You start with three guns: a chainsaw, two revolvers and a laser pistol. Each arena is packed with ammo and health/armor, so you just have to move fast to get them in time. The particle effects are responsive and beautiful, adding to the enjoyment. Enemies usually die with 2-3 hits, and it’s extremely satisfying to clear a stage and move on. On the good side, the weapons are quite fun to use. It’s also hard to come up with any strategy to complete each arena, as the game is based on the player’s quick reflexes to survive, which is borderline torturing, since Sam is basically a snail with guns. After they expire it’s shocking how slowly Sam walks, and we don’t have a ‘run’ button to assist us in this journey. However, we have a crucial factor which spoils most of the fun: Sam is painfully slow! The movement drags, and the game seems to know that, because it often gives you some short-lived vehicle to make you drag your carcass a bit faster. This gives him a likable personality, and helps to alleviate the tension during the relentless gameplay. He is a badass dude with big guns, and the difference between him and other protagonists is that he talks a lot, with jokes and complaints about the dreadful situations he has to face in the game, like going into the sewers. Sam Stone is the cliché male protagonist with a deep and sarcastic voice and one liners, and he was inspired by the protagonists of classics Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior. The premise is that simple – not really developed and a bit embarrassing, but it does the job. To aid you in this quest you’ll have a British accented computer/companion entity telling you what to do, and you’ll meet up with some aliens tribes to fight back the alien invasion. In order to do that, he must travel between different worlds and collect pieces of a medallion, until the final battle. In this game, our hero, Sam ‘Serious’ Stone, has to defeat an extraterrestrial enemy called Mental. Hence, we have the background for the Serious Sam series, games meant to be focused on the fun action of shooting monsters and making things go boom. As the industry progressed, we started to have games with more emphasis in the story and delving into different moods, and some people didn’t quite like this kind of change. Of course the reason of any game to exist is to provide a new way for the player to interact with the world, but in the mid 90’s and early 2000’s, things were simpler and more limited. Games like Blood, Doom, Quake, Hexen and the ones alike were extremely popular, and provided a platform to when people feel at least in control of something. Combining over the top and merciless gameplay with a keen sense of the absurd, it is the sort of guilty pleasure you don’t like to admit you have.ĭuring the so called ‘Golden Age of First Person Shooters’ we had pretty hardcore games with merciless gameplay, in which the main goal of making the player feel badass. In many ways it is completely hideous, but it became almost a time capsule of the time it was created. This game is a piece of video game history. It’s now available on Steam and it runs pretty well on Linux.
Serious Sam 2, released in 2005, was developed by Croteam and released to Windows and Xbox.