As I sit down to write this, my hands still occasionally twitch as my pulse returns to normal level. I just completed Serious Sam 3: BFE (Before First Encounter, allegedly, although it varied depending on who you ask), and I would not be the slightest bit surprised if there were more enemies in the final level than in the entire Modern Warfare trilogy combined. This is a game that wears its heart on it’s sleeve – it’s relentlessly, proudly bright, loud and old-school, despite having a slightly more muted aesthetic than the earlier games. Just don’t mistake ‘loud’ for ‘dumb’. SS3 is a game that you shouldn’t ever underestimate.

Serious Sam 3 is a game that, for all its sound and fury, plays its cards close to its chest until its very last moments. At first glance, it could almost pass for yet another pseudo-tactical shooter, with you dodging through narrow, ruined streets with a pistol, shotgun and a (surprisingly effective) sledgehammer, fighting zombie commandos and the occasional more outlandish foe, like cyclopean alien gorilla-things and giant wall-crawling spiders. You spend your time scrabbling around in dark corners for scraps of ammo and tiny health boosts while on familiar mission objectives like ‘Find the downed chopper’ or ‘evacuate the VIP’.

Just as you think you’ve sussed how this game is going to work, and start to feel a little disappointed that they’ve lost the spirit of the original Serious Sam, it shoves an assault rifle into your hands and leads you around a corner face to face with at least 30 enemies. You gun them down as if they were nothing, this new weapon suddenly giving you the capacity to deal with vastly larger and more menacing enemy forces at much longer range. And then it hands you a bag of C4 charges, capable of instantly killing any of the ‘heavy’ enemies that have been introduced as bosses up til’ this point, as the levels widen further, allowing more freedom of movement. And then it gives you a rocket launcher and an infinitely restocking crate of ammo to test it out with.

This trend carries on through the entirety of the 12+ hour campaign, a number that seems quite at odds with the advertised ’12 levels’. But the game plays its cards carefully on that front, too. While the first couple of levels are indeed 15-20 minutes long, they expand in time invesment as the battlefields open outwards, with almost every level from the halfway point onwards taking an hour or more to complete (a figure that doesn’t count deaths and reloads) unless you’re deliberately running past encounters. There’s a lot of shooting to be done here, and not much else. Those objectives that you saw in the first couple of levels are quickly forgotten in favor of just progressing ever onwards, killing everything in your path, and that’s just fine, because this is a shooter that’s honest with itself. You’ve got guns, you’ve got monsters to use them on – there’s the whole game. Simple, right?

Like I said, don’t mistake loud, chaotic and bright for being dumb. While you might be fighting hundreds (a number rising well into the 4-figure counts as the game progresses) of enemies per level, you probably have more moment-to-moment tactical options than any recent mainsteam shooter hit. You’re not just fighting endless generic Men With Guns who duck and pop up from behind cover occasionally. You’re dealing with harpies that bombard you with magic bolts at a distance before swooping in en-masse. You’re dealing with giant scorpion-men that hang back and whittle away at your health bar with shockingly accurate machinegun fire. You’re dealing with enormous bellowing bulls that crash effortlessly through walls that would normally shield you from bullets and claws, and you’re dealing with the series trademark – the Headless Kamikazes – an everpresent wave of bellowing death that can act as an efficient clearing device if paired with other enemy types.

You have to deal with all of the above and more, and all in constantly shifting combinations. Each gun you have has its own strengths and weaknesses, with ammo limitations forcing you to ration your heavy artillery for use on larger targets. You have to prioritize targets, evade, defend, put solid walls between you and bullet-spraying foes, while avoiding standing behind them when the enemy has rockets that could bring it all down on top of you. It’s loud, unrelenting and difficult, but it’s not stupid. Every level is a continual escalation of combat encounters, with ammo doled out sparingly, usually giving you just enough to cope, but never enough to be truly comfortable. The pacing mixes up slower, more tense indoors encounters with bombastic open field battles (accompanied by chugging electric guitars), and new guns and enemies are introduced until the final act. There’s a lot to learn here, with 12+ weapons and a good 15-20 or so enemy types keeping things fresh.

