There are about a billion games that provide a massive arsenal that can be used to create legions of orphaned alien babies, but how do you cope with all of the choices? How do you handle the stress of determining if today is a shotgun day or an Uzi day? Serious Sam has obliterated those stressful decisions with a ridiculous contraption called the Gunstacker. Soak it in, ladies and gentlemen (okay, probably mostly gentlemen). The Gunstacker allows Sam to wield not twice, not thrice, but frice quadruple the firepower of those boring old games! It’s the ultimate tower of power that stacks four weapons into an unwieldy Erector Set of death.
I admittedly don’t have much experience with the Serious Sam franchise, but after playing through the one-level demo of Serious Sam Double D, developer Nate Fouts’ enthusiasm for working with the character was evident. Double D is a 2D run-and-gun shooter made by Mommy’s Best Games; think of it as Contra with a demented sense of humor. The version I played was pretty early, and while the quantity of enemies, weapons and levels is still up in the air, the game shows a lot of promise.
In addition to the Gunstacker, I got to play with another new toy called the bounce pad, which will be acquired very early in the game. The Frisbee-like pad can be thrown on the ground or on walls and basically serves as a portable trampoline. I first used it to propel Sam to higher ground to find secrets, and later discovered its dual function of launching enemies into the air for convenient blasting.
The action itself was pretty standard fare for the genre. I ran from left to right shooting everything in sight until the desert sand was drenched in blood. The demo itself was incredibly challenging, and most enemies soaked up clips of ammo at a time, but Fouts later confirmed that the difficulty was intentionally pumped up. The weapons had a finite amount of ammo, and it was difficult to keep track of what gun was using what ammo, especially when using four at once. Fouts admitted they weren’t sure how the ammo situation would be handled in the final version. It did have a quick-save feature though, which was accessible at any time throughout the demo.
At one point I came across an open area littered with power-ups, and Fouts advised me to save before grabbing the goodies. He explained that the open forum was a classic Serious Sam trap, and sure enough, I was bombarded with bananas bombs hurled by Chimputees when I collected the new weapon. Oh, you aren’t familiar with the Chimputee? They’re just like normal chimps, except their appendages have been amputated and replaced with a jetpack, a battleaxe and a rocket launcher that fires banana bombs. They’re one of the two ridiculous enemies that have been added thus far to the cast of Serious Sam mainstays. The other, the Femikaze, is a headless lady that charges Sam while obscuring her breasts with breast-shaped bombs.
The demo concluded with about a dozen enormous laser-shooting mechanized lizard creatures that I was surprised to learn weren’t actually boss characters. Fouts plans on having the bosses be even larger, and plans to have the camera pull back very far to make Sam as tiny as possible in comparison. Serious Sam Double D, will ambush the PC sometime before Serious Sam 3 is released this summer, and it may eventually make its way onto other platforms.
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