Serious Sam Collection review

The Serious Sam games are a series of first-person shooters developed by Croteam that sees Sam “Serious” Stone go up against Mental, an extraterrestrial overlord who attempts to destroy humanity throughout time. The first game, Serious Sam The First Encounter first released on PC in 2001. The developers came back the following year with Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. There was also a Serious Sam 2 released exclusively on Xbox in 2005. 2011 saw the release of Serious Sam 3 BFG. Fast forward to late 2020, where Croteam and Devolver Digital released the Serious Sam Collection for Xbox One which added a layer of HD to the aging games. How do they stack up? Let’s find out.

Serious Sam Collection includes all content from Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and Serious Sam 3: BFE, including The Legend of the Beast and Jewel of the Nile expansions. As explained, The Serious Sam games are first-person shooters where players need to survive every level and find the exit. Often time, without any indication, you’ll have to kill everything that comes your way before you’re able to either open the door or obtain the key that will open the door to the next area.

One thing the games have for them is definitely the variety of weapons. While there’s no way near to DOOM level of kickass weaponry, the games do offer a nice variety from knives to shotguns, to a laser gun and even rocket launcher. Sure, they sound like clichéd weapons, but while typical shooters such as COD only allows you to carry 2-3 weapons at once, you can carry them all at once. And being a more arcade-y style of shooters, there’s never any need to reloading.

But with so many weapons comes an annoying problem: weapon selection. Instead of a simple weapon wheel where you select a gun with the left joystick or d-pad, you need to open the weapon wheel with the LB button and then press the Fire trigger (RT) to choose the gun. Given the game doesn’t stop and only slows down, you’ll still vulnerable to damage while switching guns. It makes something normally fluid complex and frustrating as you can sometimes end up using the wrong weapon.

While I’m a fan of the genre, the Serious Sam games are mindless shooters where you can basically stay put and just shoot everything coming your way. The games are poorly balanced. Some levels will last about 5 minutes if you go guns blazing; while others will last 20 minutes because trying to find your way is a pain in the ass. It feels like a lazy way to not only create a “fake” challenge but also a cheap way to prolong levels that should’ve ended long ago. There’s also a questionable design where you need to find a key to unlock a door, but the game won’t let you progress until you kill every enemy.

Overall, the games look fine. The first two games obviously show their ages, while SS3 looks decent, even by today’s high standards. The first game levels are pretty bland and all look the same; also some areas or even some levels are so pitch dark that you can’t see where you’re going unless you fire your guns; even witb a 4K TV with game mode enabled, it’s near impossible to see the paths; which makes it easy to miss a poorly lit door and waste time going around in circles. Another problem related to this is early on in Serious Sam The Second Encounter, you come across an obstacle where you can get one hit killed by being stomped by a pillar, but it’s so dark, it’s hard to see up before the pillar drops on your head. While the games are first-person at their core, you can also switch to a third-person perspective.

On the sound side of things, there’s nothing really noteworthy here. The soundtrack is composed of generic rock/hard rock music; almost feels like stock music purchased from a random tool such as a music equivalent of Getty Images. The games also feature minimal voiceover work. Serious Sam feels like a poor man’s version of Duke Nukem with even less funny one-liners. Enemies do generic vocal noises; there’s a very annoying headless running exploding man yelling AHHHHHHHH until it explodes; one is fine, but sometimes they come out in droves almost endlessly, it gets ear-grating.

Given the vast variety of FPS games available now, Serious Sam Collection is a definite pass. The first two games have not aged well thanks to boring, monotone gameplay, confusing navigation. Additionally, the insanely pitch-black areas make it a frustrating romp as you can easily get lost. While Serious Sam 3 BFG is the best of the worst, it’s not worth the £24.99 price tag by its lonesome.