[Review] Serious Sam 3: BFE

Serious Sam 3: BFE is an FPS game developed by Croteam and published by Devolver Digital for PC on November 22, 2011. It received a host of improvements through the Fusion version of the game that was released on March 21st, 2017.

Serious Sam 3 is Croteam's return to the series, between the release of Serious Sam 2, they were busy with a legal battle with 2K Games for the publishing rights of the franchise, a canceled military shooter for another company, and believe it or not, a Doom game pitch for ID Software that only fell through due to time zone and staff size issues. Once those did not pan out, Croteam put their heads, ideas, and assets together to turn things around for the studio and make this game.

The game had a rocky launch at first, did not have the best performance, garnered mixed reviews, lots of negative opinions, and for quite some time it was considered the worst game of the franchise. And there are still a few who firmly believe that. I held that opinion once, but I'm a changed man.

Now with the power of hindsight and fancy words, I can pretend I pierced through the veil of knee-jerk reactions (and valid issues that are now solved) so I can give it a fair review and maybe make someone give this game a chance.

Off the bat, I recommend playing the game through Serious Sam Fusion. What is that? Fusion is an official, all-in-one version of Serious Sam, containing First and Second Encounters HD, Serious Sam 3, and their VR versions all in a single install, available on Steam.

More convenient and easy to play them all seamlessly. Whenever you buy any of these games Fusion is automatically added to your library, so it is essentially FREE and there is no reason to not use it.

Fusion comes with several improvements including bug fixes, 64bit executables, Vulkan API support, multi-threaded rendering, global leaderboards, modding support integrated into Steam Workshop, and more. For Serious Sam 3 specifically, it basically fixes all the issues related to performance, bugs, and balancing that the game had at launch.

/// Story, Structure, and Pacing

The game is set before the events of the First Encounter, as a prequel, we fill the shoes of Sam Stone once again, in his time as an Earth Defence Force soldier during Mental's invasion before he jumped into the time lock and traveled back in time to 3,000 B.C.

It features a total of 12 decent-sized levels (15 if you count the extra levels in the DLC) that average between 30 to 50 minutes in length. Here you will go from urban war zones to the classic Egypt deserts and tombs.

The early urban levels... are not that great. Fun, but it's a slow start that doesn't quite represent what the game has in store for you. They are way too claustrophobic and enemy visibility in these areas can be an issue. In fact, I believe it's one of the few reasons why Serious 3 got such an immediate negative reception out of the gate, something that was even acknowledged by Croteam and corrected in Serious Sam 4.

Once you hit the more traditional desert levels these issues solve themselves, and there are several memorable moments in Serious Sam 3 maps. ''More of the same'' to some? Maybe, but Egypt is pretty much iconic and part of the series one way or another.

Other than the first levels, Serious Sam 3 has a decent ramp-up, although I think it was a tad too easy in comparison to First and Second Encounters. In general, it's considerably less punishing. I was always expecting a ball breaker like Kleer Alley at any moment, but outside of the last level it never came.

The Underground

The underground sequences were Croteam's jab at exploration and puzzles solving moments, in an attempt to improve the pacing, and trying to solve the ''serious fatigue'' as firefights can be pretty intensive. They were meant to be a breather of sorts.

Some think it had the opposite effect, finding it to be a boring speed bump. I don't mind it personally, not really a big enough inconvenience for me to dock points out of the game for it. But I have to mention it since it is an issue for some people. Overall just look for the exit and safely ignore the alien monkeys down there, don't waste your time hunting them down.

/// Jewel of the Nile [DLC Campaign expansion pack]

It's a pack of 3 levels that takes place between Power of the Underworld and Lost Temples of Nubia, so If you want to integrate it into the main game as a more complete experience, and you should play it before starting Lost Temples of Nubia.

These levels are more challenging than usual, complementing really well the base game and gives you an early and better introduction to a certain boss mechanic, and honestly, they are so good that they make up for the city levels.

The Underground part 2: Revengeance

Yeah, Jewel of the Nile doubled down and features an underground sequence, with some puzzles in it. In hindsight, this growing interest in puzzles mechanics Croteam demonstrated thought the game, would down the line lead them to the creation of The Talos Principle, a fantastic game that I highly recommend.

/// Weapons and Combat

In my review of Serious Sam 2, I talked about how it deviated from the traditional Weapon Dance, the philosophy Croteam had used to design the first two Encounters, and how it hurt the game. I'm glad to say that the dance is back in Serious Sam 3. I will talk about the Weapon Dance in a more in-depth manner in my upcoming First and Second Encounter reviews.

There is quite a few new mechanics added to the game, some were controversial on release, those being sprinting, reloading, and aiming down sights. Honestly, all three were blown out of proportion and demonized for no real reason, and still are today.

Aiming is only possible with the assault rifle and pistol, and it's just an extra zoom feature, that is helpful when targeting enemies too far away. You don't need to aim to be precise, if ADS bothers you can just, like, not press the button.

Sprinting is a nice quality of life feature that is a godsend, no more zigzagging or bunnyhopping to be able to explore a large map at a reasonable speed. You can't sprint backward, you can't shoot while sprinting so the core gameplay loop stayed intact.

