
The faster moving enemies will manage to keep up with Sam, but the slower moving (and more dangerous enemies) won’t be able to catch up. Another important strategy is to retreat backwards toward the direction you came. Enemies don’t really track Sam all that well, which means as long as you don’t stay in the same spot (or better yet, move in serpentine patterns) you can slip through their incoming projectiles. While it’s easy to see how such a game could quickly become an overwhelming experience, these games tend to be balanced well enough that, for the most part, they don’t descend into relentless frustration.
#Serious sam 3 final boss series
The sheer number of enemies Sam can face at any instant is what really sets the Serious Sam series a part from other action games. At a given moment, dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds upon hundreds, can flood out of the woodwork to descend upon Sam. While Serious Sam games tend to have a few levels like this, most of the game instead opts for wider open spaces that serve as huge arenas for extensive hordes of enemies to besiege the player all at once. Within that game, players explore labyrinthine corridors and structures, with most of the action being close quarters. Classic Doom is essentially a maze game, born out of first-person dungeon crawlers. What really differentiates Serious Sam is scale and scope. But while the start of the game did sort of harken back to Doom, Serious Sam eventually develops its own identity, one that couldn’t have existed on the technology that existed at the time of Doom. Serious Sam was deeply retrograde in this respect.

With the advent of games likes Half-Life and Unreal, action games had started to focus more on story and atmosphere than on pure action. That and that the game was just really good looking for its time. When Serious Sam: The First Encounter was released, I feel like the word was that it was a game that set out to recapture the pure no-frills adrenaline of games like Doom and Rise of the Triad. They set out to be the most intense die-hard action games out there, and they don’t pretend to be anything otherwise. These games are deeply true to themselves. I feel like right away, I’ve stumbled into some sort of joke that’s meant to imply that I really shouldn’t think too hard about the events to follow.Īnd of course, story is really only set dressing in Serious Sam. Everyone is wearing tactical gear and camo, prepared for the mission ahead of them….except for Sam, who inexplicably wears a t-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses with colored lenses (true to his wardrobe in the original game). We then cut away to Sam Stone helicoptering into Egypt with his squad mates on a mission to find a secret weapon that can stop the invaders. There is a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game that lays out Mental’s assault on the Earth, but this quick introduction only raises more questions than it answers.

Obviously, you might expect, like I did, that a prequel would fill in some of the elusive backstory. Serious Sam 3 is a prequel to the first game of the series, Serious Sam: The First Encounter. The invaders are led by an entity called Mental, but what/who he/she actually is and his/her motivations are utterly beyond my comprehension. Like I don’t know who these alien hordes are, and why they’re so dead set on coming to Earth and wrecking up the place.


They are obviously about an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth and have something to do with time travelling aliens messing around in Ancient Egypt, but other than that, the details of the plot completely elude me. I’ve never beat the game, so I decided it was time to rectify that.ĭespite the fact that I consider myself a major Serious Sam fan, I honestly couldn’t tell you what the story is to any of these games. I really need a game that just serves as a distraction right now, one that just lets me zone out and relax, and I’ve always found the Serious Sam games to be fairly good at that. But it was somewhat fortuitous that SS4 got me thinking about the game again. After everything had settled down, it sort of fell by the wayside, as I was ready to move on to other games. I picked up Serious Sam 3 fairly close to when it came out, but I only got a few hours in before life events distracted me. The recent reveal of Serious Sam 4 got me thinking about its predecessor.
