Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter XBLA Review

I remember when the first Serious Sam game came out on the PC, it created quite a stir and I was told by a lot of people to give it a look. I never took that advice, something about the screenshots and other stuff I saw  just didn't click with me. When Serious Sam was released on the XBLA I remembered everything I had been told and picked it up, played a couple minutes of it and turned it off. This was years ago, "I have retail games to play" I thought, as if the way you gain access to a game has anything to do with it's quality.

120 gig is so small these days!

With the release of Serious Sam 3 I was reminded that I have never properly experienced this franchise, I still put it off. Then one day my 120 gig hard drive was full, no room for even a save game. I had been buying  all kinds of XBLA games when they appeared in the Deal of the Week. This was when it was decided something had to be done about this situation, and I focused on completing and then removing these XBLA titles to once again claw back some space. It has been a long process, and is the reason I've played and reviewed almost exclusively XBLA titles, I have to thank this decision for finally getting me to commit and play through Serious Sam HD: TFE.

Overview
Serious Sam HD: TFE is a fast paced arcade style shooter. If you're not running and gunning you're more than likely dead. There's just enough story to give a reason for the crazy you see running head(less)first at you and for you to be there mowing everything down. This is B-Grade camp at it's gory finest, explosions, lasers, bullets and gibs. You play the titular Sam, who is very very serious about saving earth from the never ending onslaught of thousands of ridiculous alien monsters who want nothing but your annihilation.

This part in particular was one of the hardest for me the first time I encountered it

You'll run through every level, shooting anything that moves and trying to stay alive. The first run through I played on Normal and even then the game is not easy, with the hordes of enemies you need to face down. After a while you learn how each enemy reacts and what the best tactics for dealing with them are but when you are swarmed with hundreds of them, knowing what to do is half problem, pulling it off successfully is another thing entirely.

Rational
Serious Sam managed to through these hundreds upon hundreds of enemies at you without any performance hit what-so-ever and it really amazing sometimes with the sheer number of things moving about on screen. The enemies wildly vary in both their looks and attack patterns which keeps you on your toes every encounter. Sometimes just scraping through a seemingly never ending wave of Kleers with 7 health left is a win. It throws all these enemies at you at breakneck speed too, with every enemy type not hesitating to take you on. The break into a full sprint the second they notice you and you had better hope you have the dexterity to shoot and weave your way through and out of trouble.

Sam comes across a wide range of weaponry as you progress through the missions, with most being useful throughout the game in different situations. Experimenting will help you find which gun seems to work best for which enemy and while it's entirely possible to turn on infinite ammo and just stick with the one, learning how to deal with what you're facing in the most efficient way possible raises your chances of survival immensely.

You can't hide from the onslaughts you'll regularly face!

Serious Sam is a game meant to be played with liberal use of the state save and load feature, and that is not lost on the Xbox. State save is mapped directly to the Y face button, with loading happening when you die or through an option in the start menu. It's a great way to implement it on a console and is a life saver, especially when playing Serious difficulty. I was saving after every enemy kill in some firefights, and while in some games these would be close to cheating your way through, in Serious Sam it's almost expected.

Summary
Serious Sam is great fun if you're willing to get into it. It's simple, but that's the point. It's also very challenging on harder difficulties, but every time you clear a stage you get a real sense of accomplishment when you look back and realise how often you just scraped through most of the firefights. Multiplayer is a blast, with you and your mates running roughshod over the even further increased number of enemies thrown your way but unlike single player you have an unlimited amount of lives which removes a lot of the challenge. If you've never played Serious Sam before I would recommend giving it a try, if you have then I can say the Xbox 360 version is a quality remake and playing it with a game pad and voice chat is a lot of fun.