(Note: This review is about the Xbox-version, not the PC-original)
Don't be fooled by the box-art, this game isn't nearly as cartoony as you think it is.
The following sentence may offend certain readers, as it portrays a highly controversial opinion that many people (most notably fanboys) will probably disagree with:
Serious Sam is the best FPS to date.
And for the record: I don't say that lightly, what with many other excellent titles out there.
And also for the record: yes, I consider Serious Sam to be better than Serious Sam 2, but that's a review for another day.
Anyway, before you declare me batshit-bonkers and send me off to Saint-Mungo's, let me explain why I think Serious Sam is the best FPS to date.
Writing:
Serious Sam is part of a very small elite group of games:
Games where the story has all the depth of a cockroach's bathtub but where one can still honestly say that it has decent writing.
You see, the backstory of Serious Sam is highly simplistic (Aliens invade Earth, you travel back in time to find artifacts belonging to other aliens so that eventually you can get on a space-ship and go to the invading aliens' homeworld and stomp on their leader's face, though the game only goes until the space-ship, after which it is continued in Serious Sam 2). But the thing is, the developers realised this. They understood that the story was pathetic so they had to come up with another way to ease the hectic tension of the gameplay.
And the answer, as it turned out, was simple:
Gags. Lots and lots of gags.
There's so many one-liners and parodies and inside-jokes in here that even The Super Flash Brothers [http://superflashbros.net/2009/02/22/decline-of-video-gaming-3/] could learn a thing or two.
The main (and only) character is Sam "Serious" Stone, who's basically what you'd get if Duke Nukem removed his shades, stopped taking himself seriously and grew a fucking personality beyond "sexist baddass prick who grunts a lot". Pretty much all of Sam's lines are solid gold, and that's because they're just so cheesy, so unbelievably cheesy, that you can't help but laugh. It's just instinctive, you can't resist. If there's one thing the game fails at it's taking itself seriously, and thank fuck for that, because the crazy antics of the enemies in the cutscenes combined with Sam's dialogue is (in my not-so-humble opinion) A-material. Regardless, nobody will actually be playing Serious Sam because of this. It's a gold star, but not in a required field if you get my meaning.
"I see dead people."
Graphics:
In terms of sheer of sheer graphic quality, Serious Sam is nothing special.
No, what really blew me away was not the quality of the resolution, it was the quality of the design. The game is built on the Serious Engine, which allows for huge open levels that can contain insane amounts of objects and enemies. But what's most impressive is the care, the sheer detail, that went into designing the levels. The game has about 37 levels all in all, spread across 4 time-periods, and I suspect that the design-team spent bought several libraries worth of research-material because it's amazing how authentic everything seems. From the hieroglyphs on an Egyptian obelisk to the almost Gothic look of a medieval Polish church, everything looks exactly how one would imagine it really did look like back in the day. It creates a really immersive environment that's really scenic.
In sharp contrast to the soothing and realistic level-design is the design of the enemies.
There's about 2 dozen distinct types of enemies, each with their corresponding attacks, difficulty and design, and every single one of them is a spark of creative genius. The enemies are pretty much all aliens, though from various parts of the universe, and whilst they still have quite a bit realism behind them, their design are all a tad more cartoonish than that of the levels. And good thing too, because the massive and open nature of the levels means that you have to be able to see them coming from half a mile away and thanks to their design, you actually can.
While some enemies are so weak and simple you can kill them with 2 shots from your basic revolver, others are huge titans made from the stuff of nightmares and can take 25 rockets to the face without going down. And that's not even including the bosses, for which terms such as "fucking enormous", "monolithic" and "nigh onto God" fail to be descriptive. I guess the developers realised that they couldn't have both the huge open worlds of the Serious Engine and high-quality graphics so they set out to take mediocre graphics and take them to the very limit. All in all, it's an applaudably ambitious choice, and one that many other studio's would do well to copy.
