The excellent, smooth controls, and carefully thought-out weapon and enemy behaviour keep things fair, putting the blame for any defeat on your hands, and your hands only. It's a purposely cheesy take on the macho action hero who singlehandedly obliterates an army of monsters, throwing one-liners while at it - and yet serious attention has been given to the actual gameplay. No, Serious Sam doesn't take itself to serious. All of these make distinct sounds too, so that one can know when a herd of Werebulls is trying to ram them, if an exploding kamikaze (or ten) is dangerously close, and so on, immersing you in the moment, and forcing you to prioritise targets, and ponder if its best to use a rocket launcher, a mini-gun, or something more fancy like a portable canon. The visual style, for example, is minimalistic, and thus doesn't tire the one doing all the shooting with unnecessary detail, and the enemy design is very striking, so that players can make out who is who in a sea of foes. More importantly, it's not as dumb as it sounds.Īlthough this is all about shooting at stuff, it is the smart design on offer that has turned it into such a beloved cult classic. Battles start as mildly impressive, and soon turn into epic marathons, where the trigger remains pressed for five minutes straight! The action is chaotic, super fun, and unbelievably cathartic. In the end, however, the Spartan aesthetic mainly serves the gameplay portion, with a typical level going like this: Sam enters a large area, picks the new weapon, or the ammo, health, and armour pickups waiting for him in the centre, and bad things start appearing. It succeeds in doing so, with the whole thing still looking good, especially now with the addition of HD textures. The Serious engine was mostly built with rendering as many enemies as possible in mind, in larger-than-life locales. The level design is extremely simple large and usually rectangular arenas, with not much in the way of decoration. Not much detail to be found here, though. Each stage also takes place during a different time of the day, so you'll enjoy some pretty high quality skies, with bright mornings, beautiful, star-lit nights, and everything in between. Sam does his thing in Ancient Egypt, and in Ancient Egypt alone, yet while things can feel a bit samey, there's enough variety at hand, with the scenery going from endless dunes and dark temples, to villages, oasis, and more. Now keep on reading, as Cubed3 takes a look at each individual title. All these are available in their upgraded, HD versions, with all DLC included, and without any changes whatsoever, meaning that all modes remain intact, which is great, as co-op especially, has always been a major part of the Serious Sam experience. Starting with the original, The First Encounter, as well as its standalone expansion, The Second Encounter, it then skips the - tonally different - Serious Sam 2, for some strange reason (probably has something to do with publishing rights), and goes straight for Serious Sam 3: BFE. This collection bundles together three mainline games. Thankfully, the series understands and embraces the cheesiness of it all, and the core of Serious Sam is mainly all about running around in gargantuan, almost empty locales, shooting at impressively large groups of bad guys, with ammo rarely being an issue - if ever. The story is there just to place some sort of an incentive into your subconscious, of course, and an excuse to visit places, and do some shootin'. Here's the basic Serious Sam formula for the uninitiated: the plot at hand is one more typical alien invasion, with the titular protagonist being sent to the past, so that he can have a chance in defeating the arch-villain of this tale, the faceless dude named Mental.
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