There’s no shortage of replay value, either. In addition to each level holding a dozen or more secret areas, it does difficulty levels like few others. While most games these days just shrink the relative size of your health bar to accompany a switch to a higher difficulty setting, SS3 doesn’t do anything nearly as cheap. Instead, it changes the number of enemies you’ll be fighting, and the composition of the groups you’ll be going up against, making return trips bigger, more complicated challenges. This effect is multiplied further if you choose to take the game online – in addition to a variety of lightweight competitive modes, the entire campaign is playable cooperatively with up to 15 other players, and the game automatically scales the number of enemies spawned to the player count, resulting in some enormous battles if you’re playing on a full server. It’s a strain on the server, and on the CPUs of those playing, but if you’ve got the hardware, it’s a spectacular sight.

As you can see in screenshots and gameplay videos, this really doesn’t look like a low-budget game. It certainly doesn’t look like the sort of game that a comparatively tiny studio in Croatia could produce, but they’ve done it, and done it with shocking efficiency. A mountainous list of graphics options means that if you can run the Serious Sam HD remakes, you can run SS3 with respectably pretty graphics. For those lucky enough to have a high-spec gaming machine, it’ll make use of all the cutting edge hardware in your system. The game on the highest detail settings is a sight to behold, and runs at a shockingly consistent framerate from moment to moment. This is an entirely proprietary engine developed by Croteam, too – I doubt UDK could handle some of the larger combat encounters seen here.

You might have noticed that I’ve saved talking about the story for last. This is because there’s really not much of one – cutscenes are short and usually used to just point you at your next target. The entire story is about as threadbare as you can get – in the near future, Earth is under siege from the armies of faceless intergalactic warlord Notorious Mental, and it’s believed that the only chance of saving the world is to use an ancient alien artifact known as the Timelock (located somewhere in egypt) to travel back in time and stop the invasion before it happens. The only one who can activate the Timelock and do this? ‘Serious’ Sam Stone, wisecracking goofus and wielder of many guns. He’s a charming sort, rattling off corny one-liners at every possible opportunity, but a solo operator. At no point outside of a couple of very brief cutscenes will you see another living human being, unless you’re playing co-op. You’ve no buddy characters to follow, nobody to escort. It’s just you, a sack full of guns and a hojillion alien space-bastards.

It’s all delivered in knowingly tongue-in-cheek fasion, of course. The humor in SS3 is definitely closer to the earnest, knowing idiocy of Bulletstorm, rather than the ham-fisted attempts at irony of Duke Nukem Forever. A flatly delivered joke might elicit a roll of the eyes, but there’s nothing awkward or cringeworthy about the script, except possibly Sam’s new-found love of dropping F-bombs. A word which the voice actor doesn’t seem entirely happy to bark out, his delivery of it sounding unnatural and clipped. He’s a larger-than-life cartoon character in the middle of a highly implausible alien invasion. Threats of ultraviolence seem par for the course, but swearing somehow just doesn’t quite gel with the atmosphere. For the most part, the script provided a fair few chuckles, and a few fist-pumping moments of elation, but the gameplay provided far more of both.

In the end, my list of complaints about this game is very small list, and mostly down to personal preference. I wish the laser rifle hadn’t been relegated to the status of secret weapon, and instead seeded into the general levels. They could have used the Harpy enemy type more often, with them only appearing in a few levels. There could stand to be a couple more arena survival stages, and they could start off a little slower/easier. The level scripting once got stuck, forcing me to hunt down a lost enemy behind an outer wall. I wish there had been one more ‘proper’ boss fight, somewhere around the middle of the game, as it seems like one is almost conspicuously missing, and the final boss battle (while spectacular, and easily on par with the original Serious Sam) isn’t too well explained, taking some trial and error to figure out the ‘solution’ to. But in the end, these are fleeting grumbles.

When all is said and done, I’ve probably had more fun with Serious Sam 3 than any FPS in quite some time, and I’m nowhere near done with the game yet. I’ve still yet to challenge Serious difficulty mode (which will likely take me another 12+ hours), and I’ll be undoubtedly playing this in co-op on and off for the next couple months. I’ve not even given the competitive multiplayer more than a passing glance despite it seeming like fun, arcadey stuff, and haven’t even had a chance to test-drive the (up to 4-player) splitscreen mode. There’s still plenty more for me to get my teeth into, but even at this stage I can wholeheartedly recommend the game at the current $40 price tag to anyone wanting something faster, bigger and brighter than the current crop of gruffly militaristic ‘tactical’ shooting galleries.

[Serious Sam 3: BFE on Steam]

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