Sound:
Each level generally has two music-tracks.
The first plays when there are no enemies around and is a very nice and atmospheric piece which, combined with the insanely detailed level-design, creates an incredible sense of immersion. The second is when there are enemies around and is a fast-paced more action-like version of the first piece, which instantly sets the mood for the slaughter ahead. Then there are also a number of even faster and stronger tracks for boss-fights or truly epic enemy sieges. So all in all, the music is A-okay.
In terms of voice-acting, there's only one character in the entire game with actual spoken dialogue (not including the secret fans) and that's Sam himself. Personally, I really liked his performance, though I imagine this is one of those things people can be really divided on. Best not to dwell on it and move right along. Now, I don't usually pay much attention to sound-effects unless they're really good. And they are. They're really good. The weapons all sound totally authentic and the enemies all have distinct and easily recognisable sounds, which (like many other aspects of this game) works really immersively.
Holy, fucking, shit.
Difficulty:
There are four difficulty-levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Serious.
The easiest really is exactly what is says, easy. Up to the point where veteran players can complete pretty much the entire game with just the dual-pistols and the shotgun. The next two ramp it up quite a bit, and will definetly give players a run for their money. And the final difficulty, Serious, is nothing short of fucking insane. I'm not kidding when I say that the total number of enemies on Serious difficulty numbers in the tens of thousands. Seriously (no pun intended), it will fucking kick your ass and make you beg for more. If you're used to more generic FPS's such as Halo or Timesplitters, Serious Sam will be a much needed kick in the groin, as it will push even veteran old-school players to their utter limit. But you know what? That's actually a good thing. It's nice to see an FPS without tutorial-levels, regenerating health or allied NPC's for a change. Serious Sam's lower difficulty-levels keep it accessible to new players while the higher ones still make it challenging for the hard-core crowd and that's a nice bit of balance right there.
Gameplay:
I'm tempted here to quote Yahtzee and say "Press B to shoot and don't press B to not shoot." but I won't. Shooting is, however most of what you'll be doing over the course of this game. You can instantly switch between all of your different weapons in a manner that players of Red Faction 2 will find very familiar and you can assign X and Y as hotkeys to your favourite weapons. It's really nice and fluid, unlike say for instance in Resident Evil 4.
With such huge levels, accurate aiming over long distance becomes vital and as such the designers have thoughtfully provided a modest auto-lock system to accompany the already really smooth aiming. There's a wide variety of weapons to choose from, each suited for certain situations and unlike in other titles such as Halo you can actually carry all of them at the same time and don't have to drop one if you want to carry another.
Your health goes up to 100 points and doesn't regenerate (except on the lowest difficulty setting) and you can fill an extra bar of another 100, though that one drains over time until it's back to 100. The same principle is also applied to armor, and pick-ups for both as well as for ammo are scattered liberally across each level. And you're going to need them. The game also works with a lives-system (100.000 points=1 extra life) but unlike in Sonic Heroes, the system actually works. Once you're dead, you're back right where you were two seconds later, which helps keep the gameflow nice and steady. You see, Serious Sam is the kind of game where the levels are so intense that you can end up dying something like 20 times in a single level. But since killing enemies scores you points, it works both ways. More enemies increases the likelyhood of you dying but it also means more points and ergo, more lives.
Most of the gameplay besides "Go from point A to point B whilst killing enough enemies to fill a moderately-sized apartment-building" revolves around finding various switches for various doors, as well as finding somewhat more important keys for somewhat more important doors. But really, none of that matters. Serious Sam is a shooter in the most literall sense of the word: You shoot things. Everything else is just dressing, albeit dressing on a truly magnificent salad.
Kindly note the contrast here between the design of the levels and the enemies.
Multiplayer:
There's two modes of multiplayer:
Split-screen two-player co-op and split-screen up-to-four-player deathmatch.
