Croteam took a break from the Serious Sam franchise for almost 10 years after SS2. Finally in 2011 they released Serious Sam 3. This is yet another tone shift away from 2, gone are the ulra comic book style and clown humor and now its instead more back to the franchise roots like the first games tone and vibe. Even Croteam said Serious Sam 2 wasn't canon and how the serious is supposed to be, so thats why we're back to 'normal' on SS3.
The game is called BFE 'Before First Encounter' because its a prequel of the first game.
The game starts off promising enough, the cutscenes here are more 'serious', as in like the other games of the time, they are kind of trying to do the more military shooter thing. You have cutscenes using military jargon like alpha bravo niner niner, LZ, extraction points, all the typical Call of Duty stuff. So it's like they were trying to fit in with that general trend at the time. Which fine, I don't fault them for it. It just seems like every interation of Serious Sam is trying to 'fit in' with the cool trend of the era, 1 was more Doom inspired, 2 was inspired by Halo in various ways, and 3 is now inspired by Call of Duty.
The dialogue here and cutscenes are pretty decent and down to earth, you have Sam being a more down to earth gruff badass character, more than ever before, hes got cool Sunglasses now , and isn't as over the top as in the second game. They fixed cutscenes in co-op so you get to experience them all without hassle, none of them are too long, Sam cracks some smirk-worthy jokes here and there, overall they're well done and don't detract from the game unlike the overabundance of them in SS2.
They have of course drastically updated the Serious Engine again. Serious Sam 2 used the Serious Engine 2, now, 10 years later, SS3 is using Serious Engine 3.5. The technological advances are very obvious. First of all, the multiplayer component is much more polished. There are multiple different modes you can select for co-op exeprience, a Standard mode where it just forces you have 3 lives each, and every so many points you can get more lives. Unlike SS2, you don't get lives every 10k points, you get them in different stages. So for example one life at 50k, another 100k, another 500k, another 1mil etc. In this regard, its a much more challenging game than SS2 because you get less lives overall. If all lives are gone, you restart the map from scratch. We initially played on Hard difficulty, but once we realized how scarce the lives were, we bumped it back down to Normal which seemed just about perfect, still challenging and we couldnt get too lazy, but not brutally punishing. We never failed any map except the very last one, which I'll address later, but we were constantly on edge and cooperativng hard to ensure success.
Besides that standard mode, you also have 'Coin-op' which seems like some kind of system where you both share lives, and also have to beat the entire game in one session? Not too sure. Theres also another mode where you can fully customize all the co-op settings, like previous games. I like that theres a separate "Standard" mode which has every forcibly locked in and you cant modify it, so its like the intended developer experience. So polishing up the multiplayer components here is a big boon, also they totally fixed the net code and it runs really smoothly, unlike previous games.
So the game starts off much different than other Serious games. The game has a very obviously more gritty tone than others. You start off in some abandoned apratment complex, with no weapons. The first weapon you find - A sledgehammer. So the game has melee now. I'm not gonna shit talk too much about the melee here because you dont have to use it, but the camera bobbing when swinging this thing is intense and takes a bit to get use to. The melee hit detection isnt all that great and not very satisfying to use, but thankfully you soon get a pistol.
But you see a worrying sign here. Even in the first level, the level design is just confusing and hard to navigate. It's like a maze of concrete walls and buildings that look the same, and to even progress through the first level I had to walk in circles for 10 minutes before I found the pistol. At this point the game is playing more like Call of Duty than some intense horde shooting Sam game ,but soon enough you run over a hill and the classic Kamikazee enemies show up and it's usual buisness. It's weird they choose to start the game off in this way, so slow and hard to navigate. The first level is sort of a doozy, but hopefully, I thought, it was just a slow start?
Sadly, the game kinda does start off slow just in the way it introduces weapons. Its like the first level you just have melee+pistol, the second level shows you the shotgun, but the shotgun only, the third level shows you the assault rifle, etc, and you just use it the whole time. But by this point, you're almost 2/3 hours into the game, in that same time in other Sam games, you had all sorts of weapons to switch around from, but in this game it introduces everything so slowly so it feels like the pacing is a bit of a slow burn.
