Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter

sam serious stone, croatian duke nukem, a beloved part of my childhood

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If you like me played the Serious Sam games "in the wrong order" and came to try SS1 for the first time only now, then do know this remaster is a decent purchase. You already know how to play it, because the base set of weapons in the subsequent titles is identical. Most enemies are the same with a few exceptions. The map design is Egypt, Egypt, and Egypt, but it actually works well, because SS is obviously about the iconic massive chaotic open space battles. Egypt has lots of open space, or so I've been told. I wish perhaps that there were even more simultaneous enemies in some parts, but one needs to keep in the mind the original limits. IMO SS4|SM > SS2 = SS1 > SS3. People claiming SS1 is so much better than SS4 is frankly obvious nostalgia bias.

Serious Sam HD rocks! Run backwards, shoot everything that moves, try not to die. Same awesome chaos, now with prettier graphics!

Fucking chaos

Too repetitive. Levels too samey. Too many enemies lurking around corners, or straight up spawning behind you when you take a singular step. 25% of the pickups are harmful, spawning more enemies than they return health to you. There are "secret traps" that do the same. Found myself hugging corners and quick saving after every encounter, because I really don't want to memorize enemy spawns. I felt like it was better to purposefully avoid health and ammo pickups unless absolutely necessary. I also stopped bothering to look for secrets because of how many are designed to gib you unknowingly. These might make for a "funny haha streamer mad" moment, but I found myself just sighing instead. Overall the design discouraged me from wanting to explore the game, and that's no good. Told myself I would beat it, but got bored around level 10. I just can't bring myself to quick save my way through 700 enemies worth of encounters / map (I think the last map I did was 688 enemies). Got an ext...

A great time

This game had potential, but it was wasted due to poor decisions by the developers. The game is very punishing, having a lot of traps. Often you are better off ignoring areas and item pickups to avoid spawning more enemies, in a game that already has far too many enemies. It's one thing to have a lot of combat scenarios if they are varied, and the gameplay has enough variety to stay interesting. That is not the case here. The worst offender are the Kleer packs. The game spams you with multiple groups of Kleer in every single level. They are ok as an enemy, but they are so overused that it becomes tedious and annoying every time they show up. Most levels are corridors and arenas where all you do is kill an absurd amount of enemies again and again. There is no reward and most times you are forced to fight every enemy before progressing. The gameplay loop feels like a Beat 'Em Up with guns. Go through mostly linear maps until the game stops and throws a bunch of enemies. Then you have to ...