Serious Sam: The First Encounter

aka: Krutoj Sam: Pervaja Krov', Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter, Serious Sam: 1st Encounter, Serious Sam: O Primeiro Confronto, Serious Sam: Pierwsze Starcie, Serious Sam: Premier contact
Moby ID: 3512
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Description official descriptions

When aliens ruled by the evil Mental attack Earth, it is up to Sam "Serious" Stone, one of the toughest guys on Earth, to time-travel back to Ancient Egypt in order to change history by defeating Mental back in the ancient times. The First Encounter tells about the first part of Sam's voyage through Egypt.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter is a high-adrenaline first-person shooter heavily focused on frantic arcade-style single player action. The game goes "back to roots" of the first-person shooter genre; it does not feature intricate story, character interaction or the need for careful tactics which were becoming common in the FPS's of its time, instead concentrating on epic battles where the player, armed with powerful weaponry, takes on tens or even hundreds of enemies at once.

Sam travels through deserts, Egyptian temples, palaces and cities, killing countless enemies and occasionally stopping to solve a more or less easy puzzle. There are many weapons to be found; they are all classic FPP armaments - shotguns, chainguns, rocket launchers etc., up to the most powerful weapon: a cannon which shoots devastating cannonballs. There are also many pick-ups, of course, containing ammo, health and armor.

The enemies come in many varieties - headless suicide bombers, giant bio-mechanical creatures that shoot missiles, scorpions with chainguns, bulls that charge at Sam, etc. There are also a couple of powerful bosses.

Sam has a mini-computer which contains basic info about the levels he's travelling through, weapons he collects and enemies he kills.

Spellings

  • Serious Sam: המפגש הראשון - Hebrew spelling
  • Крутой Сэм: Первая Кровь - Russian spelling
  • シリアスサム ファーストエンカウンター - Japanese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

195 People (76 developers, 119 thanks) · View all

Programming
2D Art
3D Art
Game Design
Level Design
Music
Sound
CEO
Serious Sam Voice by
Moral Boost by
amp11lib library by
Additional Programming
Additional Moral Boost
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 43 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 99 ratings with 9 reviews)

It's time to get serious

The Good
Serious Sam: The First Encounter is unlike other first-person shooters that I have played, Quake included. Numerous sequels were made since the first game, and they all feature an ongoing story of Sam “Serious” Stone trying to stop Mental's forces from conquering the universe by traveling back to the past and changing the course of history. The first game takes place in Egypt which is where the battle starts to take place.

If you played first-person shooters from the Nineties such as Wolfenstein 3D and Rise of the Triad, there are some features in those games not found in today's FPSes, such as score, a high score table, and a demo that shows you what to expect in the game. Croteam decided to replicate this in Serious Sam, but although this type of information are represented by icons, not actual words.

The protagonist is equipped with the Neutronically Implanted Combat System Analyzer (NETRICSA). These are normal messages from someone that was in the same shoes as Stone, and these give you useful information about the locations you have entered, new enemies you encountered, and weapons you pick up. It also gives you hints on obstacles you will come across and how to overcome them. I like how your inbox flashes whenever you receive a new NETRICSA message.

The gameplay is a mixture of Smash TV and Robotron 2084. Most of the time you enter this huge area where you see your target destination in the distance, and you must get to it while fighting off enemies that teleport to your location rather than them waiting for you. Just like Robotron 2084, enemies will chase you wherever you go, and you can't proceed to your next destination until you take down all enemies. The battle becomes intense in these areas, and you will often find yourself running out of ammunition, and need to restock before the next battle takes place.

The enemies you meet in the game have different characteristics, and their animations are smooth. The kamikaze bomber, for instance, screams at you while they home to your location, so they can blow themselves up if they get too close. I like how you can tell whether they are closing the distance if their footsteps become louder in volume. There are bosses in the game, and most of them are gigantic. I also like how you can use certain enemies to your advantage. Those wild bulls that charge at you can take Sam to places that are hard to reach, for instance.

The cinematics add depth to the story. They mostly consist of Sam getting a precious artifact from some kind of podium, but the one that I enjoyed most was the introduction, where the story scrolls by while you get a good view of space, with all the galaxies and stars. You can skip the cinematics if you want to.

