There's a new Serious Sam game out. Serious Sam 4, and reviews have not been kind to it. So what do I do? Why, I go play the original one of course. No, not the HD remaster. The Classic Serious Sam 1. The one without widescreen and all the modern updates.

Yeah, Baby!

Let's get serious. There's a lot of rose-tinted glasses on this game. Certainly a showcase of techniques and how to use them as more than a tech demo. But as a game, it is... Passable? It certainly is a 2001 title, full of the tailing 90s edge and experimentation. It has its fun moments, though does overstay its welcome. By the half way point I was done and just wanted it over. Not that it is bad, it just feels uninspired by today's standards looking back. Certainly not in the same class of its peers.

Take the enemy roster. A mash of inconsistent ideas and honestly poor designs, retextured menaces and variants that are an early beast with the limbs removed. It is from 2001, though I do feel that earlier titles did it better. Personally, I just don't find them interesting.

Two decades ago I was more impressed with the giant Egyptian maps more than anything else. These still have a 'wow' scope to them, making you the player, feel dwarfed. (Mostly... It can get a bit cramped at times.)

AHH! The loadout! get a pistol with unlimited ammo. Due to magic or some bullshit. On the first map, not far from your starting position, you upgrade to dual-wielding another pistol. They don't sync to the firing command. Holding down for continual fire or tapping to fire does not always trigger (heh) a responsive animation. Sound blasts as bullets fire, enimes are hurt, but the guns are mostly static images.

Anyway, the pistol is crap, getting only used in the very rare case where you can sit behind a pillar and popshot off a larger scorpion. Anyway, soon you get a shotgun! Twitter idiots may call it a weapon for cowards, but this is a good boomstick. BLAM! Shoot the enemy alien scum! And what is better than one shotgun? TWO SHOTG--- Uh, what... Sorry, wrong game. You get a double barrelled shotty. Packing extra and killing those damn skellingtons in point blank range when you rush up and blast away rather than walking backwards and strafing yet again.

The game then continues for what feels like several maps without anything interesting happeing.

Then it gives you the Rocket Launcher. Grenade launcher. Assault Rifle. Minigun. Laser Rifle. And gimmick weapon. All rather quickly. It feels like you get them seconds apart.

There's no build-up. No great reveal. They're just there, and a few of these I just ran over the top of them without realising I was collecting something cool. Yeah, they are cool weapons. They're just... Boring too. A neat 'clear a swarm of tiny monsters' may happen after getting one and then you are back in the large arenas. Holding down left click when something moves in front of you. And all these cool devices just feel samey and mundane, even the grenade launcher with the power up mechanic just feels like yet another gun!

But the Knife! Oh, what a wonderful Knife! Learn to use this shiny stabby friend and you can get some fun out of rushing and positioning yourself vs the monsters and killing them with one or two hits. All but the bosses and gigantic sized critters fall to this blade!

The game is also odd on how it delivers level content. In most cases you have these wide open areas. Huge Arena levels. That's where the main action events of the game. You can even run for a few minutes to desert map edges, and occasionally find a few pickups.

Is it worth it? NO! Every damn pickup is a trap! Eventually you learn to spot the enemy trigger ones. Holding off on that 1pt of Armour Upgrade floating on the stone as you know it will spawn a bunch of things to sink all the ammo you just grabbed into. An utter slog awaits.

There's a number of cases where you can kite and aggro enough to draw a few away from the main crowd. But by the end of the game I had to cave and turn on GOD MODE. The insane number of mobs running around was just too much for this 38 year old's response time. Doom, Quake, Unreal... Those games I can still go back and play. This just feels overwhealming. Either give me lower enemy amounts or BIGGER GUNS!

And then the game decides you need... Tight corridors. A feeling of early Quake 1 levels and the desire to bunny-hop all around them. Then a baddie spawns right in front of your face. Not in an "AHHHH! YOU BASTARD!" jump-scare way, more of an "AHHHH! YOU BASTARD!" poor game design way. There's no smarts to where they pop in and had me worried I would be tele-fragged.

Oh, and then you have the puzzles! Suddenly you can make use of a 'USE' key... It pushes a button. The button opens a gate. The button also spawns in pain. Sometime right beside you! Better have that reload ready if you did not jump back as soon as you hut the use key!

Point is... Enemies need to spawn in better. They're a nuisance and there's just not enough variety to make them fun. Unless you have the Knife!

Basically, this game killed 5 hours or so of my weekend where I would of been on the couch eating crisps while watching Netflix. At least I can now tick off that I have finished 'Serious Sam:- The First Encounter - Classic Edition' now.

Worth a look to see the cool tech it was using at the time, and play to some rocking music. But there was far more fun games of that era you are better off playing.

Game Acquisition: GOG (On Sale)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 26 September 2020
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 5), Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating system
Processor: AMD K6-3 400MHz, Pentium II or Celeron-A 300MHz
Memory: 64 MB
Graphics: full OpenGL compliant 3D accelerator
Hard drive: 600MB free hard disk space
Sound: 100% Windows compatible sound card