With the sliders all the way to the top, the game looks better than any previous Sam game, though it won't trouble the benchmark titles, for obvious reasons. For anyone tired of brown military shooters with heavy, realistic movements and strict weapon limits, it's incredibly refreshing. At its best, Serious Sam 3 is a worthy movement in that symphony, a nostalgic swoon of circle-strafing, weapon-switching, monster-gibbing fun. It not only plays the right notes, but plays them in the right order. That's why Serious Sam works where so many other throwback FPS games fail. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Decapitated humanoids with bombs for hands run at you, screaming, in suicidal waves, while screeching harpies swoop from above.Įach has a distinct timbre in Croteam's composition, and the developer knows just which instrument to deploy, and when, in order to change the tempo, forcing the player to hastily adapt to each new threat in different ways. Cyclopean ape-things try to smush you into paste. Skeletal horse things shoot ball-and-chains at you. They're a bizarre bunch, drawn straight from the surreal arcade playbook. Key to this success is the bestiary of creatures ranged against Sam, our barrel-chested, gravel-voiced hero who saves the world from alien hordes clad only in t-shirt and jeans. The Sam series is rightfully feted for its manic gameplay, a juggling act of impossible odds and cathartic excess that rises and falls in pitch at just the right times. It has to be orchestrated, paced and balanced so that while the player feels thrillingly overwhelmed, there's always a method behind the madness, a symphony of slaughter that keeps the game in constant motion.Ĭroteam, the small indie studio responsible for the Serious Sam games, understands how smart you need to be to play dumb.
Throwing mayhem at the screen isn't enough.
There's a natural tendency to assume that any game which favours action over depth is working at this level, but that underestimates just how smart game design has to be in order to successfully work as dumb fun.
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