Serious Sam HD: The First 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