The music is excellent, and provides many easy listening tunes as you walk through each area. One thing that I admire in first-person shooters is the way the music changes when you are battling a huge number of areas, then changes back to the original level soundtrack once you have cleared all enemies. In Serious Sam's case, the battle music provides quite a beat to it, to the point where you can memorize it all.

Along with the main game, you get a technology demo where you have to walk through a series of hallways, and each room showcases what the Serious Engine is capable of, containing features that were not found in previous first-person shooters such as large view distances and a massive number of models. Some of the effects are quite stunning, especially the ones from the first two hallways. In addition, there is a training mode, but more about that later.

My highlight has to be wandering around Hatshepsut, admiring the graphical trickery the game has to offer, such as the flash of lightning in the horizon and the setting transition from storm to sunshine. Also, making use of the first easter egg where the developers come out of a secret room, and getting the Bio-Mechanoids to blow them up.

Croteam developed a remake of the game, using the third incarnation of the Serious Engine. I won't review this version as I would only repeat myself, but I will say that the graphics have improved, and other minor stuff has been added. The gameplay and soundtrack remains the same, though.

The Bad
There's not much point in trying out the training mode, as it is basically one of the later stages in the game but with a different setting. During the game, even the smaller enemies can run a lot faster than you, meaning that you can't shoot them at a distance without blowing yourself up if it is too late.

The Bottom Line
Serious Sam is an excellent first-person shooter that harks back to the days of Wolf3D and ROTT, while offering stunning graphics and sound. The game also throws in two of my favorites from the Eighties (mentioned above), and there is a certain strategy that is needed to defeat most of the enemies in the game. I played the Steam release which gives me the option of entering a program that allows me to create custom levels, and to create enemies for them. That is a welcome addition to the game, and means if you can't get enough Serious Sam, you can create levels yourself or download them somewhere from the Internet.

Windows · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2015

You wouldn't hear me talking about this game after 5 years.

The Good
The mindless killing is great, but...(continued in next section) and the graphics are fine and definately serve it's purpose. The gameplay is extended for a couple of hours with the multi-player, although it isn't that different from playing the single-player.

The Bad
(continued from the first section)...after a few hours it all becomes VERY dull. You've seen all the enemies and gotten all the guns about half way through the game. Then what you get is just a bunch of rehashed enemies(different colour, different size(only one of them, The Head-less suicide guys, are remotely interesting) and the same lame guns for the rest of the game. Oh, yeah, the weapons are bad. They're all boring and unimaginative except for one: The Cannon. And, in the spirit of the game, I'll repeat myself and say: Unimaginative gameplay, enemies and weapons.

The Bottom Line
This game shows just how easy it is to impress gamers now a days, with a dull, mediocre FPS. It might just be worth your money because of the low price, but that shouldn't justify putting no imagination into it. The only way for this game to live in the memories of gamers, is to keep pumping out sequels every year. And believe me, you don't want that to happen. In short, a quickly-forgotten game, with a low price tag.

Windows · by BigJKO (64) · 2002

Contains ludicrous amounts of action that will liquify your brain.

The Good
Serious Sam is a return to the mind-numbing fast-action shooter solidified by Doom. In a nutshell:

  • You have many weapons of mass destruction
  • You have many mindless enemies that exist solely to kill you
  • You have fast framerates and crisp control that you can command at a thought's notice

It's an homage to Doom, but Croteam has added their own twisted spin on the types of enemies. One of the more grotesque enemies would be what I like to call "the walking maw" -- a running torso with no head and a huge, gaping, teeth-filled mouth embedded in the chest. But easily the most, ah, disturbing enemy has to be the suicide bombers. Headless men that run at you with a bomb in each hand, stopping for nothing and noone, and screaming the entire time (yes, even though they have no head). You haven't felt terror until you've heard a faint noise... that gets louder... that slowly graduates into a yell and by that time you're frantically spinning around trying to figure out what the hell is coming at you.

There were some times in Serious Sam where the action got so thick I literally started laughing out loud at how utterly ludicrous the situation became. 60+ galloping skeletal creatures that can run faster than you, all headed your way? 10+ werebulls all heading at you like a runaway derailed train? It's friggin' nuts! And also some of the most fun I've had in recent months playing an action game.

