Sam “Serious” Stone is, in my eyes at least, a poor mans Duke Nukem. That’s not to say his games have been poor, it’s just that the Duke seems to have gathered a bigger following over the years. That was all in the past mind and you don’t have to be Einstein to realise that the Duke has had a bit of a battering with his latest outing. A release that was 15 years in the making! There was once a time when a Duke Nukem release would have gamers chomping at the bit. Has that ever happened with a Serious Sam game? Not that I can remember but maybe it’s now time for Sam to pounce a bit on the Dukes demise and hit the gaming scene in a big way.
Or maybe they’ll just rehash a load of arcade games.
Yes, that’s what they’ll do. Great idea.
I think you can probably guess what’s coming just from the title of the review, but in case you’re still in a state of inebriation from last night, The Serious Sam Collection is just that, a collection of all Serious Sam games currently available on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Spanning three years from 2010 to the present day the games in question are Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter; Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter; Serious Sam 3: BFE and Serious Sam Double D XXL. You can also add in the Serious Sam 3: BFE - Jewel Of The Nile DLC into the equation. I’m sure many an hour was spent coming up with those names!
Maybe they could have spent a bit of that time creating something a bit better than the offering we have in front of us because to be quite frank, it’s average at best.
Both The First and The Second Encounters are bog standard straight up first person shooters with not much to separate them from Duke Nukem. Or Quake. Or going even further back, that big hit in the early 90’s, Doom. An arcade game they may both be but that’s really where they should stay, in a place only the hardcore Sam fans will find them. Both games are relatively decent fun for 15 minutes at a time but once you’ve seen the humour once, you’ve seen it a hundred times. The same goes for the enemy and weapon types. There isn’t really anything outstanding and there seems to have been a big push for getting ‘as much blood in as possible’ with little to no thought with regards to level design. Whilst The Second Encounter is perhaps a slightly better looker there are many a game that came out alongside these in 2010 that blow them both away.
But stick them alongside the biggy in the collection and they are rather good.
Serious Sam 3: BFE is a bloody mess. Yes it’s almost three years younger and yes it looks alot better but my god, that’s about all it has over it’s older siblings. I’m not sure how many words ending in ‘y’ I can use but here’s four straight off the bat. Glitchy. Jumpy. Laggy. Buggy. Get past these pretty major issues and you’ll find yourself stuck solid in another standard FPS but one with atrocious loading times appearing between stages and every single time you die. It should be the standout game in the collection and the one that could have put Sam back into the big time, but it’s the one game I couldn’t wait to put down and have absolutely no desire to go back to it again. You do of course have the DLC also included on disc for this game but whether you wish to waste your time with it is your call.
But hang on a minute, we got ourselves another game left to look at in the form of Double D XXL.
Take a look at the game art and you’d be worried about this being any good. But actually it’s a rather good side scrolling shooter much in the vein as something like an XBLA classic, Heavy Weapon. Well, you aren’t in tanks but you get the idea. Powerups galore and numerous side challenges make this the most fun of all the games in this collection and whilst the graphics are still rubbish and the control system has been thought up by a monkey, I kept finding myself enjoying this and pushing myself for the next level, challenge and head-to-head arena. Stick in a friend to play alongside you and this is perhaps the only game that is worthy of another look and the only one that really does add the fun and frolics the other 3 titles have desperately lacked.
So to conclude, if you’re a Sam fan, I’m guessing you would have already picked these titles up from the Xbox Live Arcade for the 800 Microsoft points that each one costs and this collection will therefore be of zero interest to you. If you aren’t a fan of the Serious one then perhaps you’d like to wait for an XBLA sale and take a punt on Double D XXL as buying all of these for 30 quid isn’t going to change your opinion of him whilst that on its ownsome may just be enough to turn you. Yes, the disc collection can be sold or traded on after your five minutes of pleasure but I personally wouldn’t even bother buying it for that.
They are all pretty run of the mill games in their own right and even when rolled on to one big disc nothing stands out and makes you want to go back for more, other than to play a few challenges on Double D.
Sorry Sam, you need to go find the Duke and spend your retirement together......Away from us preferably.