The co-op is a lot of fun, but like many other co-op games (such as X-Men Legends 2), the game is so long that odds are you'll only play the whole co-op-campaign once, because otherwise it just drains too much time. Still, it's fun, at least the first time around. The death-match mode is probably the worst part of the game, with with the small number of arena's (which are also too small in size) and the lack of bots or online play. Me and my friends spent literally one afternoon trying it out and never bothered with it again afterwards.
Play Time/Replay Value:
The single-player campaign is pretty long (and seriously long when compared to that of many other FPS's such as MW2 or Halo) and there are many hidden secrets and gags to find if you're the explorative type, so you'll probably end up spending a little longer in each level on your second run than on your first. And thanks to the multiple difficulty-levels, I can guarantee that you'll be having many many hours of fun playing this game.
Unfortunately, here comes into play my one true criticism of Serious Sam. Because once you've had those many hours, you probably won't have them again. Once you've beaten the game on Serious difficulty, odds are you won't play it again for quite a while. The writing loses a little of it's pollish once you've heard it 4 or 5 times and the pathetically underdeveloped deathmatch-multiplayer does nothing to save this. Don't get me wrong, Serious Sam provides a lot more entertainment than most shooters. It's just not the kind of game that stays in your Xbox for 6 straight months.
Conclusion:
Serious Sam is a piece of art, no point denying it.
In terms of a single-player FPS, it does pretty much everything right and nothing wrong. Of course, the multiplayer is pretty bad, but Serious Sam wasn't meant to be played multiplayer, so this is forgiven. I realise quite well that this review almost fanboyishly positive but I like to think that all of my praise is based on objective evaluation, because I've heard my friends and family say pretty much all of the same stuff about it. The fact just is, Serious Sam is a fantastic piece of work, and if you want an FPS that breaks free of the repetitive space-marines of Haze and Halo or the "gritty realism" of Modern Warfare or Battlefield: Bad Company, then Serious Sam provides and then some.
It's imaginative, immersive and fucking awesome. Just do yourself a huge favour, and check it out.
Don't be fooled by the box-art, this game isn't nearly as cartoony as you think it is.
The following sentence may offend certain readers, as it portrays a highly controversial opinion that many people (most notably fanboys) will probably disagree with:
Serious Sam is the best FPS to date.
And for the record: I don't say that lightly, what with many other excellent titles out there.
And also for the record: yes, I consider Serious Sam to be better than Serious Sam 2, but that's a review for another day.
Anyway, before you declare me batshit-bonkers and send me off to Saint-Mungo's, let me explain why I think Serious Sam is the best FPS to date.
Writing:
Serious Sam is part of a very small elite group of games:
Games where the story has all the depth of a cockroach's bathtub but where one can still honestly say that it has decent writing.
You see, the backstory of Serious Sam is highly simplistic (Aliens invade Earth, you travel back in time to find artifacts belonging to other aliens so that eventually you can get on a space-ship and go to the invading aliens' homeworld and stomp on their leader's face, though the game only goes until the space-ship, after which it is continued in Serious Sam 2). But the thing is, the developers realised this. They understood that the story was pathetic so they had to come up with another way to ease the hectic tension of the gameplay.
And the answer, as it turned out, was simple:
Gags. Lots and lots of gags.
There's so many one-liners and parodies and inside-jokes in here that even The Super Flash Brothers [http://superflashbros.net/2009/02/22/decline-of-video-gaming-3/] could learn a thing or two.
The main (and only) character is Sam "Serious" Stone, who's basically what you'd get if Duke Nukem removed his shades, stopped taking himself seriously and grew a fucking personality beyond "sexist baddass prick who grunts a lot". Pretty much all of Sam's lines are solid gold, and that's because they're just so cheesy, so unbelievably cheesy, that you can't help but laugh. It's just instinctive, you can't resist. If there's one thing the game fails at it's taking itself seriously, and thank fuck for that, because the crazy antics of the enemies in the cutscenes combined with Sam's dialogue is (in my not-so-humble opinion) A-material. Regardless, nobody will actually be playing Serious Sam because of this. It's a gold star, but not in a required field if you get my meaning.
