See also:
- Anti-Climax Boss: Mordekai The Summoner. He's a lot less visually impressive than Ugh-Zan III, and doesn't even have any direct attacks, instead either summoning monsters or using Teleport Spam. The whole lead-up to the boss fight more than makes up for it, though.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The House Of Sam trailers, starring a unstable televangelist spreading the good word about The Second Coming Of Sam.
- Breather Level: "The Serpent Yards". Compared to the "The City of the Gods" (a Marathon Level that contains the infamous bouncing room) before it and "The Pit" (where the game goes all out with the Death Traps) after it, this level is quite straight forward, relatively light on dangerous encounters, and has the lowest enemy count in the game.
- Demonic Spiders:
- Fiendian Reptiloid Demons are very potent enemies. They have a very high amount of health, so much that it takes four sniper rounds to down them on Normal (practically every other enemy goes down in one or two), and launch extremely fast and damaging homing fireballs that can't be destroyed by anything other than the Lasergun, Cannon, or Rocket Launcher; and that's only possible in the HD re-release. They also have a punch that kills you in three hits if you have maxed out health and armor, but chances are you'll never even see it because eighty percent of the time they are placed in faraway distances or on top of buildings to spam their fireballs at you. If that wasn't enough, they never flinch, unlike ninety percent of the enemies, and they can use fireballs to block your bullets, which is not obvious upon first fighting them.
- Difficulty Spike: The Legend of the Beast DLC for the HD remake makes an already hard game even harder by only giving you half the weapons from the main game, making ammo scarce and hard to come by and putting dickish traps in certain areas. To show how hard the DLC is, the first level forces you to snipe Arachnoids. With a single Colt.
- Shocking Moments: The level "The Grand Cathedral" begins with what's called the "Corridor of Death": a huge corridor where wave after wave after wave of enemies of varying difficulty keep coming and coming. Then, after a breather segment involving launchpads, Sam exits the castle and enters an open area where wave after wave of Kleer, Kamikazes, Arachnoids, Werebulls and Biomechanoids keep spawning until the doors of the eponymous cathedral are opened. Cue the Boss Battle against a monster who cannot attack directly but keeps summoning monsters. To give an idea of how massive such a level is, Normal difficulty has nearly 1.100 monsters alone.
- That One Achievement: Getting the "MEGA MIDNIGHT SECRET" in the Citadel (which contains Serious Damage and Invulnerability power-ups, a Minigun, and max health and armor pickups) normally. The entrance is only open for a very brief window of time, and that window starts so quickly that the only way to reach it in time is to recklessly speedrun your way through most of the level. Fortunately, if you know where the secret is, you can just use the Knife on the entrance and it'll open anyway.
- That One Level: "The Grand Cathedral" from The Second Encounter, while very impressive, is also clogged with enemies, especially the early corridor which accounts for half of the total enemies of the level. The final war sequence is more forgiving as far as the respawning power-ups goes than the last arena fight in The Great Pyramid. The latter only gives you 2 +25 health pickups and one green ammo backpack, while the former gives you 2 +50 health and 2 +50 armor pickups, along with a green ammo backpack and single Serious Damage and Serious Speed pickups. Plus, partway through the fight, mother nature lends a hand with the fight by raining fire and brimstone.
