Serious Sam 3 BFE Review

Developer Digital certainly knows how to deliver visceral FPS fun on the gaming screen with the Serious Sam 3BFE on the PC platform. The goal is simple – annihilate a horde of unearthly enemies in the old-school

arcade tradition. What you have is just you in t-shirt and jeans, supported by an arsenal of weapons and a powerful PC engine, no health regeneration mumbo-jumbo, no third person cover maneuvers, and just about 500
nemeses between you and…another 500 nemesis. What could be more engaging?

It’s dumb fun alright with the oodles of sadistic violence. But it takes some real intelligence to organize all that spectacular mayhem into a cohesive totality to bring the player to enjoy dumb fun. As they say, there’s a method to the madness, and with Serious Sam, a lot of fun in the mayhem. If you’re a fan of wholesale animated violence and slaughter to the max and nothing else, rejoice, Serious Sam 3BFE delivers in spades. There’s just nothing else out there that comes close.

The Good News about Serious Sam 3 BFE

Total carnage and mayhem never looked so gorgeous than on High Definition visuals that Serious Sam 3BFE has oodles of. I never thought such violence could be made more impressive and visceral than seeing it on the wide screen format in full HD. The fun obliterating your enemies is best done best under the Easy game mode where your weapons are almost unlimited and your health becomes rechargeable. I could even set the blood to stay red, or green, or replaced with fragrant flowers or magical stars.

But the most satisfying crowning jewel in the game is its survival mode, where Sam’s signature uber-violence really shines through. With up to 15 companions, the mode is the epitome of “dumb fun” ethos. It’s here where you fight your enemies with the most predictable but immensely powerful set of weaponry right from the start and where the real game rhythm makes the most impactful thrill. And because there’s really nothing new in the game, the familiarity of FPS and arcade gaming makes playing it a no brainer.

The Not So Good News about Serious Sam 3 BFE

There’s always something to carp about a slaughter FPS game that has elements of what’s familiar with the genre just made visually better with HD. The holes become apparent especially when played in single player
mode over longer hours. Battle fatigue sets in quickly, but that’s something you expect when there’s really thing else to do but go through an amazingly endless clutter of monsters to decimate. It gets even more numbing when there’s not enough rest to laugh or smile at a humorous situation. Maybe I could leave with the debilitating experience of subduing all the creatures thrown my way, but the lack of wit, charm and humor certainly rubs the franchise of what little thinking is left on the player.

Screenshot from Serious Sam 3 (Credit: Devolver)

The Bottom Line

The game certainly has no pretensions to being other than what is does best – deliver fun with a faithful heritage to past old school of on-screen mayhem and delectable FPS carnage. Is it just another redundant FPS that is flooding the markets lately? What is there to complain when the HD visuals is just as breathtaking as the violence spread all over the screen. It’s just sad that in paying tribute to the old with a paean to what has made past FPS a real adrenalin release, Crotean somehow missed out on what’s new and more human, such as spicing it with a little humanity with a dash of comic humor. But let there be no mistake, I find Serious Sam 3 delivering what it sets out to accomplish. No pretensions to greatness here. Just plain fun, dumb fun.