Here your ammo can be counted in hundreds rather than tens, and Sam is able to withstand enough punishment to make standing battles against the horde feasible. Ironically, if you want to enjoy the game in the old style you need to knock the difficulty down to Easy or the even-simpler Tourist setting. You want to let rip in true Serious Sam style, mowing down dozens of enemies with a hail of bullets, but the difficulty settings make that impossible. The game boasts of its throwback heritage, harking back to a time when "cover was for amateurs" - but by making its tough-guy hero so fragile and limiting his arsenal so ruthlessly, it often steers you into positions where a bit of cover might not be a bad idea.
Serious sam 3 bfe youtu e trial#
Toss in some poor checkpoints and a limit to how many quicksaves you can use, and progress can become a headbanging trial of patience. This is compounded in the early stages of the game, where you're stuck with a pistol, weak shotgun and melee sledgehammer combo for too many encounters. Not only does Sam's health vanish in hefty chunks, but ammo and armour are in short supply, forcing you to back-pedal away from waves of enemies until you find a doorway bottleneck where you can pick them off without being sideswiped or backstabbed out of the blue. Played on Normal difficulty, the game is pretty tough. Single-player balancing throws up problems of its own. There are even a few keycard doors and some basic lever puzzles, but they're not too taxing.
Campaign maps too often become repetitive mazes, and with no map or radar you can spend fruitless minutes scampering around empty halls and corridors in search of the way forward. The game has also inherited some of the less favourable aspects of old-school FPS design.
Scenery snags and clipping are common, both for Sam and his foes, while any movement beyond the traditional horizontal axis tends to throw out glitches and hiccups. The Serious Engine is designed for maximum enemy population and high draw distance, but it still struggles with basic things. With the sliders all the way to the top, the game looks better than any previous Sam game, though it won't trouble the benchmark titles, for obvious reasons. For anyone tired of brown military shooters with heavy, realistic movements and strict weapon limits, it's incredibly refreshing. At its best, Serious Sam 3 is a worthy movement in that symphony, a nostalgic swoon of circle-strafing, weapon-switching, monster-gibbing fun. It not only plays the right notes, but plays them in the right order. That's why Serious Sam works where so many other throwback FPS games fail. Decapitated humanoids with bombs for hands run at you, screaming, in suicidal waves, while screeching harpies swoop from above.Įach has a distinct timbre in Croteam's composition, and the developer knows just which instrument to deploy, and when, in order to change the tempo, forcing the player to hastily adapt to each new threat in different ways. Cyclopean ape-things try to smush you into paste. Skeletal horse things shoot ball-and-chains at you. They're a bizarre bunch, drawn straight from the surreal arcade playbook. Key to this success is the bestiary of creatures ranged against Sam, our barrel-chested, gravel-voiced hero who saves the world from alien hordes clad only in t-shirt and jeans.
Serious sam 3 bfe youtu e series#
The Sam series is rightfully feted for its manic gameplay, a juggling act of impossible odds and cathartic excess that rises and falls in pitch at just the right times. It has to be orchestrated, paced and balanced so that while the player feels thrillingly overwhelmed, there's always a method behind the madness, a symphony of slaughter that keeps the game in constant motion.Ĭroteam, the small indie studio responsible for the Serious Sam games, understands how smart you need to be to play dumb. Throwing mayhem at the screen isn't enough. There's a natural tendency to assume that any game which favours action over depth is working at this level, but that underestimates just how smart game design has to be in order to successfully work as dumb fun.
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