Serious Sam: The First Encounter

A very wild fps, that takes some of the core concepts of old school fps and applies them to a world already post Half Life. Its definitly an old school game for the time, and it still feels that way when playing it know.

You play as a duke nukem-ish character who is off to save the word by collecting ancient relics, or something like that. Along the massive levels, you will encounter a huge amount of enemies to blast your way through and almost as many secrets. Its definitly a game you play for the gameplay, but visually it has a very charismatic and cartoony style. The enemy designs are pretty cool for the most part, with the exploding kamikazees being a staple of the series.

The gameplay is what you play this one for, and its pretty awesome. You are constantly bombarded with enemies, with a couple of short pauses in the mean time to figure out some very light puzzles and lever pulling. Its a concept that works extremely well in small chunks of time, but i found that this is the sort of game that i cant play for a long time straight forward. Its excess really gets to the user, and its repetitive in its strafe shooting gameplay.

It also offers basic coop throughout the campaign as well as multiplayer modes. The multiplayer modes are way too fast for me to be any good at them, but they are somewhat enjoyable to play.

Overal its a pretty essencial fps series, but i do feel that they got the formula a bit better in the second encounter.

The original Serious Sam was released at a time where franchises like Call of Duty were beginning to pop up and the classic FPS formula of the early 90s was starting to go by the wayside. Sam attempts to homage classic characters like Duke Nukem and bring back a more old-school approach to the shooter genre. A lot of the series' biggest fans will claim that it plays like Doom, Heretic and Quake, and while there are some superficial similarities in terms of minimal approach to storytelling, over the top action and enormous guns, The First Encounter has nothing of the intelligent level or encounter design that those classics of the FPS genre do.

The game takes place in Egypt and features a pretty unimportant sci-fi related plot tied in with collecting mythological relics. It's a bit like an episode of Ancient Aliens, but that's neither here nor there because the plot is simply window dressing for the action. So how is the action? Unfortunately, it ranges from merely decent to downright miserable. It can be fun early on, when the enemies and weapons are still fresh, but it's clear there wasn't enough creativity to sustain an entire campaign (which is surprising because it's only around 6 hours long.) The level design gets increasingly linear in the back half of the game, and starts to rely on spawning multiple waves of enemies in one location rather than letting the player experience each wave of enemies in a new area. These encounters can go on for over 10 minutes in a single location, simply because there are so many enemies the player has to defeat. It's made even worse by the fact that some enemies can hit you with what seems like hitscan from very far across the map and some of the enemies have an unreasonable amount of health. It's not a stretch to say that this game features downright bullet sponges like the bulls or the big scorpion creatures. They simply aren't fun to fight, at least not after the first few times. It doesn't help that most (though not all) of the weapons are unsatisfying to fire. There is nothing like the visceral punch of a super shotgun in Doom or the clanking metallic tones of a grenade bouncing across the floor in Quake - every single weapon in this game has been done better somewhere else.

As the enemy waves get more intense (and more familiar,) and the levels look more and more like corridors, the fun factor takes an absolute nosedive. There's nothing interesting about standing in a large open area and fighting wave after wave of the same enemies you've seen a hundred times already. There's one particularly poorly designed encounter that features dozens if not over a hundred skeleton horse creatures that can easily overwhelm the player and completely prevent them from moving. It can be cool to see so many enemies on screen at once, but it doesn't make for fun or interesting gameplay. It's repetitive and it can get extremely annoying, especially because the developers seem to have intentionally designed the encounters to be as frustrating as possible. Enemies will constantly spawn from all angles forcing you to constantly be spinning around, checking and rechecking corners. You will regularly be caught off-guard by an enemy you didn't see coming, perhaps because they spawned behind you way up on a roof where it's hard to even spot them. It's clear that this design philosophy is an intentional challenge for the player, but it simply isn't fun fighting five cookie cutter waves of frustrating enemies in the same location, moving to the next empty arena and repeating the process. Add in the fact that most levels have either few secrets or boring secrets, and it becomes a very monotonous and occasionally infuriating slog. It's not broken or buggy - it just suffers from a lazy copy-paste design mentality. Some might find this game enjoyable, but to put it next to the classics of the genre you might have to have a bit of nostalgia for it.

its serious sam, not much has changed between them besides new maps, I can't really say what game has better maps ora nything I just kind of breezed through them probably in a drunk haze. its a nice time waster for listening to albums and blasting between maps, so i can say that.

6.5/10

Serious Sam is a first-person shooter set in Egypt. Sam, a Duke Nukem-esque character, has been sent back in time to destroy an alien race in order to prevent the current threat to humanity. I was expecting the character to constantly churn out the clichés, but they are surprisingly sparse.

The levels are mainly presented as a series of arenas rather than the standard narrow pathways you find in modern FPS games. There's an insane amount of enemies in the game, and they often spawn at insane rates, sometimes unfairly behind you. To survive, you need to keep your eyes and ears open and constantly strafe.

The difficulty is therefore high, but luckily you can save anywhere at the touch of a button, so even though you may constantly die, you do have that 'one-more-go' attitude. Most parts of the game I was shouting at the PC “this is insane”, or “this is impossible”, but after many tries, I eventually progressed just to find tougher and more numerous enemies spawn afterwards!

You may expect to constantly run out of ammunition, but there's plenty of guns in your arsenal, and power-ups are well placed. After tough arenas, there's always a large amount of pick-ups to get you back to full health, full shields, and full stocks of ammunition. You always have to be wary though, because sometimes you stumble across hidden pick-ups but collecting these often spawns more enemies; so it's risk versus reward.

The guns vary from being standard FPS weapons, such as pistols, shotguns, machine gun, to not so standard weapons like the canon and laser gun. The guns do have their strengths and weaknesses, so you will be switching them out based on the current threats in the area. You don't necessarily need to worry about reloading since they usually have a high capacity, or you will switch out for a new threat.

The enemies that you are up against are pretty relentless, especially when teamed together. There's suicide bombers, bulls, skeleton horse type enemies that come charging at you. Shock troops, mechanical walkers and scorpion-like creatures fire guns or missiles from afar. All of which can quickly deplete your health. It's always good to listen out for audio cues of when enemies spawn. The suicide bombers scream as they run, which gets louder the closer they are to you. You can hear the galloping of hooves when the skeleton creatures come charging at you, so it's always nice to be able to prepare and switch to your weapon of choice.

Graphically, the game is quite mixed. Some textures look sharp while others look a bit jagged, but it has to be noted, the frame-rate is great considering the amount of enemies it has on-screen at once.

There was many moments where I thought I was never going to finish Serious Sam due to the difficulty, but it's so tough you just can't help but come back and try again, so I did complete it in the end. It's definitely a good shooter, although I was surprised the story and character wasn't as crazy or engaging as it was.

The Second Encounter might be slightly better than the first, but Serious Sam, through sheer tenacity and cornball iron will, still stands out as a stalwart shooter. It's not a game to be played for hours at a time, but is just so damn fun.