Let's start with an old cliché: you get what you pay for. In the case of Serious Sam (SS), however, I'm not sure the cliché holds. SS is an amazing first effort from Croteam, and given that it sells for $19.99 (US)—and that's the most you'll pay for it, by the way—it doesn't have to deliver much to be worth the money. It hearkens back to the days of the original DOOM, except that SS has a far more advanced engine, a lot more variety and generally a lot more gameplay. It's a pure adrenaline rush from start to finish, and it packs plenty of jokes to be enjoyed along the way.
The aptly-named "Serious Engine" does a serious job. Seriously. Ok, I guess nobody can resist those kinds of stupid references, can they? The locales are positively beautiful at times, demonstrating capabilities unseen even in Quake III Arena (Q3A) or Unreal Tournament (UT), such as the lovely effect of reflections from a watery surface in various places. The enemy models are nicely done, and amazingly so given the utterly incredible number of them that may be on screen at the same time. The by-now-overdone lens flare effect looking toward the sun is wonderful, the architecture is on a truly grand scale, and overall almost everything looks great.
Two additional things really bear mentioning about the visuals in SS. First, its style is very refreshing. After getting tired of squinting in Q3A, UT and other such games that give one a positively claustrophobic feel, SS is wonderfully refreshing in its use of outdoor areas, bright and beautiful textures and so forth. Second, this game brings some serious bosses to the screen. Toward the end of the game especially one can expect to face enemies literally hundreds of feet tall. The sheer magnitude of the playing field and some of the enemies and their animations is visually shocking. It sure makes the Q3A and UT engines look pretty underpowered by comparison.
The one complaint I have with the SS visuals is that the player models look terrible and move worse. Whenever a cut scene invokes a third person view, the player model and animation is simply awful. Sam looks like he has a chronic and possibly terminal case of hemorrhoids in light of the way he walks. Every time I see him, I simply cannot help wincing as he "skates" across various surfaces. I've read that human motion is the most difficult thing any animator can attempt to simulate, and maybe that's the kind of thing that still separates the little guys from the big shops like Id Software or Epic Games.
The audio is just plain fun. The music is engaging and very appropriate to the material at hand, especially the harder-rocking pieces that play while facing bosses. The sound effects are all quite nicely done, and I particularly liked some of the weapon sounds. The cannon and the double-barreled shotgun are both prime examples of thoroughly satisfying weapons from an aural perspective. The positional audio features didn't seem to add much to the game, so perhaps they weren't that well implemented. On the other hand, though, I was frequently facing so many enemies that it was hard to tell for sure. I know this much: the yell of those headless bombers never ceased to make me look around frantically while whipping out the machine gun.
The interface stays as true to the game mechanics as one could hope. That is, it's simple. Weapon selection, invoking the NETRICSA interface for more information, movement, firing and so forth are all easily accommodated via the keyboard. A particularly thoughtful touch was the inclusion of the ability to define and manage multiple configurations so that more than one player could be easily accommodated. Somebody at Croteam was really thinking when they coded the key-binding features.
It also bears mentioning that SS is one of the only games to feature such a high level of detail in its video options. It's true that virtually all such parameters can be set in Q3A, for example, by using the console, or in UT by invoking the advanced preferences window. But in SS almost every desired visual tweak is available through the standard GUI. That's a nice touch, and it's something I would like to see repeated in other first-person shooter (FPS) games.
The game mechanics are all exactly what one expects. Running, jumping, shooting, etc. all come easily to even the most inexperienced FPS player. A feature I particularly like about SS is the addition of the NETRICSA computer as it provides a wealth of helpful advice about the various weapons, enemies and so forth in the game.
Better yet, the player is never left wondering whether he should throw the switch or look around for something else to do. The gameplay is quite linear, of course, but a convoluted A to B1 or B2 or B3 to C1 or C2 or D1 or D2, etc. story is not the point of the game; rather, it's the adrenaline-soaked moments between the points that really matter. Having NETRICSA around to tell me precisely what my next objective is means that I can kick back and focus on having fun.
