Want risqué? How about headless, topless women with bombs covering their breasts? That’s one of the many very different enemies you’ll encounter in Serious Sam Double D. Enemies that are part of the army of the evil man named Mental. You’ll have to travel through time to catch up with Mental and put an end to him once in for all. Mental is prepared for you, and will put you up against some weird bosses like a big hamster, or a giant ape with weapons for hands.
Serious Sam Double D is a 2D running-and-gunning type of game. There isn’t much besides killing every enemy in your path. The game gets repetitive after playing for an hour. The controls to Serious Sam Double D are pretty good while using a controller. When I tried using a keyboard it was more difficult to move around and jump. Using a controller for Serious Sam Double D is very recommended. The graphics to the game are well done for the most part except for Serious Sam himself. The bigger enemies have a good amount of detail to them. Serious Sam and smaller enemies though, seem to be lacking in that department. I actually thought the backgrounds were really well done in graphics.
Like an assortment of weapons? Serious Sam Double D has you covered, as you’ll find lots of weapons during your adventure. Some are out in the open but some are in secret locations. Also in these secret locations are these items that will allow you to stack weapons on top of each other. This is a great feature at first, but you won’t care after awhile. All the weapons in your pile will just end up blending together, and you won’t really care what’s in the stack. I still found this to be a great, and preferred this to switching to different weapons during the game. Another gadget in the game is a jump pad. You can throw it or place it at your feet. It does exactly as it sounds – lets you jump higher. You can also put them against walls. Some of the secrets require you to jump back and forth from wall to wall. Another cool thing to do with the jump pad is to toss it at enemies, and watch it fling them into the air.
If you couldn’t tell by the weapon stacker and giant hamster, Serious Sam Double D doesn’t take itself seriously. The health bar is even included in the fun. It’s actually possible for you to get enough health so the health line bursts out of its box. There are even times were your health will be close to the other side of the screen. If you don’t like the idea of this though, there is an option to have numbers instead of a bar. Another example of the game’s craziness was the ability to climb up some of the enemies. There was a point where you are stuck in a ditch, and the only way to get out was to climb up. To climb up though, you have to keep killing enemies, and eventually you make a pile of corpses that you could climb up. I thought that was an awesome way to get out of a ditch instead of a stupid ladder like in most games.
Serious Sam Double D has a ton of different options in the game. This makes the difficulty right for everyone. Besides the normal easy, normal, and hard modes, there are speed-options. This allows you to play the game on fast or slow, though I found the normal speed at 100% was the best option. Slow was just too boring for me and fast was too difficult. Having this option is a great feature and guarantees the slower and faster gamers will get what they want. I already mentioned options for different health bars, but there is also a violence option. This allows you to choose from you spilling out red blood, green blood, or doughnuts each time you get hurt. I’m not joking about the doughnuts option.
$7.99 is the price of Serious Sam Double D, and running through the story will burn three to four hours depending the difficulty, and speed you choose. There is also a ton of secrets throughout the game that will give you more replay value. There are about three or four secrets in each level. Some of these secrets are challenges for the challenge-mode the game offers. Challenges like killing 100 enemies with a chainsaw. What disappointed me about Serious Sam Double D was the lack of multiplayer. Running-and-gunning types of games make for great multiplayer. Serious Sam Double D has some good things going for it like the many options and weapon stacking. In the end though, it’s just an ok running-and-gunning game with no multiplayer. $7.99 is a decent price for it, but I’d wait for a sale.