You'd think that a game like this wouldn't have any story or plot, but I was surprised to see that the authors of the game had more than a passing interest in ancient egyptian locales, history, and mythology. As such, a passable (if completely false) plot exists tying all the locales and (simple) puzzles together based on ancient egyptian history.

Finally, the graphical engine (the real reason Serious Sam was created was initially just as a technology demo for the engine) is superb. The engine is capable of a lot of things that you don't normally think about until you see them demonstrated, such as support for many different objects onscreen, huge wide open areas where you can see for miles in all directions (there is absolutely no fogging or pop-up that I could see), portals that really work, and nicely-implemented effects (lens flares, reflections/water, etc.) where appropriate.

The Bad
As much as the graphical engine kicked ass, I experienced some severe rendering anomolies at times that were fairly annoying, such as flashing polygons. If the game weren't so fun, I might have stopped playing entirely because of it. Note that I am in the minority -- I haven't heard of any other major graphics glitches from other players.

I also experienced an odd mouse button delay -- if I didn't hold the mouse button down for at least 50ms, it didn't register. In other words, I couldn't "tap" shots off; I had to really press the button down. I don't get this kind of behavior in any of my other games, so it was definitely Serious Sam-related.

Some situations (especially near the end) cross the line from "ludicrous fun" to "impossible situation". If you play on any of the harder settings, there is simply no way to win the game, I am convinced. I would love to see an AI bot try it.

Finally, there are some annoying situations you can get into when you need to kill all onscreen enemies to advance to the next section, but you can't find one of them because they've fallen into a pool and can't get out, or they're hidden, or stuck, or you just haven't wandered into the area where they're waiting for you yet.

The Bottom Line
This game is the action-game antithesis of Counter-Strike -- no strategy at all. Just blast everything and keep running! It's the old-school modern-day oxymoron of 1st-person shooters.

And since its retail price is only $20, why not pick it up?

Windows · by Trixter (8952) · 2001

[ View all 9 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Croteam vedder (70685) Oct 29, 2018

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Serious Sam appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Demo

Some of the most famous Serious Sam players (who even appear in the game's credits) got the complete game only several months after its release, and constantly played the same demo level while others had the full version.

Development

The first Serious Sam demo was a technology demo for the Serious Engine by Croteam, not a demo for a game in particular. The folks at the Old Man Murray website praised the game so much that eventually the guys at the Gathering of Developers got wind of it and sponsored a complete, full game based around the demo.

Music

The final level music (before the boss) is a strange heavy metal remix of the famous Phantom of the Opera opening theme.

References

Sam's red sneakers may be a reference to Sonic the Hedgehog - the speed power-up that pictures them with wings all but cinches it.

Technology

Serious Sam was the first game to implement ATI's TrueForm graphics technology.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • April 2002 (Issue #213) – Best Enemies of the Year (for the headless soldiers)
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – Best Value Priced Game of the Year
    • 2001 – Best End Boss of the Year

Information also contributed by El-ad Amir, NeoMoose, Ola Sverre Bauge and Tomer Gabel

Analytics

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Related Games

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Released 2002 on Windows
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Released 2009 on Windows, 2010 on Xbox 360
Serious Sam: Gold
Released 2003 on Windows
Serious Sam
Released 2004 on Game Boy Advance
Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter
Released 2010 on Windows, Xbox 360
Serious Sam Classics: Revolution
Released 2014 on Windows
Serious Sam HD
Released 2010 on Windows, 2011 on Xbox 360
Serious Sam: Double D
Released 2011 on Windows, 2013 on Xbox 360

Related Sites +

  • Seriously Warped!
    Home of the highly acclaimed Warped Deathmatch MOD for Serious Sam. The team is also creating the multiplayer modes for Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.
  • Seriously!
    A well-populated forum and excellent tutorials regarding writing maps, mods and scripts to Serious Sam.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3512
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Cromaa.

Additional contributors: Ray Soderlund, El-ad Amir, Unicorn Lynx, NeoMoose, tarmo888, tbuteler, Foxhack, lights out party, COBRA-COBRETTI, Crawly, Stratege, vicrabb, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added April 3, 2001. Last modified January 19, 2024.