Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter - Legend of the Beast

I put myself through this DLC right after a solid session of The Second Encounter proper, which was probably the worst way to approach it. The contrast is immediate and brutal, and not in the fun sense. Legend of the Beast is a three-level campaign expansion that takes Sam back to ancient Egypt, set narratively during The First Encounter timeline despite being sold as Second Encounter content. That wrinkle alone should tell you something about the energy behind this release. The weapon situation is the DLC's biggest problem. The Second Encounter hands you pistols, a chainsaw, both shotguns, a rocket launcher, a sniper rifle, and a flamethrower inside the first ten minutes. That generous loadout is the entire point of Serious Sam. Here, you open with a single pistol, fight off dense waves of kamikazes, headless soldiers, and scorpion gunners with it, earn a second Colt as your reward, and eventually scrape together a standard shotgun by the end of level one. The regular shotgun. Not the coach gun. The one you almost never touch in the main game because everything is tuned around having real firepower. The chainsaw shows up in level two, and it is treated like a gift. Meanwhile, the MK III Grenade Launcher, RAPTOR Sniper Rifle, and the XM214-A Minigun don't appear at all. Croteam remembered to include horde-scale enemy counts but apparently forgot to give you anything to enjoy cutting through them with. Item pickups are similarly thin. Plus-10 health vials and plus-5 armor helmets are your currency here. There is a side room in level two with a plus-25 armor pickup that triggers a massive gnaar and kleer ambush, and you will almost certainly come out worse than before you picked it up. The whole thing plays like Serious Sam filtered through a budget survival lens, and the level geometry doesn't compensate. Narrow hallways, arenas that aren't big enough for the enemy counts dropped into them, and a stretch of ugly backtracking in the middle level make the architecture feel like rough draft work. It is rough draft work. These three levels are reportedly cut content from the Serious Sam 1 alpha, and they carry that feel throughout. On the multiplayer side, you get three new Chaotic Versus maps and three Brutal Survival maps, plus the base game's online modes (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Last Man Standing) were made free alongside this release. That part has held up fine for the niche of players still running LAN sessions or co-op with friends. There is one genuinely strange footnote worth knowing: the Ram-God final boss uses copyrighted stock music, which means any attempt to record or stream that fight on YouTube will likely get flagged. Set your in-game music volume to zero before you get there if you plan to capture footage. It is a baffling oversight that has never been patched in over a decade. The boss itself is borrowed from Serious Sam 3, and while the crossover has novelty value on paper, the actual fight lands flat. For committed series collectors or Workshop modders who want the asset library it unlocks, there is marginal value here. Everyone else is getting three unfinished levels with an underpowered loadout and a finale that just kind of stops. Fred, Scout Team