Locales/Worlds

Well, it's ancient South America as it' never been seen before. You'll be journeying your bads self through locals ranging from mountains, valleys, tombs and pyramids to underground rivers of lava, lost cities and massive pit traps you have to vault across on giant magic bouncy fany thingies. And hey, no damned Egypt! (Altho as I mentioned, you've still got Pyramids. These Croteam guys seem to have a thing for Pyramids. I wonder what Freud would say about them?

Monsters

All of your old favorites are back, with a half dozen or so new nasties thrown into the mix to keep it interesting. Mental's been a busy little monstrous galactic overlord/despot in the short time since you've left Egypt and has quite a large array of new baddies to make your life difficult. The most interesting new creature has got to be the Pumpkinhead. He's a chainsaw wielding Jack'o'Lantern headed nutcase. Very sweet. If you didn't play the original, let's just say that some of the monsters are rather mundane, but the majority of them are really nice.. With a few (Lava Gollums being a good example) being downright horifyingly huge and dangerous. Imagine a 200 foot monster made of molten rock, showering you with flaming boulders... That when killed forms smaller versions of itself..... You get the idea. There are tons of different monsters, all of whom are bent on kicking your ass.... And you'll usually be facing many, MANY of them at once. Bon Appite!


Weapons

Again, we've got the old favorites, yea old Pistol, shoty, double barrel, tommy gun, rockets, etc. There are a few nice new toys (Altho, not enough ammo for them on Medium where I'm playing.) such as the flamethrower and Sniper Rifle. The Sniper Rifle is such a staple of FPSs, I'm really suprised that Croteam didn't include one in the First Encounter especially with all the wide open maps that seemed to just scream out for a nice long range weapon of some sort. None the less, there's one now and it's great. Right click to zoom in, ala UT or SOF, click again to zoom out. The flame thrower (*sigh*) just doesn't live up to the flamethrower in Wolfenstien (*double sigh) but is none-the-less a very cool weapon. Set your enemies, and the terrain around them on fire, and watch them colapse.

And just in case you want to get really, really old skool on their asses, you could always whip out the handy dandy ginsu 2000 chainsaw. Particularily effective against monster that only have Melee damage weapons. :) It slices, it dices! You can even cut an undead Kleer Skeleton in half with it, and still cut a tomato afterwards!

Multiplayer

Ah, the place where Duk.. er. Serious Sam truly, truly shines. Sure there's the standard (boring) deathmatch action.... but... Ahhh, there's also Multiplayer Co-Operative mode! WOOT! Go though the entire game with a pile of your friends, or pick and choose levels to play through. I've often complained in the past (The Mechwarrior games being my prime example) about the lack of Co-Op playability in the missions. Serious Sam 1 and now 2 offer just that.

It's an incredible amount of fun to be able to play all the single player missions with the help of your buddies. Naturally this makes it much harder, and the computer throws more and more enemies are you, depending on the number of players playing with you. This is decidedly one thing that should be tried out by all FPS fans. If not, you're really missing out! The game is especially tasty Multiplayer at LANS I've heard. ;)