A tough FPS with plenty to shoot
The levels are mainly presented as a series of arenas rather than the standard narrow pathways you find in modern FPS games. There's an insane amount of enemies in the game, and they often spawn at insane rates, sometimes unfairly behind you. To survive, you need to keep your eyes and ears open and constantly strafe.
The difficulty is therefore high, but luckily you can save anywhere at the touch of a button, so even though you may constantly die, you do have that 'one-more-go' attitude. Most parts of the game I was shouting at the PC "this is insane", or "this is impossible", but after many tries, I eventually progressed just to find tougher and more numerous enemies spawn afterwards!
You may expect to constantly run out of ammunition, but there's plenty of guns in your arsenal, and power-ups are well placed. After tough arenas, there's always a large amount of pick-ups to get you back to full health, full shields, and full stocks of ammunition. You always have to be wary though, because sometimes you stumble across hidden pick-ups but collecting these often spawns more enemies; so it's risk versus reward.
The guns vary from being standard FPS weapons, such as pistols, shotguns, machine gun, to not so standard weapons like the canon and laser gun. The guns do have their strengths and weaknesses, so you will be switching them out based on the current threats in the area. You don't necessarily need to worry about reloading since they usually have a high capacity, or you will switch out for a new threat.
The enemies that you are up against are pretty relentless, especially when teamed together. There's suicide bombers, bulls, skeleton horse type enemies that come charging at you. Shock troops, mechanical walkers and scorpion-like creatures fire guns or missiles from afar. All of which can quickly deplete your health. It's always good to listen out for audio cues of when enemies spawn. The suicide bombers scream as they run, which gets louder the closer they are to you. You can hear the galloping of hooves when the skeleton creatures come charging at you, so it's always nice to be able to prepare and switch to your weapon of choice.
Graphically, the game is quite mixed. Some textures look sharp while others look a bit jagged, but it has to be noted, the frame-rate is great considering the amount of enemies it has on-screen at once.
There was many moments where I thought I was never going to finish Serious Sam due to the difficulty, but it's so tough you just can't help but come back and try again, so I did complete it in the end. It's definitely a good shooter, although I was surprised the story and character wasn't as crazy or engaging as it was.