Review: Serious Sam: The First Encounter

At a Glance

ESRB Rating: M - Mature Audiences
My Rating: Ages 13 and up
Genre: First Person Shooter
License: Commercial
Fun-O-Meter:
Release Year: 2001
Review Published On: October 12, 2018
Played on: Martha & Thaddeus

Available on:

Windows

Available from:

Humble Store
Steam

Areas of Concern:
  • Graphic violence
  • Fantasy magic
  • Mildly suggestive content


How to Save and Pause:

Your progress is saved automatically at the beginning of each level. You can also save manually, or use quicksaves if you need to.

You can pause the action by hitting ESC or by bring up NETRICSA.

Time needed per session:

Definitely plan on playing for longer blocks of time, as the levels in this game tend to be pretty large and full of places to explore.

Does this game pose issues for Christian players?

Some players may have concerns
This game features a lot of blood and gore, even compared to other first person shooters. However, this can be disabled or even turned into candy and glitter, which turns the over the top violence into something akin to slapstick, like youd see in older cartoons.

Screenshots

[view screenshot]
Pop goes the bad guy

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A watery battle

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The mean streets of ancient Egypt



Game Overview

In the mid-1990s, First Person Shooters were all the rage. Many of them tried to make it a contest to see how much blood and violence they could include in a game, and many more also tried to depict their heroes as powerful, square-jawed, gods among men who dripped with enough testosterone to kill a horse. These games were basically an unapologetic male power fantasy on steroids. Eventually, someone had to be self-aware enough to look at the meatheads populating the genre and just laugh about the ridiculousness of it all.

And thats where Serious Sam: The First Encounter comes in. Over the top and reveling in its own disregard for sanity, this game sought to be both an excellent game and a parody of everything the genre had become known for. With its muscle bound hero, huge guns, large firearms, and threadbare plot, it looks like your standard FPS. But looks can be deceptive, and once you start playing the game youll be finding unexpected things.

For example, Sam Serious Stone likes to make sarcastic or silly comments on the events unfolding around him. You can also find some references to popular movies hidden throughout the levels. Overall, the entire tone of the game is one that is driven by the idea of just having fun with really big guns, rather than the realistic war is hell mentality that some games try to push.

However, as good as this game is, The First Encounter suffers from one primary flaw: its the first game in the series, and thus its rough around the edges. The team behind the game was clearly just warming up, because once you move on to the Second Encounter, there are more jokes, more crazy secrets, and more content in general. This isnt a bad game (far from it!) but its dwarfed by the rest of the series.

My recommendation is to pick up both the First and Second Encounter, then play the latter. If you have both games in your Steam library, you can play the First Encounters levels using the Second Encounters superior engine. Alternatively, pick up Serious Sam Revolution, which is an upgraded version of both First and Second Encounter. However, its stuck in Steams Early Access, so I cant say for sure how improved it really is.

Points of Interest

Classic FPS action

Since this was originally released in the 90s, the fancier stuff thats become commonplace in recent years isnt present, and its a welcome change of pace. Theres no leveling up, no RPG-style stat system, no skill trees, and the story is told via skippable text screens rather than elaborate cutscenes. You also dont need to focus on things like headshots, as critical hits dont exist in this game.

You do have to worry about dealing with loads and loads of enemies in the large and open levels, however, and thats what makes this game fun.

Not so serious

While this game is a manly First Person Shooter, its also a parody of the genre. When creating this game and its sequel, the developers clearly asked themselves, what would be fun? and ran with it. One example thats impossible to miss is found fairly early in the game: Sam triggers a giant boulder trap, and after being chased by it for a little bit, hell casually whistle part of the theme to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

In fact, a lot of the jokes in the First Encounter involve Sams silly commentary on whatevers going on.

Tons of fun secrets

Secret stashes of powerups and items were the bread and butter of classic games like Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake. Naturally, Serious Sam takes things one step further, as theres a plethora of hidden goodies scattered around. There are even hidden levels that you can unlock and explore, provided you can find their entrance. Of course, some of these secrets are more like ridiculous easter eggs than what youd normally expect in a game like this, but that just makes triggering them much more fun.

Steam community features

If youre into collecting them, theres a set of Steam trading cards available for the First Encounter. More players will be interested in collecting the 35 achievements that are up for grabs, though the majority of them are for doing various things during multiplayer deathmatches.

Not worth playing directly

As much fun as this game is, the main reason for owning the First Encounter isnt so you can play it directly. You see, if you own both the First and Second Encounter, then you can access the First Encounters campaign through the Second Encounters program. The Second Encounter HD uses a better engine that supports more details and fixes some pretty annoying bugs, so why use the old, buggy engine when you dont need to?

Game-breaking bug

This is one reason the Second Encounters engine is better: theres a bug in the First Encounters engine that can cause your game to crash when the final boss spawns. You cant get around this bug in-game, but there is a possible solution. Navigate to the folder containing the games files, and run the DirectX setup program from the redist folder. Once youve done that, re-validate the games Steam cache and try again.

If all else fails, just play the campaign through the Second Encounter.

Concerns and Issues

Violence, blood, and gore

Games in the 1990s often tried to push the limit on how much carnage they could get away with -- as much as people today joke about it, there was a moral panic over video games back then for a reason. As Serious Sam is both a 1990s FPS and a parody of the genre, it deliberately goes for absurd levels of blood and gore. But, this game was meant to be enjoyable for almost everyone, and thus it also caters to those who dont like the graphic content.

You can customize the gore and blood separately to suit your tastes. Dont like either? Just turn them off. Want the monsters to bleed green ooze instead of blood? Thats an option too. You can also have the monsters bleed pastel stars and confetti, and if gore is enabled on that setting, theyll pop into lollipops and candy canes instead of body parts.

Regardless of what youve made it look like, youre still spending the game shooting monsters with various pistols, shotguns, machine guns, missiles, death rays, and even a portable canon. The monsters youre fighting will returning the favor by shooting at you with everything from ray guns to fireballs, though some types of enemies act like suicide bombers: theyll rush at you and explode when they get close enough.

A little bit of magic

While most of the magic encountered in this game is just really fancy technology, some of the enemies are said to use magic in some form -- usually as a means of attack. For example, the aludran reptiloids conjure up huge fireballs that they fling at you. The rank and file enemies also use magic missile launchers, which, if I was to be very honest, are just guns that fire really slow bullets. Another techno-magical device is found in Sams pistols, which provides then with an unlimited amount of ammo.

Mildly suggestive content

The harpies, true to the term, are bird/women hybrids. Their only clothing is their own feathers, which is about as modest as your typical bikini. That said, youre probably going to be too busy dodging their magical bolts and claws to ogle them. I mean, you can try if you want, but they tend to appear in huge flocks and are rather fast moving targets at close range.

Also, the game ends with Sam facing off against a gigantic monster -- a battle that is immediately followed up with a joke about how size does matter.

Egyptian gods are actually aliens

The core of the games story revolves around a race of aliens. They visited Earth in the distant past, and installed themselves in Egyptian culture as some sort of gods. In reality, the elaborate and magical rituals revolving around them is just a bunch of disguised technology. For example, the ritual used to contact these gods is little more than an elaborate method of turning on a giant inter-stellar antenna array (otherwise known as the Great Pyramid).