Serious Sam is a game I very much wanted to like. In theory, it was a decent action shooter in the style of the classic Run n' Guns of the '80s and '90s, and it did give that impression for a few levels, but not long enough or well enough to really captivate fans of the style.
The game opens with a short background. Aliens are invading Earth after an ancient, super-advanced civilization was discovered beneath Egyptian ruins. Beyond that unskippable screen, the story is held in little bits of text that are thrown at you from level to level, all of which I skipped out on reading. The story felt cliched, but it isn't important to the game.
Your character is thrust into some ruins for some tough as nails shooty action, and it all really feels quite familiar to the classics of the Run n' Guns. A big open courtyard, the character has just a single pistol to start off, there are secrets all around that get progressively harder to find as the levels get harder.
The game's aesthetic is nice, if a bit brown. The brown works, however, as the player spends much time trudging about through pyramids and crypts at the start of the game, and most of the enemies are fairly bright-coloured. The combat is frustrating in more ways than one. Since the game is incredibly tough, the game over screen will be on the forefront more often than most would like. There aren't really enough health or armour packs scattered throughout the levels to keep the players consistently about 50 health, even while secret-diving. Secondly, the shooting itself seems to lack impact. From the pistol to the rocket launcher, the sound design and reactions of enemies just make the weapons feel stiff and as if they aren't actually doing much damage. The low variety of weapons in the early levels also adds to this. The final frustration with the combat ties well into the level design. The reason that Run n' Gun shooters such as Duke 3D and DOOM were any fun was largely due to the nonlinear level design that kept players out of large locked arenas and the like. In Serious Sam, the player is often thrust into an arena with nowhere to go until they have defeated every enemy in sight. This design philosophy of hallway-arena-hallway is detrimental to the combat, as each identical arena full of identical enemies begins to feel exactly the same quite quickly.
To the game's advantage, it has a fun sense of humour, another flash to the past days of one-liners and overblown heroes in FPS. As well as this, the game loves to punish the player for being greedy. Often, grabbing a small health pack or a few armor shards just to get oneself to 30 health or so is going to leave them worse off. They will find themselves with a mob of enemies suddenly teleporting in and knocking them about. The mechanic is interesting and not something seen so often in modern design.
The co-op runs smoothly and grants the players infinite respawns to pass the trials, which sort of defeats the point of the difficulty, but also is a blast to play with friends. Especially when friendly fire is on.
Recommendation: If you're looking for a more modern rendition of the classic Run n' Gun FPS genre, you could do a lot worse than Serious Sam. It's quite a bit of fun, but there is just enough going against it that it could never quite suck me in. If you're looking for a co-op FPS, you've come to the right place.
