by:	April 10, 2004

Serious Sam started out modestly enough: it was released for PC a few years ago at a bargain price, but with just as much punch as any first person shooter, if not a little more. Eventually, two more Serious Sam games were released on the PC, and they have since gained somewhat of a cult following. So now that it's out for the Xbox, why the attention for "just another" first person shooter?

For starters, the game has been changed considerably for the Xbox and undoubtedly uses the Xbox hardware very well. Serious Sam isn't exactly all that serious. The game starts, and immediately you are presented with "boinks" and "boings" like you would hear in a Looney Tunes cartoon. You are going back in time to save the world from total annihilation, but you feel like you're Bugs Bunny, jumping out of your hole to screw with Elmer Fudd. Serious Sam himself is a lot like Duke Nukem or Ash (of Evil Dead fame) and he presents himself as some bad-ass jackass that runs around destroying hoards of monsters.

Gameplay
Serious Sam's controls are pretty simple. A and B let you go up and down through the weapon selection, left trigger makes you jump, and right trigger fires your weapons. Easy enough, right? The weapons are also very basic: you have your standard rocket launchers, shotguns, pistols, chainsaw, machine guns, etc. - you know the drill. Thank God Croteam simplified it so much, because the actual gameplay is as thrilling as a roller coaster ride. Like a roller coaster ride, it starts off simply enough by giving you a few enemies to destroy. After the calm, the game will randomly place a power-up item in the middle of a room just to lure you in. Like when a roller coaster jerks up quickly and takes you by surprise, all of a sudden enemies randomly generate on all sides of you, firing at you or doing a kamikaze run straight at you. I'm not talking about a maximum of a dozen enemies on screen like Halo - it's more like two dozen or even three dozen! A lot of the enemies are fairly easy to kill, but some of them are huge 20-30 foot bosses that throw huge balls of flame at you. Seen enough yet? Well, the insanity doesn't just stop there.

The game has some elements of a platformer (like a health bar), and seems to be an arcade game at heart. You get points for killing enemies, and you even can get bonus multipliers based on the number of monsters you killed in a combo. That's right, you can kill multiple enemies at once - sometimes 20 or more. The game spans over three episodes, there are over two dozen levels, and by the end you are doing pretty trippy things like running along the side of walls and going upside down.