Serious Sam - The First Encounter (PC)

Despite what the name entails, Serious Sam is everything but serious. Filled with serious situations completely diffused by comical statements and scenarios our hero "Serious Sam" is marooned on an island filled with grotesque monsters. Yet, even these monsters have their charm. From the headless suicider to the scorpion sniper you've got your work cut out for you. Topped off with a whimsical and sarcastic help device meant to help steer you in the right way... while making fun of you. Even the history of the planet is humorous. Ruins, buildings, temples, all of it just weird, and then of course there's the weapons. My favorite being the ...  Read the complete review

Hundreds of enemies on screen at once in an old-school style shooter, this game, people, requires nothing but a fast mouse-hand... Serious Sam is a serious shooting game and despite the silly name is one of the best first person shooters to have ever graced the PC format. The story is extremely simple, some aliens have travelled back in time to ancient Egypt in order to change Earth's past and Sam has been sent by Earth's forces to stop them. Thus starts hours of frantic non-stop action in the first game to use the much talked about 'Serious Engine'. This engine allows for Serious Sam to display dozens of enemies on screen at once with no ...  Read the complete review

There’s nothing like a good First Person shoot em up (FPS) to while away the hours. I’ve probably played most of them on a variety of platforms beginning with the legendary Wolfstein through Doom to the trilogy of Quake games stopping off the way to play Duke Nukem, Unreal, the classic Half Life and a slew of others (Blood, Shogo and Requiem to name a few). There’s something engrossing about these games that always draws me back to the genre. Maybe it’s the immersion fact, maybe it’s the style of game play or maybe it’s because according to Right wing American pressure groups I want to be turned into a mindless killing machine. What ...  Read the complete review

Back in the day first person shooters were just that, a shooting game viewed from a first person perspective. Looking at today’s games we see a much more complex bunch of wannabes. Games like Deus Ex and Project IGI have moved the genre on miles, and games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament having taken the single player frag fest to its limits. Surprisingly then, Croteam (the Croatian developers of the game) have taken more than one step backwards and released Serious Sam, an unashamed frag fest from start to finish. I was about to make my usual comparisons with Quake or even Doom, but in this case I can't. Serious Sam is, put simply, more simple than ...  Read the complete review

Doom and Doom 2 are the best first person shooters of all time primarily for one simple reason: the volume of enemies. Whereas modern shooters are generally so graphically sophisticated that they can only cope with a handful of enemies onscreen at once, Doom's relatively basic graphics allowed for literally hundreds of enemies to be running around after you at once, forcing you to run for cover, set up killing zones and generally form your own uniqe strategies that were different each and every time you played, thus giving the game effectively limitless longevity. No game has come close to emulating this, at least not until the release of Serious Sam. ...  Read the complete review