Serious Sam is the same as it’s ever been, but is that still enough?
There aren’t many games that instantly put a smile on my face at the mere mention of their title, but Serious Sam is one of them. It’s a series emblematic of the cathartic violence and overall ridiculousness of 1990s shooters, and I’ll never forget my first time with the series, mainly due to my dad’s reaction, having seen me play it when I was a kid.
While there was no way I was getting my hands on a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City at eight years old, Serious Sam somehow transcended his anxiety about the effects of violent video games. With the violence being so over the top, it didn’t carry the same connotations, I suppose; there’s always going to be something inherently funny about a guy in Converse trainers and sunglasses blowing away scores of screaming headless men with a double-barrelled shotgun in each hand. Thankfully, this entry delivered that idiosyncratic charm in spades.
The attribution of being ‘more of the same’ usually encapsulates a deeply rooted problem within the FPS genre — one that’s been going on for over a decade.
Gamers had grown tired of bland, cliche military shooters that had been rehashed from the blueprint of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but with the new DOOM games as an anchor and a budding indie industry ready to take the gauntlet, the ‘boomer shooter’ was born. These were FPS titles that replaced the drab colors of war-torn urban environments with bloody hellscapes or futuristic architecture, and cover-based, iron sight shooting with high-speed movement and no reloading.
Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem is unabashedly a boomer shooter, but the series has always been this way. It’s still very much how I remember it: huge arenas of charging enemies in what often feels like some bastardized version of a medieval battle simulation and an arsenal of weapons akin to the entire contents of a military-grade armory. Disposing of enemies by the dozen is a thrill Serious Sam offers better than any other shooter, and there’s no other FPS that nails that sort of scale.
These have never been games praised for their graphical prowess, but the engine does a nice job at rendering the bitterly cold Siberian environments. Some of the game’s levels are impressively large, too: there are occasions where you can deviate from the typical linearity to explore other challenges. Facial animations are laughably bad, but considering I’m yet to see a game overcome this hurdle since Half-Life 2, I’ll forgive it. Besides, cutscenes are few and far between, and the ones that do pop up are usually pretty funny accompaniments to Sam’s famous one-liners.
All the classic enemies are back and in all their glory, and while there are new enemies, they’re mostly reskinned of those from the new DOOM games. Even the animations are almost identical to those of their Id Software counterparts, and it’s unclear whether this is a blatant rip-off or an intended parody.
Regardless, allusions to The Slayer go beyond just enemy design. Sam can now upgrade his abilities by finding artifacts throughout each level. These unlockable abilities are mostly synonymous with the series (such as the ability to dual-wield any weapon no matter the size), but others offer the ability to ride certain enemies or to deal more damage when you’re low on health. There are also weapon upgrades this time around, which offer an extra layer of depth to Sam’s arsenal. These are welcome additions, but the gameplay was so frantic I often found myself forgetting to use them.
This was the first instance where I realized that DOOM-style mechanics in a Serious Sam game are somewhat redundant. Without the tightly woven combat loop of those games, a lot of these extras go to waste. DOOM Eternal’s gameplay gives utility to every ability; the glory kills give you health, while the flame belch — an ability you might ordinarily forget about in the heat of combat — is always on your mind due to its potential to replenish your armor.
Glory kills are present in this title, too, but given the sheer amount of enemies swarming you any given time, there’s no point risking it. Where DOOM centers around pushing you into the middle of the combat environment to succeed, Serious Sam has always been about strafing around enemies from a distance. As such, what Siberian Mayhem lifts from DOOM is fundamentally at odds with what makes this series what it is.
Thankfully, none of that stuff is essential. You’re free to play this entry just as you have every other, and in that respect, Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem is a great success. Modern movement abilities such as vaulting and sliding are nowhere to be seen, and while this would be an issue in any other FPS, here it doesn’t matter.
Sam controls more like a vehicle than a person. That might seem counterintuitive to a genre that is all about fluid movement and twitch action reflexes, but somehow it works (speaking of vehicles, there are some truly epic segments that I won’t spoil, and you certainly won’t find those in any of Id’s games).
In its simplicity, the game channels what makes boomer shooters so fun, even if it doesn’t have all the mod cons. It’s a game that relishes in its proclivity for ridiculous violence and over-the-top set pieces, and considering you can mostly ignore the superfluous additions, what we have is another highly entertaining entry in one of the genre’s most iconic series.
It’s nothing new for the genre or even for the Serious Sam series, but if you’re an FPS fan, you’ll no doubt have a lot of fun with this one.
