Remember Duke Nukem? It was a game that was outdated and stupid, and it knew it. But it was mindless fun that could keep you occupied for days if you let it. Serious Sam is the new Duke, by that standard. The game has nothing in the way of great graphics, or even a plot to speak of, but it can and will keep you glued to your controller until you've finished and seen all of the ridiculous carnage there is to commit.
Serious Sam's plot is....plot. Yeah. There really is no plot, to be honest. Aliens from the star Sirius invade Earth, Sam is caught in the middle, and he decides to take the war to them with a plethora of weaponry that would make John Rambo weep tears of lost manhood. You begin fighting your way through a serious of Egyptian monuments until you reach Luxor, where you meet the first game's boss. After a twisted battle making use of little portals, you are teleported aboard Mental's spacecraft and the second half of the game begins...with the craft crashing in the middle of the Mayan empire. From there you fight your way through more temples until you finally fight the Summoner in a battle featuring some five hundred of Mental's minions. If nothing else, these enormous battle scenes are entertaining in a ridiculous sort of way.
Needless to say, graphics are not this game's strong suit. Nothing is particularly high-res or heavily textured. Walls achieve an entirely flat look, with no depth to them whatsoever. Character models are fairly simple too, with the designers going for a whimiscal look rather than realistic. Not that this is bad, it works just fine for the way the game rolls. Other baddies just look like stereotypical over-the-top villians, such as a miniboss who happens to be a 200-foot-tall mountain of lava (I am not kidding about this one) that spawns little lava buddies as his health goes down. Yes, it's simple, but somehow it's fun as hell.
Sound is about the same picture (no pun intended) as the appearance. Sam has a ridiculously low voice that would make Vin Diesel jealous, assuming he could reproduce it without the use of a twenty-foot length of sewer pipe. Sam does have access to a little fountain of witticisms he occasionally spouts from--one segment is a direct take from Indiana Jones, to which Sam's only response is to whistle the theme of the films. Enemies are by and large voiceless but for roars and screams and death rattles, the usual. Explosions have a satisfyingly low bass blast to them that never fails to put a grin on your face.
Controls are also painfully simple, but not for lack of effort. Let's face it--this is a shooter, and shooter controls are pretty much standardized by this point in time. You have a button to shoot, a button to jump, a button to switch between one of about eighty weapons in his arsenal, which includes a Serious Bomb that (I kid you not) kills every living thing on the screen. There's no reloading--like shooters of old, all your ammo is stored as a single dump, with some weapons, like the pistol and machine gun, sharing ammo. It's a style that harkens back to 1993 and the superbly uncomplicated shooters of the day.
After the cows have come home, what's this game about? Fun. Simple, low-resolution, bad-AI, fifty-weapons, unlimited ammo, demigod-challenging fun. Can't wait to play the sequel.
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