Serious Sam: The First Encounter

Firstly I have to say that I love this game, truly a real Good Old Game, and so great that it, along with its Second Encounter, spawned a HD version - but unfortunately the HD version isn't available here, but maybe in the future? And talking about the future, this game is a futuristic game but set in the past! The player, Sam Stone, is sent into the past to thwart the forces of Mental. So, get set for some Ancient Egyptian sight-seeing, but this is no leisurely stroll. There are literally hundreds of monsters, and you can up the difficulty for some seriously hard gameplay. The enemies are also nicely done with demons, giant scorpion-like creatures, mutilated humanoids (the first time you meet a headless screaming kamikaze bomber running towards you it will seem harmless, but just you wait until you have them coming at you from all directions in great numbers), alien skeletons, harpies, to describe just a few and then there's not forgetting the enormous bosses. The game also gets in a few quotes and references to video games and movies (a la Duke Nukem style) and adds in some humourous touches here and there. What I will say about this game, however, is don't come into it expecting a clever shooter. The enemies are more about sheer numbers than tactics as this is a classic Doom-like shooter experience. And finally, if you enjoy this game then you'll love the Second Encounter which adds in a few different environment styles as opposed to just the Egyptian one that this game has.

Serious Sam aims to be a spiritual successor to the run-and-gun FPS classics, with an arcade-like constant action feel. At its best moments, it is a serious blast and it captures that wild feel, but it doesn't take advantage of its core design as well as it could. (Fortunately, The Second Encounter does.) One bug warning to save some from wasted effort: at least some players (possibly all) have found that demo recording does not work - the recording message comes up, but nothing seems to result in actual demos being saved. VISUALS: While simple, this is an attractive game, and a reasonably modern machine should be able to max out all of the engine's many options. While models and environments don't have tremendously high poly-counts or rich atmospheric effects, everything looks clean, shadows are detailed, and the draw distance is impressive. The engine specializes in huge, open areas and equally huge enemy counts, both of which are used extensively in the game. You won't see fancy water or beautiful bump-mapped closeups, but you won't care as you're blasting your way through hordes of attackers or desperately firing into a foggy or dark-cloaked room. You can swap freely between first and third-person perspective, which can be particularly helpful when surrounded. Recently, 'HD' versions have been released on a more modern engine - if you have the hardware there could be some value there, but the original looks plenty good and won't tax your machine. Nothing looks blocky, the textures are more than good enough to keep your eyes happy, and the blood and exploding bits are plentiful. The only complaint I'd register in the visuals department is that there isn't a ton of variety to the architecture. AUDIO: The soundtrack is pretty good, and very appropriate; it is also helpful, since it changes to heavy, fast battle music any time an enemy notices you. Given the nature of the game, you will be listening to the hard stuff most of the time. Guns all have distinct sounds, and each enemy has an occasional idle noise, alert yell, and firing sound (unique to general type). Most have vocalizations for being injured and a death cry as well. Spawning enemies or goodies make a clear noise, although the game occasionally uses this to mess with your head. Charging kamikazes have a very helpful loud yell that changes volume with distance and is usually fairly easy to localize, and galloping kleer and werebulls are also audible, although harder to localize. Overall, the game sounds good, and gives all the audio cues you need, but be warned that it seems to occasionally mess up the balance and mislead the listener in close quarters. CONTROLS and GAMEPLAY: You have the standard set of FPS controls, with full customizability (except for the #$%^& screenshot button, as usual). You don't need to reload your weapons, except for the infinite-ammo starting pistol(s). This fits the high-speed, constant-pressure gameplay style, but contributes to the same-y feel of many weapons, particularly the 3 high-rate-of-fire guns. You basically have two kinds of chaingun, plus a variant that chews ammo less quickly, rockets (and grenades that mostly serve the same role when you're low on ammo), shotguns (you'll mostly use the double-barrel), and a ridiculously powerful cannon late in the game. When you're not under pressure, you can save valuable ammo and use the infinite pistols, but this is generally tedious due to their slow damage rate. All weapons except the shotguns have perfect accuracy, which combines with the color-coded (health indicating) reticle to encourage long-range cheap shots. Weapon switching feels just a touch too slow for a game of this type, making changing weapons in combat often risky, which is a real problem when your chaingun finishes demolishing its ammo supply. Furthermore, there is no "last-weapon" swap button, making changes much more difficult and mis-selection a frustratingly easy possibility. There aren't tremendously many enemy types either, and the way they're used in-game further reduces the felt variety; heavy units are frequently placed on pillar tops or otherwise out of reach and immobile, with no effect other than confining your movement to cover (chaingun-wielding arachnoids) or adding occasional extra targets to shoot (homing-missile-firing reptiloids) until you have time to pick them off. Biomechanoids are the only heavy units that usually move much, and they're fairly easy targets, only constituting a major threat when large groups of the strong, rocket-firing Majors are dropped in with hordes of other enemies, thanks to their attacks being easy to dodge at range. Those other enemies will usually be Kleer, the primary threat throughout the game, or Beheaded Kamikazes, the fast high-priority targets the game likes to spring on you. Before you get the cannon, the heavy, very fast Sirian Werebulls will dominate your attention combat, and after you get it you'll always want to use it on them. Levels consist of series of arenas in which you will be attacked by several waves of enemies. The biggest fights will provide new health, armor, and ammo drops between waves, or timed respawning goodies. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're having trouble), many rooms have most enemies pre-spawned or triggerable near the door, allowing you to simply retreat before it closes, then bore yourself half to death opening the door, firing a few shots, taking cover, and repeating. This is particularly boring if you're an ammo miser and choose to abuse the weak infinite-ammo pistols for this purpose. With hitscan-weapon enemies (arachnoids), it feels rather silly to do anything else, since being out of cover for more than about half a second will result in a lot of unavoidable damage. Most heavy enemies can also be shot around corners without exposing yourself, which is even cheaper but at least saves time over taking 4-shot bursts during their spin-up delay. Outdoor areas are more interesting thanks to the absence of cheap cover, but tend to be too easy, thanks to the nigh-unbounded retreat distance available to you, and the fact that you can usually move out of the detection range of late-spawning enemies. STORY/ACTING: This is an old-school shooter - constant action with a bit of framing story to motivate the running and gunning. Acting comes down to occasional one-liners from Sam, which are appropriately silly and macho, although Sam's a much more agreeable character than, say, Duke Nukem. This ain't Half-Life 2, but you're not going to care as you desperately pour lead into wall after wall of charging foes. There's a bit of humor injected via the tactical descriptions provided by the cybernetic-assistant-in-your-head as well, but that's all in text. DIFFICULTY: The game offers 5 difficulty levels, ranging from "suitable for those with no FPS experience" Tourist level to "are you serious?" Serious level (and the initially-locked "you're not serious" Mental, which is Serious plus enemies fading in and out of invisibility). The lower levels increase starting, maximum, and pickup health, while the levels above normal mostly increase the number of enemies and the damage they do. Serious may increase the speed and leap-attack distance of some enemies as well. I played on Serious level [and collected all secrets], and difficulty was a seriously mixed bag. Unfortunately, the low tolerance for error it affords encouraged me to use cheesy tactics, since cover options often boil down to near-immunity using the door vs. complete exposure in the arena, with pointless-feeling unavoidable loss of health before you have time to eliminate all the chaingunners. The designers appear to have acknowledged the issue by giving most coverless arenas obvious rocket-jump-accessible walls, sometimes complete with jump pads in out-of-map areas to send you back if you don't land on top. This is a rather unfortunate method of balancing a game, since taking potshots from a position of near-invulnerability is pretty tedious, especially when you run out of ammo and must resort to the weak starter pistols. That said, after playing The Second Encounter, I went back to all the major arenas I had jumped out of and played through them properly; somewhat surprisingly, none took very long to beat, since all of them had adequate ammo spawns, and I was more inclined to use ammunition aggressively when in the thick of battle. Still, there are plenty of rooms that heavily encourage use of the door, and the lack of mobility for heavies (and bad pathfinding for all enemies) means that any time cover is present, it is easy to abuse (and boring if you save ammo). There are a few inescapable arenas and others that I stubbornly tried until I beat them fair-and-square, and I found a few of these pretty hard on the first play-through. This may have been due to the limited time I spent fighting properly and my tendency to over-conserve certain ammo types, since after playing The Second Encounter, all replay tests proved to be surprisingly easy. The tensest moments come when you run out of chaingun and laser ammunition and no longer have a way to keep back an advancing horde of kleer, resulting in a big turning battle as you slowly whittle them down with the shotgun, often complicated by the appearance of much-faster werebulls to mess up your timing and throw you around. Unfortunately, this gets a bit tedious after the umpteenth time it happens; it's a bad sign when the appearance of more-irritating enemies (harpies!) becomes a relief (sadly, once you learn to handle them, they're rarely much of a threat). You can quicksave anywhere, and the game keeps your last 8 quicksaves, so an accidental save right before a rocket nails you in the back is not a huge problem. I tried not to overly abuse this feature in combat, but I was quite glad it existed in some of the longer arenas. LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS: If you're having trouble with a firefight, see if you can trigger some of the enemies from the doorway, or look for somewhere to rocket-jump to. Avoid this as much as you can, since camping on a ledge taking potshots is a lot less fun (and results in enemy clusters that will keep you there until you're done), but it's possible in most of the hard areas. Feel free to use ammo aggressively; this will make the game go by more quickly and you will always be well-supplied right before a big battle (cannon ammo is particularly plentiful in the late game). The chaingun and laser gatling can cut down a lot of the projectiles thrown by Kleer, particularly if they're heavily bunched up, and the pistols can do so when kiting a big group at extreme range outdoors. When facing Common Reptiloids from medium+ range, the pistols have adequate speed to take it down while covering you from incoming projectiles, so long as you prioritize their missiles near the end of each clip. Thanks to the homing nature of the missiles, it is easier to take out single reptiloids by standing in the open than it is to dodge around cover, since you can keep all incoming missiles in view (of course, abusing a corner so no shots are fired at all is the easiest approach). In arenas with respawning goodies, pick up ammo early and often, and be aware that ammo packs can differ in which ammo they are most heavy on (in the late game one arena grants 20 cannonballs per pack, almost as fast as you can use them). There are a lot of secrets in almost every level, including special exits to two secret levels (out of only 15 total!), both of which are pretty extensive. Most of these are mildly hidden items, pickups that trigger surprise enemies, or Doom-style dark patches of wall to hit. Keeping an eye peeled for dark spots or initially unreachable items will cover a lot of them, and wanton destruction of prominent objects will get almost all of the rest, along with a hearty helping of extra enemies. There are very few secrets that require trick jumps or other skill challenges (although many secrets are optional triggers for challenging mini-fights). As mentioned above, the sequential-arena level design suffers from easy exploits, and it also gets pretty repetitive after a while, since you keep seeing the same enemies. Only a few of the boss fights offer much challenge, and some are recycled (the first "mob boss" is a good example, although it is pretty neat when you first encounter it). THE VERDICT: Rating this game is hard; there are a lot of fun elements and I want to give it a 4, but the level design weakness, the irritating control limitations (mainly the lack of a fast swap), the general samey-ness of the weapons, and the repetitive combat all eventually sap some of the fun. Were it not for quicksaves, several of the longer fights would have been quite aggravating; being ganked from behind by a surprise spawn is Not Cool if you lose ten minutes of hard-fought battle to it. Ultimately, the game just barely fails to earn a 4, mainly because it spends too much time failing to force the player into the all-out run-and-gun action around which it is designed (it is a bad sign when you view the presence of heavies as a tedious timesink rather than a threat), and because most of the challenge comes in the form of "yet another long turning battle with Kleer".

