Serious Sam: The First Encounter

 


The Serious Sam franchise has a long history sprawling all the way back to 2001 with The First Encounter

Hot off the heels of Doom, Quake, Half Life,and Duke Nukem with the Build engine we had this little team from Croatia develop their own in-house engine and arena style first person mascot shooter called Serious Sam.

The game is chaulk full of features that even today put other games to shame. Its clear they were passionate about technology and programming because the list is almost endless of all the neat little unique features that are in this game.

For starters its fully co-op and fully customizable.
In other retro shooter games like Doom, Quake, Duke 3d, etc, which DID support co-op out of the box, but in those games the co-op is a gimped and lame experience where you can just constantly respawn and it loses any challenge. However, in Serious Sam you can fully cuztomize the co-op experience to do things like set the amount of Respawns, or even completely disable respawns and rely on manual Saves / quicksaves JUST LIKE single player! Thats an insane feature ive never even seen in any other fps. Who knew you could have a co-op experience play just like single player, quick saves and all? This adds a unique and funny 'mechanic' where you and your partner have to cooperate together to try to determine when the best quicksave point is to reload from.

I played the whole campaign in co-op, with Respawns disabled, relying on Quick-saves just like single player. We first played on difficulty 4/5 to try to compensate for the fact that its coop so we didnt want it to be way easier, but no, a few levels in and yeah its a really challenging game so we put it back to 3/5 and it felt more appropriate.

More features I can mention,
-the graphics settings, customization, options are endless,
-theres a button you can press to pull up a PDF to view every gun/monster/level description etc in the game.
-If you hover over your ally, the hud flashes, showing you his status/equipment.
- You can press H to put the game into a fully functioning, useful third person view
- The game tracks your score indiviudally and also shows a combined score
- Fully customizable co-op , with options to have it so you and your co-op partner each have their own item spawns

I could go on and on about all the different weird quirks and oddities in this engine. This was an era back when 3D gaming wasnt quite figured out, so almost every game was completely different than the next, with its own different standards and conventions. Its not like nowadays where hundreds of games uses the same Unreal engine with the same controls and graphics or whatever. This game is a very big sign of the times, and I think its great and shows something that we kind of missed when we more 'standardized' 3d gaming.

The graphics are also surprisingly very impressive for a 21+ year old game. The textures are surprisingly high res, the models look great especially on the enemies, all the guns are satisfying to use and look and sound great, there is some really nice lighting/specular effects and the game is really colorful and has all sorts of nice exciting effects and pickups. The pickups especially are satisfying to pickup, they glow vividly and make nice sounds, theyre abundant and make it feel fun to collect. The graphics and sense of scale the game has is still unsurpassed by many games, as well as the sheer amount of enemies on screen and the chaos of it all. It definitely still holds up, at times it doesn't even feel like a 21 year old game. I would go as far to say I prefer the graphics in this game to many modern looking FPS games.

Where doom was about this horror, tight packed corridors and clausterphobic hellish enviornments, and Quake was about medevial castles and strange otherworldy areas, Half life about exploring a gigantic underground complex etc, Serious Sam goes the complete other direction - it takes GIGANIC almost 'open world' enviornments that seem to never end, and has incredible draw distances that even today are impressive.

A lot of the visuals and vistas in this game are still amazing. It has you feeling like an ant inside this gigantic playbox for you to mess around in. It has a common theme of making the player feel tiny and insignificant, and then juxtaposing that with all these gigantic visuals and endless swarms of enemies running towards you in the distance. Complete with all the classic sounds such as the headless guy exploding screaming "AAAAA" letting you know exactly where he is, making for a really fun and threatening enemy to have in your presence.

Though, its not to say the game is just an endles stream of entering some giant empty area, and then survivn swarms of enemy. No, while there is some of that, atleast in the first half of the game you have actual developing, progressing level design that where you explore through various temples and outdoor locations, coming across all sorts of scripted events, 'jumpscares', and it slowly and cleverly introduces all of the weapons and enemies to you, one by one.

The first half of the game has a more constant fast paced,discover feel. Where you dont really just stand in one room for 10 minutes, while there is some of that, its more like constantly making your way through the the level more like a Doom or something like that. The 'objectives' are fairly mild, its mostly just finding the right door to progress, or having to pickup a few different key items, or having to press a switch on the wall. Admittedly, there are a few bullshit moments like in the Sewer level where you press Use on a door, and nothing happens, but you really have to swim in some super deep pit and find this tiny button to open the door. I later learned that when it says 'Analyzing' you can open the PDA to view hints, but the fact that I never realized that is kind of a testament to how sort of janky and unstandard all these mechanics are. It takes awhile to get used to, but the mechanics are all unique. But for the most part, atleast in the first half of the game, the level design is great and you keep coming across all sorts of new varieties in sights and sounds, slowly being surprised by all the new guns and enemies it introduces. I found it pretty brilliant and a key example of how to introduce FPS enemies/weapons.