The second level takes place inside this dark underground maze, and it starts to look like youre playing a psychological horror game or something, complete with jumpscares and all. But it loses its wow factor soon when yet again, you get into this annoying level design of running in circles in a maze not knowing where to go.
A lot of the level design is like this unfortunately, it repeats that underground dark maze thing a few times throughout the game. Other levels are more standard fare Serious Sam gameplay, long stretches of linear outdoor lanes, like bowling alleys, open arena type places where you need to find 4 keys randomly placed around to progress, stuff like that. Overall the level design is really hit and miss. The game is extremely 'brown n bloom' , like this might be the most Yellow looking Sam game yet. Everything is just a yellow hunk of dusk and samey looking buildings, but its not that bad usually. When you know where to go, and the game has a steady momentum, its pretty damn fun.
When it has momentum going, its fun because the graphics and general engine, gameplay, controls etc are all very polished and in particular the game has a really satisfying gore system now, blood smears all over the place, your gun can get covered in blood, the enemies can get gibbed and blow apart chunks all over the place. The classic roster from the first games is back in full swing here, no more random dozens upon dozens of new enemies like SS2, you have all the classic enemies the Kleers, Kamikazee guys, One eyed mutants, Harpys, Scorpian things with chainguns etc, they're all here and consistently and strategically used. They look better than ever, the model quality here , animations and enemy designs are just top notch. The best in the series so far. The enemies here are really threatening and have very specific mechanics just like the first game, but nothing like SS2. The kleers in this game are no joke, they are super fast and if you accidentally let a few of them bunch up on you , it could be over in seconds. The headless Kamikazee guys were a slouch in SS2, cause they were so slow and lacked initmidation, but here they run super fast, explode in chains, and can fuck you up in a moments notice. The way the enemies look and play in this game is probably the best thing about it. Unfortunately I will note that at times their pathfinding can be total shit and they'll just stop following the player and instead run into a wall endlessly and just wait there until you come find them. This sucks especially with the Kamikazee guys because you can turn a corner and find 10 of them just running into a wall with bad patfinding code and blow up in your face. Maybe it was some weird network problem , or maybe they just gimped the pathfinding.
The guns are very modernized and updated too, you have more tactical shooter style guns, similar to other contemporaries. For example instead of a revolver, now you have a Desert Eagle that you can aim down sights, you have a pump action shotgun , and also the classic Double barrel , which seems to even use the same animatiom fron the original games. They work well enough, but still I keep thinking the double barrel leaves something to be desired. For example it cant even one shot most enemies point blank, so its like whats the fuckin point? not sure why they keep making the shotguns so weak in these games. What's kinda crazy is for the assault rifle you now get something that looks straight out of Call of Duty , its a M4 with a Holo sight and you can aim down the sights. Also, you can SPRINT in this game. Yeah. A Serious Sam game where you can Sprint, and Aim down sights. Crazy, isn't it? It actually kinda works believe it or not, but of course it mostly feels like they were just trying to modernize and keep up with contempoaries. The rocket launcher now is really satisfying to use, it has a great animation showing it loading the next rocket. and the physics of it travellingg through the air are really fun. It gibs enemies and turns them into ezxploding mist of gore and blood, great stuff. Theres a few new enemies here, most notably the weird flying witch thing that grabs you and floats you and freezes you into place, that one is really annoying because she keeps becoming invincibile and teleporting around, just generally tedious to fight. Theres a big minotaur guy, hes really cool and impressive visually with fun mechanics like throwing super fast fireballs at you that you have to dodge. Hellish looking creatures, and even one creature that looks and behaves exactly like the Mancubus from Doom which I found pretty funny and blatant ripoff, but fun to fight and scary to look at. Another new enemy is the monkey but these guys are just fucking annoying they keep hopping all over the place and barely fight you just a tedious enemy to deal with. Overall the enemies and weapons are great and some of the best they've ever been.