Thank you GOG for giving this game for free. You guys are awesome <3

I just finished playing this game not too long ago. My mind has been officially blown. Everything about this game is HUGE, from the levels, to the baddies, and the guns.... oh yes... the guns. At the heart of this gem is a simple, "run and gun" shooter, but what sets it apart is the beauty and care that went into the wide open levels (unlike Doom which is spent mostly in corridors) and the RIDICULOUS amounts of enemies you must face. For throwing literally hundreds of enemies at you ALL AT ONCE, it maintains a smooth frame rate and the pace doesn't lag. The guns continually get bigger and bigger and each one can deal with enemies in a unique way. One thing that surprised me about this game is that if you pay attention to the monsters, they all have patterns which, when figured out, allows you to kill them much more efficiently with certain weapons. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (particularly Sam's wisecracks) but these are typically followed by "OH MY GOD" moments, so you quit laughing pretty quickly. There are very few puzzles to solve, which, for those of us who are used to the frustration of scouring level after level in Duke Nukem 3D or Doom, is a serious blessing. I could go on and on all day about how great this game is, but you need to play it for yourself and see first-hand how awesome and fun it is. $10 for a game of this magnitude is a trifle. Get it now!

I serioursly played this game today. Serious Sam is so serious, but to be serious I must say that I didn't played this game years before. This serious game has seriously surprised me as it is sooo good old game. Seriously serious arsenal of seriously dangerous weapons, which help our Serious Sam to fight with seriously serious about killing us monsters. Game is seriously serious about it's difficult level, playing normal is seriously challenging. I am seriously serious about this game is seriously good, even better, I didn't played Doom, Duke Nukem or other pseudo-3D games, but Serious Sam is sieriously 3D game with sieriously 3D models of enemies (humans(?), monsters and undead). I seriously recomending this sieriously serious game for all casual new and seriously serious old gamers. This seriously review was so serious ^^