The second half of the game has more of what the series is known for. By that I mean you go into these big, empty open areas, and wave after wave of enemy spawns at you and you just have to survive for sometimes like 5-15 minutes. I don't really hate it, but there are times where it feels like the lesser of the levels. For instance, in the later half of the game theres two levels back to back where you go into this flat village with a generic square copy pasted buildings over and over and thats basically the whole level you just have to go around and find some keys while endless waves of enemies spawn. And the last few levels in particular are kind of just like enter room, survive for 15 minutes, enter next room, survive for 15 mins. Its not bad, but its a noticable departure from the first half of the games constant doom-like level deisgn. I dont nessesarily prefer one or the other, but yeah there were times when the survival waves dragged on a bit.

The pacing, or atleast how the levels are split up can be a little strange at times. For example, most of the levels are 10-20 minutes long, but one level in particular in the seocnd half of the game is so big it almost takes like 2 hours long. Kinda weird and exausting, it would of been better if that level was split up more into bite sized sections.

There's a great marriage between all the enemy types and the weapon types. There is both a huge variety of weapons and enemies.
The weapons you have stuff like dual pistols, tommy gun, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, cannon gun, shotgun, double barrel etc.

What's really cool about the guns is that even when you get a 'upgrade' like the Double barrel from the regulr shotgun, or the Chaingun from the tommy gun - the first gun isn't irrelevant. You can still carry all guns, and there are many situations where instead of using Double barrel youll want to use regular, because its faster and has more range. Or times when youd rather use Tommy gun, than chaingun, because the chaingun has a slower spinup time, and the tommy gun conserves more ammo.

And this is a game where depending on what type of enemy youre fighting, youll be constantly swapping between guns. So its not this like mindless romp of just using the same gun and holding down fire for the whole game - No, youll need to constantly memorize all the different numbers 12345678 of different guns, and constantly swapping between them according to the situation. Like oh, theres waves of the fast skeleton monsters? Switch to fast laser gun - Oh shit, theres a bunch of the charging bulls? Switch to the cannonball gun and take them out like bowling balls - Oh shit, theres waves of the screaming headless guys? Quick takeout the chaingun and kill them fast - Oh theres a lot of enemies in one cluster? Quick use the rocket launcher. Youll be doing this CONSTANTLY every 5-15 seconds its a constant juggle of switching guns according to enemies and thats what makes the gunplay so satisfying and thrilling, they really nailed the symmetry between weapons and enemy types here, its like a perfect evolution of the Doom monster concept.

Speaking of enemy types, theres a lot. And they're all vastly different, not just simple reskins. They all look crazy and memorable , from the regular grunt deformed gunner humanoid guys, the headless suicide bombers screaming at you, the fast running skeleton monsters, the charging bulls that satisfyingly roll over when killed - to the more gigantic monsters such as these weird dinosaur things with chainguns, these weird alien monsters with Hitscanning bullet shooting guns that can shred you apart, and even more gigantic monsters like some guys that look just like Diablo himself from diablo 2. Its pretty awesome and its like as the game progresses, they just keep throwing new enemies at you.

The difficulty is perfect too, like i said I was playing co-op, but using quicksaves and no respawns just like single player. So anytime either of us died, we'd quicksave just like solo. And the game can make you feel safe one moment with 100 health/armor, but if you put your guard down you can get melted fast. So its a super intense action eyes-peeled game and it works perfect for co-op  especially with the quicksave aspect. You can even see your friends health/armor so if you find pickups youre constantly shouting to your friend to come get the pickups and to cover me etc, its really fun.

There are times when the game is almost too challenging, where we died over and over, but it never got frustrating or really stupid, it just seemed like the mark of a good game and a case of us needing to become more skilled as players.

Now the games not perfect, it is pretty damn buggy and janky granted it being a 20+ year old game. The co-op isnt perfect, sometimes you get some glitches which kinda hinder progress but nothing game breaking, sometimes you get disconnects, but the complaints are mostly just techincal problems, nothing nitpicking at the core game, except maybe the default controls being slightly insane like Alt to reload,  and Mouse2 opening PDA but also apparently also being 'Use' which I never figured out until halfway through the game and had to manually bind a 'Use' key myself. There were times when I thought the game was 9/10 or even approaching 10/10 but nah, the second half of the game kinda has worse level deisgn and too many arena wave sections, some hit and miss level design, overall kinda buggyness, and some other small nitpicks like the can game kinda be fatiguing after a few hours because of how intense it is.

There's not much to speak of about story, its just youre a typical early 90s/2000s macho badass to save the world, Like Duke Nukem, sam has light hearted humour and occasionally says One liners, but its nothing as iconic as Duke. There is really nothing to say of story, theres no cutscenes, or very few of them. 

It also has a pretty great soundtrack, especially the first few levels some of those ambient tracks are great. It's got a lot of variation in the music which really helps the 'atmosphere' at times.

The last boss is particularly insane because at one point you look behind you, and there is a gigantic monster taking up your whole screen you really do feel like an ant in comparison, then you have this huge battle fighting him and waves of enemies, running for pickups. But he wont ever die until you actually run to the other side of the arena and go into a temple, where you fight him inside his like UFO base.  Then you have to jump around these pads through some hoops to start a laser blast sequence, and place him inside the laser to win the game. There's a goofy comical ending cutscene skit where sam is using a Payphone from the alien ship making dumb jokes, and the games over. the humour is pretty stupid, but its never cringe, its enderaing. But yeah its a damn good game, and probably better than those 'HD Remakes' . I played them and beat the HD ones, but this original version just has a lot more charm to it.

8/10