Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19444 in Video Games
• Brand: Godgames
• Released on: 2001-03-21
• ESRB Rating: Mature
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com
Serious Sam returns to the roots of first-person shooters, serving up big guns, hordes of enemies, and plenty of attitude. The entire game is steeped in an ancient Egyptian theme, with locations that range from claustrophobic temple passages to wide-open arenas, and with surprises lurking around every corner.

The monsters are uninspired, but Serious Sam substitutes quantity for quality. Enemies do little more than blindly rush at you, but when dozens are converging on your position at the same time things get hectic in a hurry. Fortunately there are plenty of health, armor, and ammunition packs to pick up along the way, so expect a sore trigger finger after fighting all the way through to the game's epic end battle.

The only real faults with this all-out action fest are that it ends all too soon, and the Egyptian theme--though beautifully wrought--gets old. Still, Serious Sam's bang-for-the-buck ratio is high enough to make most complaints moot, and players will be too busy trying to survive to get bored with the scenery. --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

• No-frill, nonstop action
• Beautiful lighting and environments
• Incredible end battle

• Can be frustratingly difficult
• Repetitive gameplay and uninspired enemies

Amazon.com Product Description
Serious Sam places gamers in the role of special-forces veteran Sam "Serious" Stone. Sam Stone travels back in time to an ancient Egyptian world with the mission of assassinating a great evil: Notorious Mental. Mental has set forth to wipe out Earth and all humans for sheer fun, just as it did with all of the other civilizations throughout galactic history.

Players can defend the world in either single player or multiplayer modes. Multiplayer modes support two to four players in split-screen action on a single computer. In cooperative mode, gamers can join forces against the hordes of enemies.

In Serious Sam, players will travel through beautiful and realistic terrain, both indoors and outdoors. Serious Sam's powerful 3-D technology, based on the company's proprietary Serious Engine, offers directional lighting and realistic-looking daytime scenes. In addition, the game's technology also allows for multidirectional gravity, dynamic volumetric fog and haze, and destructible objects. Players wishing to create their own levels can use the free Serious Editor and Serious Modeler, which are powerful real-time editing tools that include tutorials.

DailyRadar Review
Serious Sam is not the best computer game we've ever played, but it is the best $20 computer game we've ever played. The 20-buck price point, usually the domain of add-on packs, re-releases of old games, mass market "games" and unadulterated crapola, has been redeemed with this one single release. Not only has the Eastern European-based Croteam demonstrated the possibilities of garage development, but it's also delivered Gathering of Developer's first good game since the company released Railroad Tycoon II back in 1998. For a game that was spawned almost accidentally, Serious Sam is certainly entertaining. Originally released as a demo for the Serious Engine, the sweet 3D game engine that was the focus of Croteam's work, the game rocketed to Internet stardom thanks to the intervention of the geniuses at Old Man Murray. The demo might have dropped off the face of the planet if not for the random grab by OMM's Erik, who praised the game mightily, drawing the attention of developers like Levelord and George Broussard and, ultimately, the Gathering of Developers. Once again, the entire gaming world owes Old Man Murray a debt of gratitude, as this is one of the better 3D FPS we've played in the past few months.

But let's get something straight right off the bat. Serious Sam is not the next incarnation of Half-Life. It is not designed better than No One Lives Forever. It doesn't have the awesome multiplayer component of a game like Unreal Tournament. The engine, while good, has nowhere near the jaw-dropping complexity of Quake 3. What Serious Sam is, in fact, is a fun, fast, cheap game, heavily schooled by Doom and infused with a unique sense of humor.

In Serious Sam, the player takes on the identity of the titular Sam, who is, as the title indicates, very, very serious. He's quite serious about blowing the living beejeezus out of anything that accidentally wanders into his way, be it beheaded shotgun assassins, skeletal cows or the occasional giant lava monster. From the start, you're shooting at masses of enemies, picking up ammo and health powerups and generally looking for the next key/door or button/door combination necessary to move on to the next level. Plan on doing a lot of this, 'cause this is the essence of the game, which is repeated throughout the next 14 levels, until Sam reaches the final climactic boss battle.

This game has seen the return of an unusual phenomenon that we haven't come across since the old Doom days. The player is required to annihilate so many enemies that you actually feel "full" after extended battles. You're done; you've slain enough demons, rocketed enough monsters, gunned down enough bezerkers. In one section of the game, the player must run around an enclosed courtyard while literally 200 demonic frogs rain in from all sides (you know there are 200 of the lil' bastards because Croteam has included a counter for hilarious effect in this section). The resulting action is nothing less than minutes spent circle-strafing and firing off round after round into the deepening mass of helltoads. After eventually finishing off the last of the buggers, you'll need to take a break to rest your eyes and your cramped hand, which has spent 10 minutes clamped around your mouse in a deathclaw grip. Later levels are even more insane. The conclusion of the game has you fighting your way through a virtually Herculean task of slaying that seemingly never ends.