"I see dead people."
Graphics:
In terms of sheer of sheer graphic quality, Serious Sam is nothing special.
No, what really blew me away was not the quality of the resolution, it was the quality of the design. The game is built on the Serious Engine, which allows for huge open levels that can contain insane amounts of objects and enemies. But what's most impressive is the care, the sheer detail, that went into designing the levels. The game has about 37 levels all in all, spread across 4 time-periods, and I suspect that the design-team spent bought several libraries worth of research-material because it's amazing how authentic everything seems. From the hieroglyphs on an Egyptian obelisk to the almost Gothic look of a medieval Polish church, everything looks exactly how one would imagine it really did look like back in the day. It creates a really immersive environment that's really scenic.
In sharp contrast to the soothing and realistic level-design is the design of the enemies.
There's about 2 dozen distinct types of enemies, each with their corresponding attacks, difficulty and design, and every single one of them is a spark of creative genius. The enemies are pretty much all aliens, though from various parts of the universe, and whilst they still have quite a bit realism behind them, their design are all a tad more cartoonish than that of the levels. And good thing too, because the massive and open nature of the levels means that you have to be able to see them coming from half a mile away and thanks to their design, you actually can.
While some enemies are so weak and simple you can kill them with 2 shots from your basic revolver, others are huge titans made from the stuff of nightmares and can take 25 rockets to the face without going down. And that's not even including the bosses, for which terms such as "fucking enormous", "monolithic" and "nigh onto God" fail to be descriptive. I guess the developers realised that they couldn't have both the huge open worlds of the Serious Engine and high-quality graphics so they set out to take mediocre graphics and take them to the very limit. All in all, it's an applaudably ambitious choice, and one that many other studio's would do well to copy.
Sound:
Each level generally has two music-tracks.
The first plays when there are no enemies around and is a very nice and atmospheric piece which, combined with the insanely detailed level-design, creates an incredible sense of immersion. The second is when there are enemies around and is a fast-paced more action-like version of the first piece, which instantly sets the mood for the slaughter ahead. Then there are also a number of even faster and stronger tracks for boss-fights or truly epic enemy sieges. So all in all, the music is A-okay.
In terms of voice-acting, there's only one character in the entire game with actual spoken dialogue (not including the secret fans) and that's Sam himself. Personally, I really liked his performance, though I imagine this is one of those things people can be really divided on. Best not to dwell on it and move right along. Now, I don't usually pay much attention to sound-effects unless they're really good. And they are. They're really good. The weapons all sound totally authentic and the enemies all have distinct and easily recognisable sounds, which (like many other aspects of this game) works really immersively.
Holy, fucking, shit.
Difficulty:
There are four difficulty-levels: Easy, Normal, Hard and Serious.
The easiest really is exactly what is says, easy. Up to the point where veteran players can complete pretty much the entire game with just the dual-pistols and the shotgun. The next two ramp it up quite a bit, and will definetly give players a run for their money. And the final difficulty, Serious, is nothing short of fucking insane. I'm not kidding when I say that the total number of enemies on Serious difficulty numbers in the tens of thousands. Seriously (no pun intended), it will fucking kick your ass and make you beg for more. If you're used to more generic FPS's such as Halo or Timesplitters, Serious Sam will be a much needed kick in the groin, as it will push even veteran old-school players to their utter limit. But you know what? That's actually a good thing. It's nice to see an FPS without tutorial-levels, regenerating health or allied NPC's for a change. Serious Sam's lower difficulty-levels keep it accessible to new players while the higher ones still make it challenging for the hard-core crowd and that's a nice bit of balance right there.
