Serious sam 3 bfe gameplay trial#

With the sliders all the way to the top, the game looks better than any previous Sam game, though it won't trouble the benchmark titles, for obvious reasons. The Serious Engine is designed for maximum enemy population and high draw distance, but it still struggles with basic things. Scenery snags and clipping are common, both for Sam and his foes, while any movement beyond the traditional horizontal axis tends to throw out glitches and hiccups. The game has also inherited some of the less favourable aspects of old-school FPS design.

Campaign maps too often become repetitive mazes, and with no map or radar you can spend fruitless minutes scampering around empty halls and corridors in search of the way forward. There are even a few keycard doors and some basic lever puzzles, but they're not too taxing. Single-player balancing throws up problems of its own. Played on Normal difficulty, the game is pretty tough. Not only does Sam's health vanish in hefty chunks, but ammo and armour are in short supply, forcing you to back-pedal away from waves of enemies until you find a doorway bottleneck where you can pick them off without being sideswiped or backstabbed out of the blue. This is compounded in the early stages of the game, where you're stuck with a pistol, weak shotgun and melee sledgehammer combo for too many encounters.

Serious sam 3 bfe gameplay trial#

Toss in some poor checkpoints and a limit to how many quicksaves you can use, and progress can become a headbanging trial of patience.

The game boasts of its throwback heritage, harking back to a time when 'cover was for amateurs' - but by making its tough-guy hero so fragile and limiting his arsenal so ruthlessly, it often steers you into positions where a bit of cover might not be a bad idea. You want to let rip in true Serious Sam style, mowing down dozens of enemies with a hail of bullets, but the difficulty settings make that impossible. Ironically, if you want to enjoy the game in the old style you need to knock the difficulty down to Easy or the even-simpler Tourist setting. Here your ammo can be counted in hundreds rather than tens, and Sam is able to withstand enough punishment to make standing battles against the horde feasible. FPS veterans, however, will find the game is far too easy at this level - with recharging health, no less. Visceral thrills with no challenge, or tougher gameplay with limited opportunities for mayhem? There's no balance to strike between the two, and Serious Sam's signature thrills often get lost in the gap. If you have friends online then these problems tend to evaporate, as Croteam has gone above and beyond in its service to multiplayer. The entire campaign is playable in co-op with up to 16 players, the number of enemies scaling depending on the size of the lobby. You can also play four-player in split-screen, an option that was welcome in previous Sam games but is downright charitable in 2011.