Serious Sam's Bogus Detour

If you like any Serious Sam games, you'll probably like this. The quality of the art is amazing, and the gameplay is frantic and fun. I've spent hours just playing the game, and so far spent just as many making my own campaign with the editor, which is surprisingly easy to figure out. Get this if you're a Serious Sam fan, you won't regret it.

Just finished the game with a lot of headaches. They basically took Serious Sam, turned it into a topdown shooter but removed the things that were fun about the franchise. Even on the easiest difficulty, enemies are bullet sponges. In the 3D Serious Sams you'd just plow through hordes while feeling like a god. In the Bogus Detour you just feel weak, from beginning to end with a collection of weapons of which 90% feels useless which in turn makes you use 1 to 2 weapons all the time. Maps are big, you really have to explore them to find secrets (I think I found a grand total of 0). There is no map or whatever so in the end its just a lot moving back and forward to wherever. You know you're on the right path once another horde runs towards you. The worst part is weapon selection. In chaotic moments you just randomly press numbers until the right weapon pops up. This becomes apparent in bossfights. Oh and this is not a spoiler, just a tip: At the last stage of the endboss, if you fail, do NOT press restart. Quit the game and reload your save file or you will have to do a whoooole long annoying section all over again. I did it 3 times :)

There's a lot I like about this game, but the last level was simply too much. I don't think I've ever seen a game want to so blatantly waste your time just for artificial difficulty. Every other review of the game has covered a lot of why the game has a lot of flaws, and I was overlooking them even at their worst. But the thing that made me decide to give such a negative review is the final level. Spoilers, obviously: The final level isn't the longest of the levels in the game, but it's going to take you at least 15 minutes if you rush through it (which I did, MANY times). Why does this matter? Well normally it doesn't on other levels. If you die you can just load the last checkpoint autosave meaning that if you mess up bad you can just try again from a checkpoint, making the lives system feel pretty meaningless. That is until the last level where the final boss comes in multiple stages. Not only do you need to fight all the stages, but if you happen to die during the final stage due to the timer imposed by the game, you get a "bad ending" and they make you replay the entire level which also resets your auto save to the start. There's no manual saves on normal or higher difficulty, and you can't change the difficulty when you start a campaign. This was so unbelievably frustrating I uninstalled and will never look back. The game is just such a waste of time that punishes you for not having precognition or just being godlike at the game. Fuck. That.

From a glance with in-game screenshots and gameplay trailers, Bogus Detour looks good to play. It has a nice pixel artstyle, the music by Damjan Mravunac is great, and there is a good amount of variety to the level themes and locations. You have plenty of weapons in your arsenal, with classic weapons like the Cannon and new weapons like the Erasergun, which is a powerful railgun that pierces through enemies. With a good amount of weapons to create pixel carnage, what can go wrong? Unfortunately, a lot of things. The first issue you'll notice right away is how slow your movement speed is, an issue that is made worse with how large and long the levels are. It's bad enough you will be looking for keys and secrets, but the slow speed makes combat less enjoyable. To compensate, you have a dodge mechanic that you can use to avoid taking damage, but a lot of the time you'll use it just to move around the levels faster. There is no map to speak of either, so get used to hearing Sam vomiting a lot. Another issue is RPG mechanics, where you kill enemies to get XP and level up to buy yourself upgrades. You can also collect stars in levels which act as upgrade points you can use. The problem is that some upgrades are clearly better than others like faster movement speed and more dodges, while some are just useless or harm you more than anything else. There's an upgrade to do more damage while standing still, who thought this was a good idea? You can't save whenever you want, instead you need to find a checkpoint to save your game. But you also have a limited number of lives to beat a level. You can find more lives in each level, but if you end up losing all your lives, it's back to the start of the level. Losing a ton of progress is never fun. Weirdly enough, you can quit and load a save to get your lives back, so what is the point? With more issues like the minefields and Serious difficulty being stupidly unfair (half health and armor, why), Bogus Detour is just Bogus.

Great fun! Feels like Deathspank and looks like Broforce, awesome fun!