REVIEW : Serious Sam Collection (XBOX Series X)
Sensitivity is probably not high on the list of skills required to save the Earth from an invasion of time-hopping alien monstrosities; all that’s required is the ability to shoot monsters in the face and hurl vulgarities at their remains. Which is lucky, as Sam “Serious” Stone is nearly as sensitive as a drunk 80’s comic at a Weight Watchers meeting.
The biggest, the difference is that while the Duke hasn’t seen the inside of a decent game since Duke Nukem 3D, Sam has consistently provided fun, if not amazing, blasters. That’s a good way, to sum up, the entire four-game Serious Sam Collection: consistently fun, but not all that great.
The set begins with Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, originally released to high acclaim in 2001. An old school blaster that features a bare-bones story about travelling through time to stop arch-villain Mental from taking over the Earth, TFE features everything you’d anticipate from the genre at the time of its launch: over-the-top violence, circle-strafing, a health-counter, bottomless pockets, armour pick-ups and a paper-thin, almost arbitrary tale.
The Second Encounter highlights a fairly decent, if dated, multiplayer, but it’s simply really fun if you’re into the sort of simple, run-and-gun points-scoring schtick that used to account for a multiplayer.
That said, the remastered versions of Serious Sam 1 and 2 are particularly cathartic. Enemies come at you in such swathes that it’s difficult not to laugh as you blast and blast and blast away at their evil mutant faces, and there’s such an array of weaponry that you’ve always got a tool for the job at hand. It’s brash and stupid and wilfully wicked, and originating from another era isn’t a justification, but Sam, like Duke, is a relic of a time when his label of crude humour and borderline-stupid shooting was fully expected, if not fully accepted.
Serious Sam 3: BFE was an effort to bring Sam up to date, with developers Croteam reviving the Serious Engine, filling battlegrounds with debris and small details and adding a slew of melee attacks to Sam’s repertoire.
The biggest leap ahead here is an elegant one, clearly, and it’s shocking how much difference half-decent lighting and textures can make. Opponents have been redesigned, too, and are no longer basically-animated sprites but fully realised abominations that put the willies up you when they rush towards you. The gameplay remains almost indistinguishable, but more detailed environments add a little more clout to the continuous shooting. There are a lot more game modes on offer in BFE, including an enhanced Survival mode, classic, coin-op and standard multiplayer.
There are cutscenes to flesh out the story, the first of which appears fairly ludicrous as Sam sits in a chopper full of kitted-out marines in his customary white T-shirt and man-shades.
Sadly, it suffers similar issues to Duke Nukem Forever. It’s not the boiling pile of broken arse that Gearbox’s game was, but it’s still sinful of presenting old school mechanics in new outfits and, sadly, in an FPS old school really means archaic corridor-based shooting gallery. Serious Sam 3 may be fun in small doses, but it becomes tedious quickly, even despite its repeated use of overly masculine one-liners and an impressive line-up of enemies.
The final game in the collection is a complete departure from the norm that oddly manages to capture the Serious Sam “spirit” better than BFE does. Serious Sam DD XXL is a side-scrolling blaster built for solo or co-op play and recognises Sam tackling the same opponents in the same way, only in 2.5D.
The enemy types you’ve come to know and expect are present, Sam’s impossibly deep and gravelled voice is as you remember it, and the action is just as thick and hyperactive as it should be. The Serious Sam games, like Doom before them, have always been big on secret areas, and exploring in DD XXL will reward you, too.
The look, feel and sound is vintage Sam, combining bright, comic book colours with blaring rock music and smart-mouth back-chat, but it can become just as dull as first-person Sam pretty quickly. Also, while you’re given the buttons to fire from a fixed position or jump to avoid opponents, there are often too many on-screen to contend with and it’s easy to become overwhelmed. It lacks the instant save functionality of the other three games and, although checkpoints are abundant, repeated death is always disturbing.
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