Gameplay:
I'm tempted here to quote Yahtzee and say "Press B to shoot and don't press B to not shoot." but I won't. Shooting is, however most of what you'll be doing over the course of this game. You can instantly switch between all of your different weapons in a manner that players of Red Faction 2 will find very familiar and you can assign X and Y as hotkeys to your favourite weapons. It's really nice and fluid, unlike say for instance in Resident Evil 4.
With such huge levels, accurate aiming over long distance becomes vital and as such the designers have thoughtfully provided a modest auto-lock system to accompany the already really smooth aiming. There's a wide variety of weapons to choose from, each suited for certain situations and unlike in other titles such as Halo you can actually carry all of them at the same time and don't have to drop one if you want to carry another.
Your health goes up to 100 points and doesn't regenerate (except on the lowest difficulty setting) and you can fill an extra bar of another 100, though that one drains over time until it's back to 100. The same principle is also applied to armor, and pick-ups for both as well as for ammo are scattered liberally across each level. And you're going to need them. The game also works with a lives-system (100.000 points=1 extra life) but unlike in Sonic Heroes, the system actually works. Once you're dead, you're back right where you were two seconds later, which helps keep the gameflow nice and steady. You see, Serious Sam is the kind of game where the levels are so intense that you can end up dying something like 20 times in a single level. But since killing enemies scores you points, it works both ways. More enemies increases the likelyhood of you dying but it also means more points and ergo, more lives.
Most of the gameplay besides "Go from point A to point B whilst killing enough enemies to fill a moderately-sized apartment-building" revolves around finding various switches for various doors, as well as finding somewhat more important keys for somewhat more important doors. But really, none of that matters. Serious Sam is a shooter in the most literall sense of the word: You shoot things. Everything else is just dressing, albeit dressing on a truly magnificent salad.
Kindly note the contrast here between the design of the levels and the enemies.
Multiplayer:
There's two modes of multiplayer:
Split-screen two-player co-op and split-screen up-to-four-player deathmatch.
The co-op is a lot of fun, but like many other co-op games (such as X-Men Legends 2), the game is so long that odds are you'll only play the whole co-op-campaign once, because otherwise it just drains too much time. Still, it's fun, at least the first time around. The death-match mode is probably the worst part of the game, with with the small number of arena's (which are also too small in size) and the lack of bots or online play. Me and my friends spent literally one afternoon trying it out and never bothered with it again afterwards.
Play Time/Replay Value:
The single-player campaign is pretty long (and seriously long when compared to that of many other FPS's such as MW2 or Halo) and there are many hidden secrets and gags to find if you're the explorative type, so you'll probably end up spending a little longer in each level on your second run than on your first. And thanks to the multiple difficulty-levels, I can guarantee that you'll be having many many hours of fun playing this game.
Unfortunately, here comes into play my one true criticism of Serious Sam. Because once you've had those many hours, you probably won't have them again. Once you've beaten the game on Serious difficulty, odds are you won't play it again for quite a while. The writing loses a little of it's pollish once you've heard it 4 or 5 times and the pathetically underdeveloped deathmatch-multiplayer does nothing to save this. Don't get me wrong, Serious Sam provides a lot more entertainment than most shooters. It's just not the kind of game that stays in your Xbox for 6 straight months.
Conclusion:
Serious Sam is a piece of art, no point denying it.
In terms of a single-player FPS, it does pretty much everything right and nothing wrong. Of course, the multiplayer is pretty bad, but Serious Sam wasn't meant to be played multiplayer, so this is forgiven. I realise quite well that this review almost fanboyishly positive but I like to think that all of my praise is based on objective evaluation, because I've heard my friends and family say pretty much all of the same stuff about it. The fact just is, Serious Sam is a fantastic piece of work, and if you want an FPS that breaks free of the repetitive space-marines of Haze and Halo or the "gritty realism" of Modern Warfare or Battlefield: Bad Company, then Serious Sam provides and then some.
It's imaginative, immersive and fucking awesome. Just do yourself a huge favour, and check it out.
