Thankfully, this portion only lasts a short time before switching to traditional Serious Sam gameplay. The first few hours play more like a pseudo-survival game where Sam is exploring dark mazes and trying to spot enemies with his flashlight. Most Serious Sam games would introduce new weapons and enemies every few minutes, but this Sam is different. Sam has to find his separated team while battling hordes of enemies armed with only a sledgehammer and pistol. Unfortunately, a rocket hits Sam’s transport and his team gets separated in the small town. Serious Sam 3 begins with the titular Sam being flown to a small desert town to theoretically kill many enemies with a military unit. ![]() Killing Enemies with Rockets Never Gets Old The result is an unbalanced but decent experience that sometimes feels like two different games. Serious Sam 3 features these main concepts for a majority of the game but tries to combine them with shadows, flashlights, and smaller weapons. Instead of more enemies, there should have been more colors in the palette and more variety in the level design.Serious Sam has generally been associated with three main concepts – large open areas, mass amounts of enemies, and running backwards while frantically shooting these enemies. It’s an interesting case study on the whole saying “less is more.” The dev team clearly believes “more is more” and the funny thing is that sometimes they’re right – other times, a bit of editing on the enemy numbers would have really tightened the experience up. Co-op is more worthwhile, since you’re applying the already decently-fun single-player structure to messing around with friends.īFE has some fantastic moments despite its very low-budget feel and it can be uniquely entertaining in its absurdity and intensity, but we advise players to take it in sips: playing for even a few hours at a time becomes exhausting and tedious. Gameplay-wise the competitive component offers nothing you couldn’t get out of Quake III, and that game has much more interesting weapons and map designs. It is, though, more of the same and Serious Sam has never been about depth – it’s about slaughtering a million ridiculous enemies, so taking that same template and applying it to small multiplayer scenarios is less than inspiring. If, for some reason, the single-player campaign isn’t enough for you, BFE features some surprisingly beefy multiplayer offerings, with multiple co-op modes and an impressive array of competitive modes. It’s supposed to be an old-school throwback to when FPS games were about nonstop killing and endless circle-strafing or running-backward-and-strafing. Again, this is such a weird stylistic choice because Serious Sam is supposed to be the respite from “modern” shooters. The ENTIRE game is a series of brown textures – sand, brick buildings, and so many brown Egyptian ruins that playing this game may make you forget there are any other colors in the rainbow (hey, brown’s in the rainbow, right?). Similarly, while Serious 2 took us to all kinds of lush and colorful environments, BFE returns to Egypt and just lingers there like an unwanted party crasher. ![]() Whereas previous Serious games gave you things like (allow us to quote our review of Serious Sam 2): “clockwork rhinos, mutant footballers, three-headed flaming hounds… witches on broomsticks, Orc-carrying gyrocopters… zombie stockbrokers…” BFE sports a few strange leftovers from previous Serious games, like the iconic headless kamikazes, who run at you screaming while carrying a bomb in each hand, but other than that the enemies have become extremely generic Doom knockoffs: fat ogre-dudes with rocket-launcher arms, cyber-demon mechs with, uh, rocket-launcher arms, scorpion dudes with Gatling-gun arms… man what’s with all the weapon arms? The enemy design, for the most part, is totally uninspired, which is bizarre considering inspired enemies are one of the series’ hallmarks. ![]() ![]() BFE achieves the latter with not much of the former.
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