, I can’t speak to the evolution of Sam between 3 and 4 (at least not yet), but I know a Serious Sam game when I see one and this has all the hallmarks. Ludicrously huge encounters, meaty guns, bizarre humor, and unexpected secrets are all here, along with some innovations I wasn’t expecting. This is easily the most fun I’ve had with a Serious game yet, which is remarkable seeing as how it hails from a totally different developer.

Again, I can’t fill you in on the details of the story, because the last time I left Sam, he was planet-hopping across cartoonish worlds in pursuit of Mental. Here, he’s rolled up to the frozen climes of Siberia to check out a disturbance reported in the Tunguska area. Obviously, it’s a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of monsters, and Sam’s here to kill them all and let the renderer sort them out. He’ll run across a few solid allies in his journey, and make a surprising discovery about one of his foes. There’s probably some other stuff going on, judging from the notes and audio logs scattered about, but if we can be real for a minute, I’m not running around in a Serious Sam game for the story.

I’m here to gib as many enemies as the game is willing to throw at me, and hot damn does it throw out some enemies. Ramping up very quickly from the serene coastal opening, Sam has literally thousands of foes to mow down across icy tundra, frozen farmlands, precarious cliffs, ramshackle villages, towering refineries, and ominous warehouses. Timelock Studio, the collection of modders responsible for bringing Siberian Mayhem to life, absolutely understand why people play Serious Sam games, and have an admirable talent for composing surprising and creative encounters. This game feels like a greatest hits album of frenetic fights, challenging you with hallways choked with charging Kleers, plazas strafed with fire and harpies, and wide-open plains with more enemies than you can even imagine.

Sam’s arsenal is up to the task of taking on this army, of course, with a collection of solid stand-bys like shotguns, launchers, and a beam cannon that makes enemies explode. There’s also an assortment of gadgets like on-demand healing, speed boosts, black holes, air strikes, and a portable combat hoverboard that come in very handy during the larger fights. Notably, there’s a skill point system here (apparently carried over from 4) that offers some absurdly powerful abilities like dual-wielding any two weapons and melee-executing even the largest foes. They’re so dramatic, in fact, that it seems odd they’re not just included in Sam’s standard repertoire. On the bright side, getting to dual wielding is easy enough through the freebie skill points you earn through normal progression, and once you’re toting around a minigun in one hand and a beam cannon in the other, you’ll wonder how you ever got on without them.

The other notable feature of Siberian Mayhem (which may also have been in 4, I can’t say) is side objectives that help fill out the vast open spaces most levels have plenty of. Most of the game’s missions have a side objective that’s activated simply by approaching the area, and it usually rewards an extra skill point on top of the extra ammo and possible early weapons you’ll get along the way. These can get very involved, with one being a full-on quest into a secret bunker with one hell of a payoff. I really like this inclusion, because Serious Sam games have always valued and rewarded exploration, and having entire side missions to play through with their own setpieces is a really big bonus.

It’s hard not to love the sheer volume and variety of action offered here, especially when you get to some of the more creative encounters and vehicle sections. The game is also broken up occasionally by cutscenes, most focusing on Sam himself but also introducing other characters like a rag-tag gang of stereotypical Russian crazies. I could knock the quality of the animations or voice acting in these bits, but again, story and drama are not what I’m plowing through a Serious Sam game for. I took around six hours to blow through the whole thing and do most of the side missions, which puts it somewhere between the good ol’ First and Second Encounters for length. And honestly, that’s about right for a Serious Sam game. You want these nice and punchy, so you can drink up the action and silliness before it wears out its welcome. Siberian Mayhem is just that, a fine figure of modern Serious Sam action, and one that I doubt will disappoint classic FPS fans.



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