Serious Sam: Next Encounter is a First-Person Shooter videogame developed by Climax Solent and published in April 2004 by Global Star Software and Gathering of Developers for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube. It's a spinoff of the Serious Sam series.
In the game, Mental attempts to get retaliation on Sam by creating a pint-sized evil clone of him. Going through ancient Rome, feudal China and finally legendary Atlantis, Sam fights against a cyborg gladiator minotaur, a mechanically modified three headed Asian dragon and the soul of a Sirian warrior fused with the spaceship to create a terrifying giant flying robot, before he eventually defeats and captures the evil clone.
See also
This game shows examples of:
- Action Bomb: In addition to the Beheaded Kamikazes, NE include a second version who still has his head attached, but wears a strait jacket, a hood with a painted-on smiley face, and lugs a giant stick of dynamite on his back.
- A Taste of Power: The first level has Sam spawning in with a minigun and a bucket of homing ammo, and lets you go to town against hordes of Dums-Dums in a large flat area. The level ends with Sam being beamed out of the coliseum and teleported elsewhere in Rome, where the game then progress in typical Serious Sam fashion.
- A-Team Firing: The Sniper Rifle deals less than a fourth of its full damage without the scope - this is handwaved as the gun being able to detect if the user has it in a proper aiming position and somehow slowing down the bullet if not so the recoil doesn't rip his arm off.
- Atlantis: The third and final location (the first and second being respectively ancient Rome and feudal China). Here legendary Atlantis is represented as an Advanced Ancient Acropolis with Magitek aesthetics everywhere. Interestingly it's depicted as being under a frozen polar ice cap instead of being sunk at the bottom of the ocean, though the inhabitants are obligatory Fish People and cyborg marine creatures (squid, crabs, etc). Also, it has the most gimmicky and varied levels in the whole game, as well as being the crash site of a Sirian spaceship.
- Bag of Spilling: The games handles weapon retention in an odd way: While continuing from one level to the next will have the player retain whatever weapons and ammo they had collected up to that point, reloading a checkpoint or loading the level from the main menu will instead have the player start with a pre-defined weapon loadout, which often mysteriously lack guns that were mandatory to collect in the previous level.
- Balance Buff: Most of the guns have been boosted up significantly. For instance, the Shofield Pistols have a 12-bullet clip compared to the Colts' 6-bullet drum and can shoot as fast as their BFE counterpart. Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher, Flamethrower and Uzi Pistols support at least two types of ammo, with one being the "original" mode and the rest being gimmicky. But what really takes the cake here is
the Sniper Rifle that takes down an Adult Reptiloid in two shots while zoomed. Needless to say, neither the original Sniper Rifle nor even NE's cannon had such power. - Bilingual Bonus: Present in a stealth form. The word "Reeban" as in the Reeban fishes is pretty close in pronunciation to a Russian word "ryba", which means "fish". Ditto for the Peelah chainsaw.
- Butterface: The Witch Harpies.
- Catchphrase: NE has a couple of one-liners which occur every time Sam fights the werebulls, no matter on which level he is.
- Sam: Enough of the bull already.
Sam: Ole!
- Canon Discontinuity: Croteam has stated the game to be non-canon.
- Cephalothorax: Dum Dums.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Ammo glows yellow, health red, armor blue, weapons green, and key items purple.
- Cute Monster Girl: The Witch Harpies look this way from afar, but their faces...
- Degraded Boss: The Alundran Highlanders are quite common in comparison to other games. In one very late mission, six of these guys appear at the same time.
- Die Laughing: The game has laughing gas as ammo available for the XOP Gas Gun. One spritz of this will cause any non-boss enemy will cause them to laugh uncontrollably and, if they're not attacked afterward, will simply run out of energy from laughing too much.
- The End... Or Is It?: The game ends with Sam grabbing the evil Serious Sam Clone from the wreckage of the Sirian Darklord and beam back to the present... only for the computer of the crashed Siran ship to then generate dozens more Evil Serious Sam Clones.
- Flunky Boss: In a fashion similar to TSE, the game puts Sam against Diabloid and Sirian Darklord with plenty of baddies in their respective battles.
- Gameplay Grading: Players are awared a Bronze, Silver or Gold medal depending on their score at the end of each level. Collecting golds unlocks bonus levels and other features.
- Gangsta Style: Sam holds the Uzis like this after sustained firing, although the effect is purely cosmetic.
- Homing Projectile:
- Sam can shoot lock-on stuff, Homing Bullets and Heat-Seeking Rockets in particular.
- Common Alundran Reptiloids can also shoot homing projectiles.
- Instakill Mook: The Elephant Gunners are elephants with cannons instead of trunks, shooting massive cannon balls that instantly kill you on a direct hit. Thankfully there aren't many of them in the game, but killing them when they do show up is a top priority.
- Meaningless Lives: NE doesn't have a lives system. Instead, dying at any point sets Sam back to the most recently activated checkpoint, less 5,000 points.
- Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Diablotaur has two biological arms (carrying a sword and a shield) and four cybernetic arms that fire off different weapons.
- Nerf: The minigun has a noticeably longer spool up time than it does in the rest of the series.
- No-Gear Level: Sams loses most of his weapons when going from Rome to China and China to Atlantis.
- One-Hit Polykill: A zoomed-in Sniper Rifle shot can destroy several enemies.
- One-Scene Wonder:
- The Serious Combine and Serious Submarine, both of which are only used in levels that have to be unlocked by collecting gold medals.
- There is exactly one red backpack to be found.
- Pinball Projectile: There's ricochet ammo for the Uzis.
- Regenerating Health: Inverted, Sam's health and/or armor would drop if it exceed 100.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: The description for the Kamikaze Marine Mark II explains that they originally were Sirian soldiers who willingly defected to Mental and were rewarded the deed by being locked and tortured in a dark dungeon.
- Rewarding Vandalism: Taken literally in one early mission under the name of "Prohibition Bonus".
- Running Gag: Each of the three eras have a spot where Sam remarks something in the level reminds him of when he met first/second/third/fourth wife and then lament that "it's a shame what happened to her" without elaborating. Apparently, Sam is a serial widower.
- Scoring Points: The Next Encounter has the most complex scoring system in the series. Players get extra points from chaining kills in short succession. If the player manage to chain 20 kills, then Sam enters a Super Mode where he moves much faster and gets 2 times the point value on every enemy killed. The end of level result screens also gives extra points for every enemy killed above the PAR count, every second under the PAR time and a fixed amount of points for finding every secrets in the level.
- Sprint Shoes: Picking up roller skates allows Sam to move faster for a short period of time.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: NE has gnaars replaced with Dum Dums, teethy green balls with two arms, similar to the ones you may find in II's M'Digbo. Not only are they hardly a threat either, they also come up in two flavours: walking and flying (with the second codenamed as Twiddle Dum Dums). They can't be invisible, however...
- Likewise, The Cucurbito enemies from The Second Encounter are replaced with the new Porcine Beserkers.
- The Arachnoid enemies from the first game are replaced with a new similar scorpion-like enemy with mini-guns for arms.
- The new Atlantean soldier enemies behave very similar to the Zorg alien soldiers from The Second Encounter.
- Trio Boss: The Hydra boss has three heads: one fires rockets, one blows fire, and one shoots a laser. They have to be fought at the same time and, although they share the same health bar, need to be defeated individually.
- Unique Enemy: Some non-boss mooks will be exclusive not only on a certain episode, but on a certain level as well, unless they make their only reappearance in The Lost Levels section. Several of these include Elephant Gunner, Wicker Man, Dib Dib Dum Dum, and Phoenix Bomber.