It's got another feature from modern games where you can run up to any enemy and press E to do an instant animation to kill them. Either by ripping off their head / heart etc. Its not always good to do this, cause you can still take damage. It's kinda weird seeing this feature in a Sam game, but I didnt mind too much. I kinda only did it a few times to see the various animations but overall its only a sidenote for the games gameplay.
The game has 12 levels and,
The first 8 levels or so of the game go by really fast, just a couple hours, and more or less it was a good time, some annoying places where you have to go around looking for 4 keys, and they seem to always be hidden inside some big storage contrainer, not somewhere that looks super important or obvious, so you can spend 10 mins walking around an empty map looking for them. Those levels were relativiely short, like 10-30 mins each. But the last few levels all of a sudden start having insane lengths of like 1 hour - 1 hour 30 each, and start to kinda feel like a slog to get through. Why do they always do this, and make the last few levels so much longer? By the time we had thought the game was almost over, it turned out there was another half dozen hours. More of the same stuff, bug yellow open enviornments, you know typical sam gameplay. Theres some boss fights which were mostly good, giant spaceship you have to shoot a certain place, pretty intense, the giant minotaur guy and the floating witch thing were once bosses but then turned into regular enemies.
It sounds like I'm mostly saying a lot of good things about the game, its just weird because the actual gameplay/engine/enemies/weapons etc are all awesome, its just let down by some super hit and miss level design. Some levels will be pretty fun, but then others will just drag on way too long or have really tedious annoying empty arens where you walk back and forth trying to find that one key or door you missed.
They redo these underground dark temple ideas a few times and they just suck. I love the idea that they were trying to do a more horror twist, but the level design down here is just annoying. Its a maze of shit that all looks the same and sometimes you have to find switches on the wall to progress but it just isnt obvious at all and is a total chore to get through. The last few levels in particular were really starting to drag the game down where once we thought the game was really good, now we're starting to think its just a chore and becoming tedious.
Then we got to the last level and it was kinda the final nail in the coffin for enjoyment. The last level is a hour and a half gigantic slog of huge linear corridors of every enemy possible where they give you boxes of infinite C4 then Rockets etc and you have to just stand there and tediously blow up waves of enemies for dozens of minutes at a time. its not even hard or challenging it just takes fucking forever and is annoying. By the time you finally get to the last boss arena, guess what? You get instantly annihilated and wiped out in 60 seconds, lose all your lives, and have to do it all over again to even get chance to get back there and figure out WTF to do.
That's because the last boss is designed like shit and makes no sense. The last boss is this giant scorpian monster thingy and to kill it you need to FIND the jetpack, LEARN the jetpack mechanics, FIND these glowing poles, WAIT for boss to go do some animation fighting a worm, and then know to go up to the bosses back and put the poles in his back. What the fuck? It would make sense if they gave you the jetpack 10 mins before the boss, you know, to allow you to learn the mechanics and understand it - but no, they give you the jetpack AT the boss arena, in between spawns of hundreds of fucking enemies, the jetpack can run out of energy so you have to learn to read the meter on the left of the screen all the while trying to figure out wtf to do without failing and having to waste another hour getting back to the spot. Total shit! Of course we had to look up how to do it online because FUCK getting back there and failing again.
Side note: The game has Steam achievements, a first of the franchise, and it was fun to try to get some of them, theres even a main menu button for achievements to view them and theyre all quirky fun little things like kill 20 kleers with sledgehammer / kill 5 guys at same time with certain gun / quicktime kill certain enemies x amount of times etc.
So yeah terrible last level/boss, the game has some of the best weapons/enemy roster of the series but its let down by frequent hit and miss level design and some tedious objectives, as well as every level kinda looking the same yellow mess. It's like the first few levels suck and are off to a slow start, the middle levels are pretty fun, and then the last few levels suck and are just boring and too long. Wtf?
6/10
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