Serious Sam Reviewed 

Being a direct port from the PC version of Serious Sam, people expected some awesome graphics. There is a lot of detailing used in this game. You will be fascinated by the use of bump mapping and lens glares. Some of the monsters that you face are some what cheesy looking, but not all. Some of the enemies are greatly detailed. You will be impressed by the explosions in this game; they have that nice ballistic look to it. The environment is greatly detailed and shows off some cool ancient Egyptian style of markings and structures. Need less to say, this game pushes the Xbox.

When starting the game, I quickly assumed that the sound wouldn't be very hot judging by the cartoon-ish noises that were used in the menu. The in game sound effects are muffed. The enemy noises are low grade and nothing too special about it but I do like the screaming headless dude with the bombs in hand and Serious Sam's comments. I still prefer to hear those sayings from Duke Nukem. The environmental ambient noise is very repetitive, it's as if that eagle follows you every where you go. The gun fire and explosions are decent, but still lacking in quality. The musical score only really kicks in when they're enemies around. Otherwise, you travel in total silence. Sometimes you'll hear faint music playing in the background. And the Arabian music is not something that I like listening to when on a rampage.

Serious Sam will take you some time to get used to the controls. So in other words, there is a slight learning curve. But that is only with the thumb stick. You can configure the thumb stick with a few preset axis configurations. If you find the controls a bit awkward, you can always invert looking, adjust sensitivity, use auto centering and aiming. Now for controls, you will be using the right trigger to fire and the left trigger to jump. The Jewel buttons are mainly used to select next, previous, or 2 favorite weapons. The white jewel is used for entering Netricsa aka mission briefing. The black jewel is used to activate, zoom and center your view. You have the option to change these configurations as well if you are not comfortable with the default settings.

There is not much I can say about Serious Sam other than it's a shoot to kill type of game; so if it moves, shoot it. While in single player, you will go from level to level just knocking out everything in site. The end result is for you to destroy the evil Mental and rid the galaxy of all evil threat.

Although this game offers a great stress reliever in letting you shoot anything that gets in your way, it will eventually lose its fun factor. After being trapped in a large area and being bombarded by waves after waves of silly looking monsters, you will see what I'm talking about. I must admit that I love the array of weapons that you can choose from, weapons that are even more devastating than the last. I think the point of the game is just to use all the color weapons.

Now to help heighten what excitement this game has left, they added several multiplayer options. You can either play cooperative or deathmatch. Now the deathmatch games can be played 4 players on a single Xbox or 16 players spanning over 4 Xboxes with 4 players on each via system link and/or hub. The cooperative can be played 2 players on a single Xbox and up to 8 players across 4 Xboxes with two players on each Xbox.

Now the deathmatch aspect is pretty cool, you just run around the level looking for others so you can blast their heads off. You get to use what ever weapons are found in the map. It's just an ordinary deathmatch game. The coop lets you pit yourself and a friend together in the middle of the single player levels to complete. So if you don't like playing the single player on your own, you can get a friend or friends to help you play cooperative.

Now this game is far from perfect. First off, there are some seriously long load times. When I say long, it ranges from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Yes, I have waited that long for this game to load. Now another problem that I had was the disc kept stopping on me and giving me a message saying that my Xbox lens may be dirty. I believe their might have been a defect in the CD. But I read that many users had faced these same problems.

If you are looking for a game that is no more than senseless killing with a weak story line, then you will enjoy this game. Serious Sam is great to just put in and blast a bunch of monsters away. But I really wouldn't waste my time with this one if you are not into games without a strong storyline. Also, the fact of the defected CD could also hinder many others into restarting the game and waiting several minutes for the game to load over and over again.

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