''Well ackchuyally, you can sprint away from enemies''

Oh yeah? Stop shooting and sprint away with your back turned from the increasing horde, go ahead be my guest, see what happens.

As for reloading, there's no way around it, you might not like it, but it's a good mechanic that adds more depth to the combat. It forces the player to find a time frame (or create one himself) that is safe to reload, it adds to the juggling nature of the Weapon Dance, when can you reload, find openings to do so, do you have a plan B gun ready in case you run out of bullets?

There's also the introduction to a more destructible environment, once you are out of Cairo. This in my opinion greatly improves the flow of combat, providing a mix of hard and destructible cover that you can take advantage of, weaving a path in between the battlefield. In turn, this makes the combat more dynamic, with maybe a smidge less running backwards.

The destructible walls come with a few path-finding bugs though, sometimes you will have enemies, Kleer in particular, that will get stuck in level geometry from time to time.

And finally, there's the addition of melee executions, while not useful 100% of the time, they are a reliable way to kill some enemies at the end of the fight, more of a situational ammo saving tool, but welcome nonetheless.

Moving on to guns, it features a few new weapons, of these we got the Sirian mutilator, a gauntlet with an energy lasso, can be used to kill small groups of enemies or single large ones like werebulls, useful to save ammo, safer than using a melee weapon, but the process is longer.

There are now C4 bombs, like a grenade but it deals some serious damage and has a large blast radius, I found it really useful to use against grouped-up Kleer hordes and against the new tanky enemies that I will talk about shortly.

A sledgehammer (Axe during Jewel of the Nile) was introduced, and it's good for wacking a lot of Gnaars in quick succession.

And lastly, the Devastator, the game describes it as an automatic explosive shotgun, but it behaves like an explosive railgun, pinpoint accuracy, high rate of fire, high damage, and high blast radius, useful to take out large and dangerous threats quickly. Oh, and it's very likely a reference to Duke Nukem's devastator.

There are a few substitutions, sledgehammer took the place of the chainsaw, Deagle replaced the colts, the Tommy gun got replaced by the assault rifle. While aesthetically I like the order weapons, the new variations have their place here, and not all is lost, the sound design for the new guns is really satisfying.

In total there are 13 weapons, which is within the normal range for a Sam game, but in the main campaign, the sniper and laser rifles are relegated to secrets only, with scarce ammo if you don't know where to look for. They were however given their time in the spotlight during The Jewel of the Nile expansion, so even more of a reason why you should play its levels spliced in between the main campaign.

/// Enemies and power-ups

For bad guys, you have a reiteration of the classics, kamikazes, bio-mechanoids, beheaded soldiers, arachnoids, etc. But we do get a bunch of new enemies that became mainstays for the franchise, finding their way into Serious Sam 4.

These include Khnum, large and dangerous bipedal bulls, Scrapjack, tanky dual-wielding rocket launchers, both were recycled from that scraped doom pitch I mentioned earlier. We also got spider enemies, Witch bride, a teleporting high priority enemy, thechnopolyp (helicopter).

I've seen plenty of clueless angry youtubers that don't know the full story of Croteam and the Doom pitch, pointing fingers at Serious Sam 4, throwing tantrums online as if it was infringing on Bethesda-Zenimax copyrights or something, but these designs were introduced here in BFE, they have been out ten years ago, missed the mark for the outrage but ok. Besides the concept of a big bipedal demon and a fat guy with guns aren't really that unique of a design to garner such rage.

But anyway, moving on, about power-ups, well... there are no power-ups in 3. Well, actually I lied, technically there's the jet-pack, but that's used two times total if you count the DLC. I kind of missed power-ups, although Serious Damage would seriously make things even easier than they already are.

/// Sounds and Music

With music composed by Damjan Mravunac, the original composer for the original games, he brings back his Egypt-themed bangers just as an iconic part of the games as Sam itself.

As usual for Serious Sam, the audio is perfect, I'm able to know an enemy's location and the direction he's coming from a mile away, each enemy has easily identifiable sound cues to the point that you know what you are going to face before you even see it.

And the sound design for the guns is just great, a large improvement over the original games and their HD re-releases.

/// Conclusion

Serious Sam 3 doesn't achieve the same level as First and Second Encounters, those are like the Crown Jewel of the franchise, Croteam proved themselves that they still got what it takes to make a serious game. It is nowhere near as bad as some youtubers make it out to be. Come into Serious 3 thinking that you are going to just circle strafe everything to death with a double barrel like every other shooter, and of course you are going to have a bad time.

It aged well, and it has all the elements for some serious fun. Worthy of a paythrough even nearly 10 years after its initial release, you just need to respect the game and approach it willing to learn its mechanics.

The meaning of BFE in the title was never officially explained by Croteam.

It is interpreted as Before First Encounter, Battle For Earth, or Bum F*ck Egypt, military slang for ''in the middle of nowhere''. It is theorized that it means all three and it's just another Croteam joke.

''What are you screaming for? The pain hasn't even started yet.''

-Sam Stone