Serious Sam: The First Encounter Review

Well, I kind of dropped the ball since my last post in November. Oops. I admit I was working hard at school rather than typing up reviews that no one will read. Sue me.

However, the good news is that this is the start of my spring break so I will have a bit of time on my hands. That means more reviews on games that will most certainly be shit. Everyone knows it's more fun to review terrible games rather than actually good ones.

So it just happens on the worst holiday of the year that I came across a game so awful I had to write a review. I just had to. People, I present Serious Sam: The First Encounter!

This is 90% of the game.

So the premise of this game is... Hard to explain but I will try. Just give me a second to condense everything into a single sentence.... Okay I got it.

Serious Sam is basically an Egyptian-themed FPS where you redundantly mow down hordes of the same enemies (mostly those jumping skeleton bastards) with underpowered weapons that feel like shit. In other words Crimsonland in first person but BAD.

Words cannot really describe how bored I was for the time I played it. For the amount of time I put in nothing seemed to grab me. Perhaps it was the awful polycount of the meshes. Perhaps it was the bore of killing the same enemies over and over again but in slightly different shaped arenas. I can't really explain it. The best way I could lay it out is in a comparison.

Lets say the 2007 title Oblivion was great because it combined many different aspects that were done extremely well. These aspects amounted to something greater than the sum of their parts. TFE seems to do that but in a way that makes everything boring. There is no plot so there's no incentive to find out what happens next. You know you're just going to be killing the same enemies with shit weapons if you continue so it's not even fun. TFE manages to be both boring and unrewarding. Let me draw you a chart.

You can thank the artiste directly.

So, to sum it up this game is utter shit. Please get Painkiller instead. It's pretty much this but GOOD. On a side note, thank you GOG for a lack of DRM.