A great concept marred by a horrid execution
Numerous technical issues, generally poor design choices, and horrid visuals and audio, to name a few, trample the game's otherwise cool concept into ground. What's left is a frustrating, formulaic mess of a game whose only redeeming value is a passable cooperative mode.
The plot (if you can call it that) follows Sam "Serious" Stone on a mission to investigate some sort of disturbance in time... or something like that. I don't know. The story isn't really explored much aside from the occasional nonsensical cut scene showing Sam getting into some sort of crazy shenanigans over the course of the game. All it's really there for is to give context to all the runnin-'n'-gunnin'. I can't say whether a more in depth narrative would have helped, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt.
But then, if you're playing this game, it's obviously not for the story but for the action. And boy does it deliver! Every encounter is always intense and exhilarating, with what feels like hundreds upon hundreds of monsters (or "uglies," as Sam calls 'em) charging forward, surrounding you with almost no room to maneuver, guns always blazing. These battles are long, hard, and will drain you both physically and mentally, leaving you downright exhausted by the end. Seriously, these battles are tense.
So tense, in fact, that you'll probably end up being a nervous wreck by the time you're done. This is largely because the game has an evil tendency to make you think you've cleared an area of aliens only to throw another two or three hoards of them at you. It doesn't help either that the game also randomly throws multiple enemies at you in tight corridors just a couple feet from you. This really adds to the game's constant element of surprise, and forces you to always be prepared for the unexpected.
However, those surprises become less, and less common as you progress further. The cause of this is the extremely formulaic gameplay design that becomes all too predictable in almost no time at all. Basically, if you see a vast open space containing health, armor, and ammo pick-ups in the center, you can expect to see enemies start pouring in from all sides the second you finish grabbing the aforesaid items. That's fine and all for the first five or six hours, but after that, it just gets old and repetitive.
This is where the game starts to fall apart. Without an interesting story to engross yourself in, or any surprises or additions gameplay wise, the game loses any incentives it had to keep you going. As a result, this accentuates the game's many, many technical issues.
The worst of them being the horrid sound design. As stated previously, enemies tend to come at you from all sides constantly throughout the game. And that's all fine and dandy, but there's just one major problem: you can never tell which way they're coming from because of the broken sound design. For example, say you're dealing with some headless kamikaze soldiers who explode upon impact. Normally you'd be able to discern their location from where their screams were coming from, but here, such tactics don't work, as their screams are always barely audible regardless of whether or not there's a load of ambient noise in the area. As you can guess, this leads to many unfair deaths and loads of frustration.
As far as other sound problems go, the sounds for swimming underwater are absolutely horrid. It sounds like a saw trying to cut through rusted metal. I kid you not, it actually sounds that way. Thankfully your ears aren't subjected to this torture much throughout the game, but when they are, you'll be reaching for that mute button (finally! A use for it!).
Another issue stems from the fact that the guns sound (and feel) weak. There simply isn't any punch, no sense of power from firing them. Instead, it feels like your shooting a bunch of peashooters. This is because the sounds of gunfire fail to convey the sense that you're wielding a powerful, destructive weapon like most other shooters. Shotgun blasts lack that oomph and generally doesn't sound like a shotgun, Uzis sound like someone trying to imitate the sound of gunfire instead of the actual weapon, and rockets lack the explosive power you'd expect from them. This makes them extremely unsatisfying to use, and generally makes them feel like a bunch of cheap knock-offs.
The visuals are less than satisfactory as well. The game has aged incredibly poorly since its 2004 release. Character models are blocky and have blurred, muddy textures that are repulsive. Environments are mostly a collection of large open flat areas that aren't particularly interesting despite the settings themselves. Animations are stiff, and movement often looks as though characters are sliding across the field instead of walking.
The game also has both cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes. Out of them, the co-op's the better mode. Despite the campaign's many issues, it's still some fun to be had blasting waves and waves of aliens with friends. The competitive mode, however, isn't quite on par. The mode allows up to four players to duke it out locally or online (which may or may not still be active) across several very large maps based on locations from the campaign in the standard deathmatch and capture the flag modes, as well as a mode called pass the bomb. This mode has players passing around a timed bomb between each other as they attempt to be the last one standing. It's passable, but the large size of the maps, combined with the low number of players make it pale in comparison to other, similar shooters on the market.
In fact, passable is what best sums up Serious Sam: Next Encounter. The exhilarating, fast-paced action provides some fun for a little while, but the numerous technical issues, and predictable gameplay hamper the experience greatly. The potential is definitely there, but this encounter simply doesn't deliver.