Story? We don't need no stinkin' story! Seriously, that's what the developers seem to be saying with SS, and it's just fine by me. I know lots of reviewers get all bent out of shape when a game doesn't have a deep, intricate, preferably nonlinear back story with which to suck the player into whole new worlds of imagination. SS doesn't even try. There's this bad guy, see? And he's sent lots of bad guys to do bad stuff, see? Oh, and you're gonna get lots of cool weapons and blow them all away in massively frantic firefights, see? If one paragraph was good enough for DOOM, it's good enough for SS too.
The content in SS is really quite impressive for its price. The game features a number of puzzles, a healthy bestiary of monsters, a wide selection of weapons, a number of wonderfully-executed environments and so forth. The Egyptian theme gets a little overworked by the time the game is over, but it's done so well overall that I really can't fault the developer.
Better yet, the game is well paced. For a game that throws huge numbers of enemies into the fray, the areas and foes are obviously designed with a great deal of care. The progression—save for one glaring omission which I'll mention in a moment—seems so gradual that it's only after the fact one realizes that literally hundreds of monsters just got wasted compared to the few dozen that might have popped up much earlier in the game.
The one glaring pacing problem is in an area whose name I don't even know. Anyone who has played the game will recognize this, however, as it was the most frustrating experience in my video gaming career to date. Now I should admit from the outset that the enemy in the game I liked the least was the kleer skeleton. There's just something about that clippity-clop sound of galloping hooves that annoys me to begin with. The fact that these nasty things usually show up in dozens only makes it worse. The very worst spot in the game involves what seems like thousands of kleer skeletons pouring into a relatively narrow pathway that winds around for a while.
At that one spot, I was literally going nuts. I used rockets, I used grenades, I ran out of ammo with the machine gun, laser rifle and pretty much everything else and still they kept coming. Eventually, I got proficient enough with lobbing grenades and rockets that I was able to destroy enough of the horde as they were initially coming around the corner that I could whip out the rapid fire weapons and survive while running backward and dodging about like a mad fiend. Still, it was a close thing, and I'll bet it took me a good thirty attempts to survive it. Compared to that, the entire rest of the game was a piece of cake. If I never see another kleer skeleton, it will be too soon.
The multi-player modes of SS are particularly fun, most notably the wonderful cooperative play mode. Deathmatch is fun, but the only thing that really sets it apart from Q3A, UT, or a wealth of other such games, is the selection of weapons. The one significant addition to standard deathmatch fare is the alternate method of scoring. I rather liked that as it essentially punishes spawn fragging and gives everybody an incentive to gang up on really good players. In short, it kind of helps level the deathmatch playing field and that's a pretty neat thing.
Cooperative mode bears special mention because it is absolutely fabulous. Because of the simplicity of the game, it is a blast to get a bunch of guys running through it together, wasting everything that moves. Since dying is punished only by a loss of some ammunition and a little bit of progress, and since the player spawns automatically with a good complement of equipment, it makes it very easy to forget about all the little stuff and just have fun blasting away with your friends. I've made it through the entire game that way within an hour or two, and it's some of the most intense gaming action to be had anywhere.
There are only two disappointing facets to the multi-player aspect of SS. First, there are just too few servers. I'm really quite surprised given the game's price point that more people haven't flocked to it. SS is a blast, and the game's longevity would be helped greatly if only there were a few hundred more servers. As it is, I have a pretty hard time finding a good server on which to play.
The second disappointing aspect only compounds that problem, I'm afraid, insofar as the networking code in SS isn't the greatest. The big game development shops could probably learn a few things about graphics engines from the boys at Croteam, but the latter have much more to learn about net code from the former. The network code in SS reminds me of playing DOOM ][: Hell on Earth over a bad modem connection. That's not good considering that I'm trying to play SS over a fast Internet connection. I guess that twenty-dollar price has to rear its head somewhere, and the network code is pretty cheap.
Overall, SS is an excellent value if you like FPS games. It's not a particularly deep game, and the replay value is only moderate given the problems mentioned with the multi-player aspect. Still, it's an incredibly good first effort from the developer, and I would suggest buying it if for no reason other than that it will help provide more competition in the gaming industry, which can only be good for us consumers. Besides, SS is a blast to play, and you'll be missing out on the most adrenaline-soaked gaming sessions in the contemporary gaming scene if you pass it up.
04/11/2001