Serious Sam 3: BFE Game design review

I'm a big fan of Serious Sam, having played the originals, 2 and now 3. I've always enjoyed the solid gun action, the interesting environments and the overwhelmingly crazy number of enemies running towards you. Serious Sam 3: BFE (Battle for Earth) tells the story of what happened just prior to Sam entering the time lock which allowed him to travel back into time.


What I liked
Serious Sam arcade action- It's a Serious Sam game full of action, large arenas and a multitude of crazy enemies and overwhelming odds.

Running- This is a good new thing to Serious Sam. I like the ability to run and reposition yourself.

Destructible scenary- This is a good fun addition to the game. It really kept me on my toes as no place is truly safe in the larger arenas.

What I disliked
Weapons- The sledgehammer is fun (albeit slow) as is the devastator shotgun which is really awesome. However the sniper rifle and laser gun are secrets in the game which you have to look for. It's also missing weapons like the chainsaw, grenade launcher, flamethrower and the Serious bomb.

The new C4 explosives are alright but I don't feel like its the same as the grenade launcher. You also get the Sirian multilator which is unfortunately next to useless. You might as well just melee the enemy.

Finally, I kind of wish there was something similar to the homing parrot of Serious Sam 2.

Reloading- One of the best parts of Serious Sam was the lack of reloading. Unfortunately reloading is a big part of this game and it feels out of place and slowing the game down.

Melee attacks- I like the addition of melee attacks in the game which instantly kills an enemy. However what I don't like is how Sam holds on to a bodypart as a trophy afterwards. You can actually toss it at enemies and damage them but it's really slow, next to useless and almost never hits.

Graphics and artstyle- Serious Sam 3 takes place in a future Egypt very similar to our modern era which is also the same setting for Serious Sam Episdoe 1.

This Eygpt however is a realistic and gritty war torn modern zone and when compared with the Egypt from Serious Sam Episode 1, the variety of time periods from Episode 2 and the crazy wacky episodes of Serious Sam 2 I find Serious Sam's environments very disappointed. Who can forget the splendor of fighting through Mental's hordes in Egypt during its heyday or Babylon? What about that planet where everything was really big in Serious Sam 2 or the Kleer planet? If I wanted to play a modern military shooter set in a gritty urban environment, I would play Call of Duty. Overall, I feel Serious Sam 3 needed to be more creative and interesting. Why not have more sections with futuristic alien technology? Aside from the enemies and some alien tombs, there was nothing interesting. Even a couple of alien tanks or structures would have livened things up around Egypt.

Level design- The game in my opinion often forces you into cramped corridors and space especially at the beginning which in my opinion is terrible. Serious Sam has always been about large open spaces faces hordes of enemies, not closed corridors and everything just needs to be even larger and bigger. Furthermore, because of the very similar environments the levels just don't feel memorable. The game gets better as it progresses and the last level is awesome and epic as always.

New enemies- Unfortunately the new enemies don't add to the game. Most of the new enemies, such the pillar hoping attacker and the flying sorceress feel very out of place. The first actively hides from you around pillars turning it into a hide-and-seek game while the flying sorceress is invicible until it starts using its magical powers of stasis. There's simply no way to damage them properly for the majority of the time and you end up having to wait around for them to expose themmselves. It feels out of place for a game like Serious Sam.

Sandclouds- Great showcase of technology but this tends to obscure the action. Enemies aren't affected by this as far as I can tell so they can still see you.


Story- The story is average but the talking is just boring and way too serious. And it kind of just ends abruptly with Sam entering the timelock. Also, in the ending, Sam has jetpack but he doesn't start with one in Serious Sam: First Encounter.

Jetpack- So you have a jetpack but you only get to use it in the last level. A real wasted opportunity.

Conclusion
Serious Sam 3 is a fun game don't get me wrong, but the new things they added just don't quite seem to fit my expectations of a Serious Sam game. I'd still rather play Serious Sam Second Encounter HD over this any day.

Serious Sam: Random Encounter

Serious Sam Random Encounter by indie studio vblameer is their take on the Serious Sam franchise based off the Japanese RPG format. The game has wandering around a 2D map like other JRPGs. Every few steps you will enter into combat and have to fight enemies in a action-turned based format with up to 3 characters. During combat the game has two section. The menu selection section consists of you deciding where you want your weapon to fire, deciding to switch weapons or use an item. The game then unpauses and your characters carry out the action. You can move your charaters up and down the screen to avoid enemy fire and direct their fire more effectively. I think the 2D Graphics are spot on and definitely convey the 16-bit era type gameplay quite well.

From a game design perspective, it's a  good concept but below average execution. So what went wrong in my case?

Combat is unbalanced- In the real serious Sam games, the game strikes a very sharp balance between enemies and your weapons. So while there are lots of enemies, you also have lots of ammo and your weapons are usually just enough to take them out. Unfortunately, in this game that balance is broken, there are often way too many enemies and weapons just don't deal enough damage.