While we dinged Kiss: Psycho Circus for being too Doom-like, the problem with that game was that it simply threw tons of monsters at the player with no real sense of design. Serious Sam does not have that problem. Croteam may not have the greatest level designers -- most levels are hallways that connect to larger rooms or outdoor environments that feed into courtyards, and the game never leaves the Egyptian setting -- they have mastered the art of level flow. They know just where to place their monsters, where to hide triggers, when to relent on the tide of beasties and just when the player is going to run out of ammo, health or patience. After 10 minutes with the game, you'll begin to appreciate the sense of humor Croteam had when whipping this game together. Eventually, you'll come to realize that the full backpack of ammo and the health-up hovering so invitingly in the middle of a big, wide open courtyard are going to spawn a horde of really, really pissed off critters the second you touch 'em. And you won't care. In fact, you'll most likely laugh, ready your best weapon, quick save and charge into the middle of the room. Because that's the sort of mindset that Serious Sam engenders.

Sam's Beheaded Kamikaze is perhaps one of the funniest, scariest enemies we've seen in recent memory. Most of the time, the Kamikazes make themselves known long before they're seen, because the moment they spawn, they begin screaming and running at the player in a straight line, detonating the bombs in their hands as soon as they come within range. The player cannot outrun the Kamikazes, forcing a self-preservation strategy of hunting them down their moment the screams are heard. The rest of the monsters in the game suffer from a disappointing sameness -- skeletal demon, small hopping critter, larger gun- and rocket-toting creatures -- and are lacking the Kamikaze's standout looniness. The same, unfortunately, goes for Sam's arsenal. The only weapon we saw that really spoke of creativity was the cannon, which fires a gigantic cannonball that rolls across the screen, smiting everything in its path.

Had Serious Sam been released in the $35-50 price range, there's no way on God's green Earth that we would give it a Direct Hit. Yet for $20, it shouldn't be missed. Grab this game on the way to the checkstand; you will get every penny's worth out of it.

Customer Reviews

Serious Fun!!
Remember how much fun DOOM was? Well, SERIOUS SAM is a definate throwback to DOOM and DOOM 2. There is non-stop action in this game! Great weapons and graphics. There are several instances in SERIOUS SAM, where you are just swarmed with monsters coming at you! I believe 368 monsters was the most on the screen at the same time! Pretty intense fun! Fun is the key word here. You'll have a lot of fun playing SERIOUS SAM! If you don't like FPS, you may like this one for sheer action!

There isn't much story, but who cares? The whole reason this game was made, was to make a DOOM-style game with a ton of enemies coming at you. it isn't to hard for newcomers either. There aren't a lot of eloborate puzzles to solve, just a lot of shooting of monsters!

CroTeam has made an impressive game here people. The graphics are indeed stunning, but I am no expert when it comes to grapics, but it looks just as good as the QUAKE 3 engine.

To top it all off, this game is seriously fun; ....

Serious Fun for Serious FPS Gamers
There will be those that say that Serious Sam is just another shooter like Quake or Unreal and they would be close. There are those that would say that SS is just another squad based combat game like Tribes and they also would be close. Then there are those that will look at the graphics, environments, worlds, weapons, bad guys, AI, speed, configurability, support, mods, scripts, and adrenelin gland crushing action and say..."This is pretty freakin intense!" and they would be right on target. If you have only enough money in your budget to get one newly released game, get the one you've been waiting for with the most anticipation. If you are lucky enough to have enough for two...also grab Serious Sam. You will find yourself trying to decide which game to play. Over and over again.

Serious Sam - Serious Action
With it's hardcore action and lacking storyline, this is *the* game for everyone who loved id Software's Doom games "way back then". Those that are too young, or for some reason never played these wonderful pioneering games, should also pick up this game, to see what they've missed, and also have a really good time.

What's wonderful about Serious Sam is the unique game engine these guys from Croatia (that's in Eastern Europe) has made. What do you do when you don't have the money to lisence an existing game/3D engine like the Quake engines or the LithTech engine? You make your own, of course! The engine that these Croatians came up with is unbelievable. It has all the fancy effects you could wish for, like fog, bumpmapping, particle effects, etc. But where it really shines, is when it comes to rendering the extremely large levels that Serious Sam is build up of, and the insane amount of enemies.

And insane it is. Actually in one of the level you're pitted in a quite small room, against 2-300 small toad-like creatures jumping over a wall with one mission in life: kill you. Mowing through them with the machine gun is unbelievably fun. Also in the normal levels, you're pitted against hordes of enemies, from small to HUGE, even at normal difficulty. When I played through the game on normal, I virtually had my finger glued to the quick-save button (F5 - remember that). You never know what's around the next corner, but you're likely to die.

Alas, the game is quite difficult (on Normal that is), but that isn't why i deducted a star in the rating. The reason for that is that after I had mowed through about 2000 enemies (I don't remember the number exactly, it might have been many more) with an impressive array of weapons, it was suddenly over! I had used only about 6 hours of effective gameplay. And that's a bit short. When a friend and I cooperatively beat the Serious difficulty, we used about 4 and a half hour.

If you aren't an experienced FirstPersonShooter-player, you probably will have some troubles getting through the game on Normal, but you also have Easy and Tourist modes, so there should be enough fun for eveyone in here. You also have Hard and Serious if you're feeling good, and also a Mental mode, only unlocked if you manage to beat the game on Serious difficulty...this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, buy it now! If you really like this type of action games, you've probably never had as much fun behind your computer as when playing Serious Sam. It's a bargain, and remember: Not all great games come from the US :)