It is Time to Get Serious

I never played Serious Sam when it came out, despite it looking like a fun game. At the time of release I was heavily invested in playing or modding Quake and Counter-Strike, and didn’t see the need for another FPS in my collection. Well, now every game of the series is in my collection, so I started with the third game…

Serious Sam 3: BFE starts slow, teaching you how to fight with your hands before it gives you a weapon. You will fight small waves of enemies as you make your way through the earlier levels. As you progress you are introduced to weapons one-by-one, starting with the sledgehammer.

The sledgehammer allows you to cave in the skulls of aliens that get too close. It’s slow but, if timed right, effective. Next you will find a pistol and be able to shoot your way past enemies who are now launching rockets at you. As the enemies get more challenging, you will find ever more powerful weapons to help you in your fight, ranging from shotguns and assault rifles, to rocket and grenade launchers.

This slow start helps to build the tension as the player learns the basics of the game. You know that you will get better weapons eventually, but this will come hand-in-hand with tougher fights and deadlier enemies.

Enemies include one-eyed brutes with huge hulking arms that they use to run faster, headless men with bombs strapped to their hands screaming as they run toward you, and the leaping skeletons of some alien animal.

Each enemy provides a unique challenge, requiring different strategies to defeat. Rockets can be dodged but are explosive, machine guns will always hit you, forcing you to use cover. Fast melee enemies force you to learn their movement patterns to dodge them. Beheaded Kamikazes can be forced to blow up other aliens.

When you start feeling confident in managing these varying strategies, the game throws its first major boss at you: a huge, red, scorpion-like creature armed with machine guns for hands. This creature towers over you as you dodge it’s attacks and throw shotgun pellets into its flesh. It becomes a battle of attrition, but eventually, it dies, and you progress to the next part of your mission.

After encountering more of them you realise that it isn’t a boss anymore. The game expects you to keep fighting these creatures in the many alien battalions it sends hurtling your way. Then you get to the next boss and you realise that this enemy was small compared to what’s coming. It creates both a sense of the Sam’s growing power, but also the growing threat of the enemies he faces.

The boss fights actually serve two different purposes: they provide a challenge at the end of a level, and they teach you how to fight a new enemy. By the end of the game what you thought was a tough challenge becomes commonplace, with many of these “bosses” throwing their arsenal of rockets, lasers, and bullets your way.

After this, the numbers in the horde get more numerous and multiple types of enemies are combined in waves, and you still have to adapt your strategies based on the enemy types. When hordes of clawed skeletons are rushing toward you it’s wiser to take them out before dealing with the rocket wielding mechanoids that tower over them. The rockets can be dodged, but if the skeletons huge numbers can easily overwhelm you.

The experience of the game was very nostalgic for me. I felt like I had picked up a more polished and technically capable version of Duke Nukem. The gun play and variety of weapons feels like something out of Half-Life, and the enemies feel like they could fit in with the aliens in Quake. I never expected Serious Sam 3 to pull me back into the kind of fast-paced, chaotic action that defined old-skool FPS games, but here I am, dodging rockets, smashing aliens with a sledgehammer, and running backwards a lot.

The story of the game is fairly simple, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. Sam needs to activate a super weapon so he can travel back in time and save humanity. To do this he will need to fight through hordes upon hordes of aliens which makes up 90% of the gameplay.

There are “puzzles” in the game, but they’re simple: find the keycard, go to new area, kill more bad guys. Which is fine, this isn’t a puzzle game, it’s a game about being a badass and shooting things until they die. Sam’s one-liners emphasise this, and they’re actually pretty funny, even if a little goofy.

From around the midpoint of the game you will start to get the games ethos: fight your way through huge swarms numbers of enemies. You will have to learn how to use your weapons effectively and sparingly to keep up. One of my favourite things to do was to lay a bunch of C-4 and setting it off when a wave got through.

With these huge waves, you often end up having to run backwards through the level so you don’t get overrun. I realise in hindsight that this gameplay is the inspiration behind I Hate Running Backwards. The enemies and bosses in that game are from the Serious Sam games, including the headless kamikaze bombs.

Just when you think you’ve mastered the game’s chaos, it hits you with a curveball. You think you’ve escaped and the game is nearly over, but you are attacked again. You end up stranded after crashing in the desert, and lose all of your weapons.

You will get the weapons back fairly quickly, but it creates an opportunity for you to use the less powerful weapons again. Since this part of the game isn’t a tutorial, it is able to challenge you once again, testing how well you can survive enemy waves with just your wits and a sledgehammer.

As the game nears its end it starts throwing everything it has after you. Hundreds of enemies will teleport in left and right, including several of the huge enemies armed with rockets and laser guns. You can feel the end coming as you meticulously work your way through enemies, relying on rockets, C-4, giant cannon balls, and running backwards.

Unfortunately this part of the game starts to get repetitive. You can refill your rockets at one of the many infinite rocket crates around the level, so ammo is no longer a problem. This removes any worry about what weapons to use, a key component of the gameplay, as you can just spam rockets to your heart’s content.

The game keeps throwing the same composition of waves one after another, turning the fight into a grind rather than a challenge. They could either have had more variety in the enemies, or just cut down the number of waves, and it may have been the better for it. As it stands, the tension is lost for a while as the difficulty drops.

Finally you meet the end boss of the game, fighting the sandworm that’s been stalking you as you move through the desert. The boss is actually a fun fight when you know how to do it. Unfortunately it’s very tricky to figure out how to actually kill the boss.

At first, it seems like no matter how much damage you deal, the boss just shrugs it off, quickly regenerating its health. I died 30-40 times trying to figure out how to damage it fast enough. The problem here is that the game hasn’t given you any clues as to what you are supposed to do.

Once you do figure it out, usually by looking it up online, it is genuinely fun. But it introduces two entirely new mechanics during the final fight: a jet pack, and throwing metal bars as if they were spears. With no prior hint of their existence, this turns what should be an epic conclusion into a frustrating death cycle. Had the game woven these mechanics into earlier encounters, the fight would have felt like a true test of mastery rather than an unfair puzzle.

Perhaps Sam could use the rocket pack to escape before losing his weapons. Perhaps the first Khnum¹ could be encountered before Sam gets explosive weapons forcing him to use spears that are scattered around to kill it. That way, when the player encounters these items during the final boss, they would have a better idea how to go about killing the boss.

Serious Sam 3 is a flawed game, but it captures the heart-pounding, explosive fun of classic FPS games. I went in expecting a decent shooter and came out remembering why I fell in love with this genre in the first place. If you grew up blasting demons in DOOM, laughing at Duke Nukem’s one-liners, or outgunning aliens in Quake, then you’ll feel right at home.