Serious Sam: Next Encounter

PS2 review by Philip Morton, published on Monday 17th May 2004

Like Final Fantasy and Perfect Ace, Serious Sam isn’t the most truthful of titles. Of course, the Japanese RPG blockbuster series will probably still be around in ten years time and Oxygen’s tennis game was far from perfect. Yet these names are unintentionally ironic, whereas Sam is deliberately deceiving for comedy purposes, with the Next Encounter moniker echoing the obviousness of the film Airplane 2: The Sequel. You’d think that the game with a title like that would be at least slightly humourous, but the joke’s really on anyone who buys it.

Sam is a muscle bound, gruff and insensitive character, one with little personality or intelligence. Our soulless ‘hero’ isn’t really likeable in any way, he just exists and that’s about it. In films, you are a passive spectator watching the cast, so it doesn’t matter if the guy on the screen is a loser because you’re not him. In games however, you are the character and frankly, who wants to be a spineless deadbeat?

Other games have dodgy heroes, but decent gameplay can often save games from disaster. The trouble is, is that Serious Sam: Next Encounter has no redeeming elements that can save it from ruin. On almost every point you can pick out, the game falls apart, disregarding the simple design principles that, if followed, can make games playable and positively enjoyable. Painkiller is another first person shooter with a very similar game mechanic, but the differences between it and this are quite astounding. It’s as if no-one really took this project seriously from the start.

So where does the game trip up so badly? For starters, the weak plot is conveyed poorly right from the start, bewildering the player before they’ve even got their hands on a gun. All you manage to pick up from the suspect voice acting and meager cut-scenes is that some small guy has something bad and Sam is going off to stop him by killing lots of people and firing an copious amount of guns. Unlike Painkiller, it doesn’t draw you into the game world and the it’s just not convincing. An excuse for gratuitous violence in games is fine by me, but it’s got to be a good one.

Next Encounter is a first person shooter, and an exceptionally basic one at that. The twin analogue sticks move you around and look, with the shoulder buttons handling weapon changing and firing; that’s it. Hold R2 to fire, then move around, aiming at the oncoming hordes of generic monsters as they spawn in. The enemies just run towards you, lacking cohesion and intelligence. Gunning them down is easy with the weapons you’re given and there’s never a need to run away or back off to reload or regroup. You could do it with your eyes closed, upside-down, hanging from a suspension bridge, naked.

The game also does a great job of patronising the player. Considering that the game is rated 16+, you’d expect the mainly adult audience to be treated in a reasonably mature way. Yet the game seems to consider the player as some child who is only capable of shooting and collecting various powerups in a rudimentary way like a combination of Pac Man and Time Crisis. Little cartoon styled scores appear above every enemy you take down and are added to your score. Shoot people, get a good score. Just do it, you don’t need a reason. If any games should be blamed for a rise in gun crime, it should be games like this.

The locales you fight in are crude, bland and utterly characterless (but I guess that suits Sam, after all). There’s no atmosphere to speak of, unlike the superb one that features in Painkiller. Next Encounter fails on the simplest of goals; to create a believable game world of which you want to be a part of. I want to find out more about Vice City (GTA) and Balmora (Morrowind), but not this stagnant, uninspiring place. If you don’t want to be there, why bother?

As in all games viewed from a first person perspective, you look directly out of the eyes of your character and ideally you should feel part of him or her. Yet Next Encounter somehow manages to feel like you’re simply controlling a couple of hands holding weapons rather than a real person. There’s no credible kinetic movement or energy that would make the whole experience believable. ‘Feel’ is something that distinguishes the great from the good and games like Prince of Persia have this just right, with convincing, organic and natural movements. Serious Sam: Next Encounter simply feels like and plays like a mess.

Visually, Next Encounter is merely unimpressive. In a time where we have the likes of Far Cry, Fable and Halo, games which look like the original Half-Life with less character do not fare well. Your opponents are generic, uninspiring characters with simple animations to get them from spawn to death. The environments, as mentioned before, are bland and lackluster, with little textural detail or style. The game runs fairly well and the framerate doesn’t drop noticeably, but you’d expect just that with a game that has such substandard graphics. Next Encounter’s visuals are painfully second-rate and in a genre where the benchmark is especially high, this is simply not good enough.

Online play has been included along side offline multiplayer, with a co-operative two player mode and a variety of other generic deathmatch modes. This would certainly be advantageous if it were any good, but alas, it is not, so the replay value falters. Good games make use of online and offline multiplayer to extend their lifespan, but who wants to play a bad game even more that they have to?

Serious Sam: Next Encounter was a real disappointment for me, having heard relatively positive accounts of the other games in the series. I thought it might embrace the genre’s core gameplay elements and values in a fun, easy to get into package, but how wrong I was. The game is a real mess, with shoddy graphics, a badly constructed and executed plot, repetitive and flawed gameplay, bland multiplayer elements and a serious lack of atmosphere. Next Encounter isn’t even worthy of an average score; it’s clearly a substandard game in a genre packed with an abundance of quality titles.