mikehodges2 wrote:Just thought I'd update this thread. Bought SS3 during the xmas sale, when it was half price.
The first levels
are a bit slow, not too many enemies etc, but push through. For example, when you get to the level where you get the minigun, it gets much more...er...serious
Not completed it yet, difficulties on normal, and some bits are particularly tricky, taking me a few tries before I get out of 'kill everything' mode and prioritising certain enemies! Such good fun though, well worth picking up!
Thing is, there is way more than two levels before you get the minigun. It's almost half-way through the game before it actually picks up, then you get monster spammed, and since the new enemies are super OP for a SS game, along with the terrible weapon balance, it doesn't match up. Not to the originals anyway. The game just ends up being incredibly frustrating. I played it to the end, but there is no replay value at all due to the horrible weapon imbalance, enemies, and levels being all desert. SS3 talks about dodging and no cover, but that's all lies since they overuse hitscan enemies and the ones that aren't are barely avoidable. Werebull spam is insane, and ammo for the powerful weapons is very scarce.
This review sizes up the game pretty well:
http://www.gamesradar.com/serious-sam-3-bfe-review/Similarly, while Serious 2 took us to all kinds of lush and colorful environments, BFE returns to Egypt and just lingers there like an unwanted party crasher. The ENTIRE game is a series of brown textures – sand, brick buildings, and so many brown Egyptian ruins that playing this game may make you forget there are any other colors in the rainbow (hey, brown’s in the rainbow, right?). Again, this is such a weird stylistic choice because Serious Sam is supposed to be the respite from “modern” shooters. It’s supposed to be an old-school throwback to when FPS games were about nonstop killing and endless circle-strafing or running-backward-and-strafing.
Look, we understand this game is about throwing insane amounts of enemies at you, but the pacing is all out of whack in a number of places. It’s often lacking in proper lulls and crescendos: you’ll encounter a huge swarm, it’s super intense, and then you clear it out. Great! But then a few random stragglers follow up. Then a few more stragglers. A few more. More. Holy crap, when does this pointless, challenge-free trickle end? Sometimes it might be as many as ten to fifteen “waves” of tiny handfuls of enemies that serve no purpose other than to keep you from progressing to the next part of the level. This structure pads out the game way beyond the length it should be – it can take nearly two hours to get through a level that has a layout of space that would take twenty minutes in any other shooter.