Croteam really disappointed me with Sam2, so I really hope they are able to win back some respect. Sam2 sacrificied most everything that made the Sam1 episodes great. They just tried too hard to appeal to console gamers. As a result, it didn't appeal to either console gamers or pc gamers.
Sam2 was much smaller in scale than Sam1, the battles were smaller, and they tried to be too cute with a bunch of silly nonsense than didn't fit well in the Sam world. It also didn't deliver the physics integrated with gameplay that Croteam promised. I still like playing an occasional old-school style shooter, but Croteam must wise up and figure out what made Sam1 much more successful than Sam2.
Qixote
So it's not just me, then? I'm not the only one who felt Serious Sam 2 wasn't, well, serious enough? I also felt that they were trying to be cute and silly, which caused the story to lose all sense of forboding. In the original two games, even though there was humor around every corner and some oddly designed enemies that sometimes bordered on wacky, they managed to keep you feeling like you were actually fighting a truly evil force.
In SS2, I could have been Bugs Bunny fighting armies of Elmer Fudds and Yosemite Sams for all I cared. Like I said, it just lost the "seriousness" that was the secret ingredient that somehow made you interested in the otherwise ridiculous story of Serious Sam. It kind of reminds me of Duke Nukem I & II or Jazz Jackrabbit, where all those games were kind of silly, but you still felt like you were fighting a really bad guy.
For me, that was actually the most disappointing aspect of SS2. The second most disappointing was, as you mention, the smaller battles and battle arenas. In fact, each battle seems to have a limit to how many enemies can be spawned and attacking you in that area, and everytime you kill an enemy another will respawn. In contrast, in the originals they usually just kept spawning again and again, and if you didn't kill them quickly enough you risked being overwhelmed. It doesn't help that Croteam promised to have bigger enemy armies and battle arenas in SS2, a pretty blatant lie.
There were various smaller things that were disappointing, like cheesy bosses, little use of ragdolls, too much focus on the points (whereas before they were more like a neat, old-fashioned feature on the side), less specialized weapons, a lot of cool old enemies didn't return, NPC's that were there just to be there, the most disappointing ending to a game to ever exist, etc., etc.
That said, I didn't hate SS2. I semi-enjoyed it. But God, I was hoping for so much more, and somehow they gave us less than the originals did. So, I too really hope they go back to the formula of the original games.
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