Serious Sam: The First Encounter

The Good
Retro is the new black. For every game that looks forward and tries to push the boundaries of gameplay and design, there is invariably another game that relives the days when shooters were fueled by sheer testosterone and "story" meant a paragraph in the manual. Serious Sam is one of the latter, an extremely stupid Doom homage that purposefully ignores all the innovations in gameplay since 1995.

You play as Sam Stone, a guy who has been sent back in time to stop an alien invasion before it begins. It was made by a Croatian development team and is the first of a series known for its intensity and over-the-top violence. The game's calling card is that you fight large numbers of enemies, sometimes several thousand per level. Serious Sam is crazy and unrelenting, sometimes you'll survive a battle with only 3 health and 10 shells left...and then have to fight again. Serious Sam's enemies are very aggressive and dangerous, and pose a massive threat even in small numbers. The absurd body count and non-stop fighting make Serious Sam an exceptionally intense game.

The game mostly takes place in Ancient Egypt, and the game has a funky art style that sets it apart from other games. The game takes place outside in huge courtyards and market squares, giving you lots of elbow room for the game's massive battles. As far as weapons go you have a knife (which is surprisingly useful), pistols with infinite ammo, single and double-barreled shotguns, a tommygun and chaingun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, the series' trademark "Serious Bomb", a laser blaster, etc. Even the weak weapons pack a punch, and the diverse nature of the game's enemies mean you have to switch around a lot. Speaking of which, deformed and drooling horror-movie rejects are the rule here, as you have to fight such critters as headless suicide bombers, fridge-magnet shaped apes, and giant scorpions cross-bred with spiders. The bosses tower over you like skyscrapers.

Although it's mostly a by-the-numbers Doom clone, Serious Sam does experiment with some new ideas. You have an on-board computer called NETRISCA, who will provide information on the enemies you fight (analysing how strong/dangerous they are, etc), give you warnings about potential ambushes, or give you guidance on how to escape the area you're in. It speeds up the action in the game because you don't have to run around for 15 minutes looking for a button to press or an elevator to ride.

Graphics aren't great, but they do what they're supposed to do. Hundreds of enemies can be rendered on-screen at once with little lag, and the game's bright colors and exuberant art are reminiscent of Indiana Jones. There are some nice graphical effects like lens flares and realistic blood splatters (when a fast-moving enemy crushes you, it leaves a giant blood streak on the ground), and surprisingly good AI. Enemies will chase you up staircases, and even jump narrow ledges if possible. The game also has a dynamic soundtrack, which changes tempo to match the amount of action on screen.

Ultimately the best thing you can say about Serious Sam is it succeeds in expanding upon the frantic action of Doom. It seriously does make almost every other FPS game look tame, and that's not bad at all for a budget game.

The Bad
The game looked very promising when I first started playing, but sadly it never delivered the goods. Serious Sam begins and ends as a gimmick game. It's fun for about 20 minutes and after that is an extra-stupid version of Quake. It's weird how a game with this amount of KICKASS ACTION can be so...boring.

Serious Sam's gameplay formula boils down to the same thing: enter a large area, and destroy a huge swarm of enemies in order to collect some random item/weapon from off the ground, after which an exit will open somewhere and you can move into the next area where you will probably have to do the same thing. This is all there is. A computer bot could play Serious Sam.

Serious Sam is often compared to Duke Nukem 3D, but it isn't half the game Duke 3D was. The design isn't there. Serious Sam has huge environments, yes, but they are bland and featureless. There are huge expanses of practically nothing. Sam Stone gets a couple of weak one-liners but there's nothing like the retarded non-stop comedy of Duke. Environmental interaction is limited to pressing buttons and blowing up statues. The game's zany graphical style is cool at first, but every level looks the same. The only area where I would say Serious Sam's content shines is in the monster and weapon design, and frankly games that get off on wacky and weird enemies are a dime a dozen these days.

Since Serious Sam's action is repetitive and uninspired, and the levels boring and bland, I guess I can't do anything except pass this off as a 21st century version of Galaxa. But even by arcade game standards Serious Sam doesn't work. Sam Stone moves too slowly considering the pace of the action, and avoiding enemies when you run out of ammo is nearly impossible. Explosions do way too much splash damage and you'll often be killed by your own rockets. The game's aiming system automatically snaps you on to targets, which is nice, but it's only a token offering considering how frustrating combat can become.

The game has a very annoying over-use of monster traps, meaning when you go to pick up health or ammo monsters spawn from everywhere and attack you. Serious Sam's monsters are so fast and aggressive that this is a major problem, since the game gives you no warning whatsoever and enemies will often spawn right next to you.

The Bottom Line
Action-packed but generic and forgettable, Serious Sam is bargain bin material. There's not much of a game here and even on its own terms it is frustrating for the most part.

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?

The Good
EVERYTHING. Serious Sam is a game with nothing but action. The plot is almost non-existant, the puzzles suit 3-years-old, and the blood is flowing like a river all over the place. The only thing you'll do in Serious Sam is blow things up, with a variety of deadly weapons.
The game already has a powerful fan base around it, ever since its original demo was released. New maps and mods are created daily, and the top sites (whose links you'll find on the Related Sites section) are filled with tutorials which allow even the scrubbiest player to create cool additional features for the game.
As an added bonus, Serious Sam wasn't created by a well-known company, therefore it's published as a "budget" game- ie, it only costs 20$!! That's nothing compared to the newest 50$ monstrosities (like Tribes 2, another modern FPS)


The Bad
Nothing. This game is meant for the sole purpose of having fun and watching the gore fly over the monitor, and it fits this purpose well.

The Bottom Line
Who needs plot? Who needs thinking? Serious Sam is the 21st century reincarnation of Doom, with amazing graphics, powerful engine and great sound and SFX. If you call yourself a fan of FPS, or of gaming in general, go and buy it- NOW.