Once you leave Italy and head to France, things become even more open for you and if you thought the levels around Rome were large, you ain’t see nothing yet.
Being able to choose how to upgrade Sam meant that I felt more connected to him than ever and I wasn’t just controlling a robot guy, so that was a nice touch. You can now upgrade Sam, there are not a heap of options, but the ones there are nice and you will want to upgrade him, because doing so will let you duel wield weapons, reload faster and more.
The addition of the side missions helps highlight that the game has evolved a bit, since the series began some 20 years ago and while those additions are nice, they are not all the game is bringing with it. By freedom, what I mean is that the game provides you with a number of side objectives that you can undertake or ignore, if you do ignore them, you might miss out on some sweet weapons or extra items, I know I debated on one and the reward was a mini nuke, but I was wanting to push on, so I skipped it. Initially you only start out with a pistol and a knife, which is ok, but pretty soon you find a shotgun, then a double barrel shotgun and the gun count keeps increasing, but you are not handed all your guns, which helps highlight one of the nice new additions the game offers, freedom. This was always something the series loved to do, but here they have managed to amp it up further here, because there are times when the enemy count can easily break 100 and that is only the beginning. It is nice to get more context to the running and the shooting, I just wish it tied together better, the problem is I can’t give a great example without spoiling the story and I won’t because it is still interesting, it just would highlight my point perfectly.Īs I mentioned before, the game is still just running around and shooting everything, it is just basically dancing with guns, because when waves of enemies come at you, there are a lot of dodging and shooting. Setting up a mission is fine, but the cutscenes at the end tend to ignore everything that happened to get to that point, even when Sam first meets the big bad, they ignore it and just push forward. The story more or less plays out as bookends to the games chapters, though you occasionally get some story in the middle of them, this is a bit of a double edge sword. Each member adds something to the dynamic and while Hellfire and Carter tend to be more hands off in the action department, but the other members will be heavily involved and the mission they have seems simple, find a priest in Rome, easier said than done, help them locate a powerful weapon and taken down the alien threat, simple. Sam is no longer a one-man army, in the sense that he has other people with him, there is the rookie Kenny, the pilot Hellfire, the alien conspiracist Carter, the loudmouth Rodriguez and the silent one Jones.
Aliens have invaded, that much is true and Sam is a member of a specialist group of soldiers, who travel the world, taking on any alien threats and also take control of any potentially dangerous and powerful artefacts they discover. The question we have to ask ourselves is, does the return of Sam bring back some old school fun, or should this artefact of gaming, be left alone?Īliens have invaded and Sam uses an army’s worth of guns to blow them up, that is the story, well it was in the past, but this time around there is actually a proper story being told. Over the years, we have had tactical shooters, gritty shooters, twitch shooters, team shooters and shooters that relied on ink, but there hasn’t been anything like Serious Sam for a while.