The former is colorful, epic, and heaping spoonfuls of fun. The latter is grungy, repetitive, and most of the time extremely tedious.

Where to begin… it has a lot of potential. But it falls short on so many levels. The actual game is decent, I enjoyed playing through the SP story even if the AI was ridiculously stupid. MP is fun. The environments are varied and looks just you’d expect. The weapons are very satisfying to use as always. And as with earlier PK games there’s a lot of secret areas and thins to hunt for, and that is pretty much the only reason this game is even worth trying.

However, it’s so buggy I don’t even know where to begin. Homegrown really shouldn’t have released this until next year at the earliest. Loading save games crash the game. Trying to connect to a MP game crashes the game. AI has no pathfinding abilities what so ever and will get stuck on gravel laying on the street. Bosses die before you even get a chance to fight them. Server browser displays servers from Painkiller Overdose. Clipping errors. Falling off the map when walking into a wall. You name it, it will make your game crash.

Co-op, which was one of the selling points of the game (but not for me personally) is extremely poorly implemented. You basically have to launch your own dedicated server running a SP map and your friend will join through the server list or IP. Yet another unfinished feature.

The devs are working on resolving the issues and seems to at least care. I feel bad for them having to release the game in this state! Hopefully they’ll at least get the game to a playable state.

MP is probably the string point, fun game modes, awesome maps, best netcode of all the games in the series, and good old bunnyhopping madness. I love it!… but of course no one is playing, because everyone crashes all the time.

So, unless you are financially independent this shouldn’t be your next game to buy. If the devs follow through with what they’re saying about support and patching, it might just be a good buy for 5€ in like a year from now. I DO NOT recommend ANYONE getting this game right now, even if it has its good moments.

That said, I definitely preferred Painkiller, because of the crazy variety of awesomely atmospheric levels and enemies combined with some very powerful dual-function weaponry and ragdoll physics. Also, neat music. And the tarot card powerups.

The Serious Sam games (first two, at least) seemed to have basically one level palette each. There might very well be better pacing or level design or whatever, and coop’s nice. But aesthetics do matter a fair bit to me when I’m doing relatively simplistic (if fast-paced) gameplay like running around and shooting things. I don’t dislike them, they just never grabbed me enough to play all the way through like I did Painkiller. The main game of Painkiller, anyway. By the time the first expansion came out I didn’t really have time to get into it, and although the first mission is (iirc) quite effectively creepy, it’s also a pain to play and that’s as far as I got. Overdose I have steered clear of.

Alt-text never works for me on this site. Boo for that.

It’s already Fall 2009. Is SSHD going to get an actual release date soon or can i just assume it’s moved to 2010

KG