Aiming is awkward- Just like in Serious Sam, enemies can come from almost any angle, allowing you to choose where you aim your gun might actually have had a detrimental effect on creating gameplay balance. I found myself focusing the guns in the centre and then finding the enemies from the top and bottom pretty much . The gun coverage is simply too narrow to accommodate all the enemies on the screen and I simply kept getting overwhelmed.

I understand the developers were trying to make it feel like an FPS but from a game balance and design perspective I think they should have reduced the amount of control players had over the aiming and reduce the areas where the enemies could wander around it. In other words, making it similar to a Tower Defense game like Plants and Zombies.

Need better pickups and more powerups- Some of the pickups are really fun but there are often in short supply. Furthermore because they are limited it's difficult to know when they should be used. I think one thing the designers should have done is created special abilities such as the ability to move faster or attack faster, the equivalent of magic spells in other RPG games. I think this would have really solved the entire problem of balance while increasing strategic depth and playability.

Conclusion
As one reviewer put it, it's a great 'proof of concept' but really needs some polish to be worth US$5 it was released for. I say just play the original Serious Sam game or get Serious Sam Double D instead.

Serious Sam Double D: Game Design Review

First of all I found Serious Sam Double D a very fun game. There are plenty of secrets to discover, the gun stacking ability is pretty fun, the enemies bizarre and bosses are huge. I think it does relatively well to capture the crazy essence that is a Serious Sam game.

From a design perspective, there are some minor issues that could use a bit of tweaking. A lot of the issues centre around the game physics and certain design decisions. All of these are minor and don't really get in the way of a cheap, fun 2D shooter.

Controls and Jumping - Controlling and jumping isn't bad in the game, but it lacks a weight to it compared to other platformers like say Megaman or Contra. Some reviewers complained about this problem saying it completely ruined the game. I think there is some issue to it but not to the extent of spoiling the game for me. The jumping pad does ad an extra dimension to dodging but I wondering if putting in a double jump or super jump might have been a slightly easier option?

Gunstacking - Gunstacking and swapping gunstacks is fairly intuitive however I found the gunstacking a bit underutilised. Yes you can stack lots of guns with each other but all too often I found myself pretty much gunstacking all the shotguns or all the tommy guns or all the rocket launchers. Only very occasionally would I use the chainsaw or greande launchers or flamethrowers.

Enemies tend to be quite powerful so you pretty much need all the firepower you can stack. I guess what I'm trying to say is that although gunstacking is fun, the significance of gunstacking choices diminishes at times so I'm left having to use the obvious choices like 4 shotguns rather than mixing and matching.

Also, when you gun stack you can only gun stack weapons that you've found in one gun stack. For example, imagine if you've found 2 shotguns and 2 tommy guns each gun can only be in gunstack 1 or 2 or 3. You can't have your shotgun in both gunstack 1 or 2 at the same time so when you swap, the same shotgun appears in stack 2. The system just doesn't allow that. In gameplay terms, I found this broke the flow of the game. In the early parts of the game when I had fewer weapons, rather than swapping between stack 1 and stack 2 and stack 3 with the keyboard, I ended up continually entering to the gunstack screen and reconfiguring my existing stack to manage the small number of weapons I had.

From a game design perspective I wonder if reducing the number of guns to a more manageable 4 but increasing the damage might be a better idea. Also having some sort of combos system or bonus system where using certain configurations might trigger bonuses (i.e. 2 lasers = more damage) might be helpful. Some might argue that having 2 shotguns and 2 laserguns firing at once is your combo system and they might be right on further reflection.

Dodging enemy bullets can be difficult - Because of the 2D side scrolling nature, it can be difficult to dodge some enemy bullets. Yes, you are relatively manoeuvrable in the air thanks to the floaty controls but the bullets are too closely spread in many cases. It's not a deal breaker but I think spacing the bullets and increasing the zoom out might have been better.

Artwork and animation- This is personal opinion but I think the artwork and animation should take a different path. I appreciate Serious Sam is not really a serious game but I find the 'paper doll' feel of the graphics and the lack of good animations an area which could be improved on.

Zooming and character size - When you look at games like Metal Slug or Contra or SHUMPs like R-type, the characters or ships tend to be super deformed or smaller than usual taking up relatively small amount of screen space. The camera in this game will often zoom in and out to show how large the enemies.

From a game design perspective I wonder if it might be better to stick to just one perspective and design the game around that single perspective. This might sound restrictive and a minor detail but I think it might have forced the designer to carefully consider certain aspects of the gameplay such as the size of the bullets, the space required to succesfully dodge incoming enemy fire and the floaty controls as well as creating more integrated experience. On several occasions they zoom just wasn't quite right.

No cannon - One of the signature weapons of Serious Sam, the cannon is missing from the game! A serious Sam game without the cannon? It's like accidentally leaving out the shotgun! I'm sure it wouldn't be too overpowered...

Overall a game that does convey the Serious Sam mayhem most successfully. It isn't quite Contra or Metal Slug level of polish however which is a real shame but the game is fairly easy to like and is very enjoyable.