Serious Sam 3: BFE

If you're weary of last holiday's high profile first person shooters and their endless hype, Serious Sam 3's endless enemies and endless ammo are the perfect antidote. The single player campaign is a rush that rarely lets up, and it gets awesomely insane when you play it in co-op with some friends. If you missed Sam 3 over the holidays, you owe it to yourself to pick it up now.

Serious Sam 3 is a game that deserves to be played, because it shows what shooters were and could have been. It shows that there's more to the genre than what AAA developers have shown us in the past decade.

Pure mayhem, pure fun, pure Serious Sam, pure first-person shooting. [Jan 2012, p.66]

You get an awesome experience at an absurd value with Serious Sam 3: BFE. Not only is the campaign incredibly substantial, but it offers an experience not seen since Painkiller.

There's just something about holding the trigger and mowing down hundreds of aliens that were kind enough to walk right into the hail of bullets that puts a smile on my face. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to ice my trigger finger.

A worthy descendant of the original Serious Sam titles, it's a FPS that deviates from the standards of today's games: its difficulty level is high, it challenges your reflexes, it's utterly addictive and it's honest, as it delivers on what it promises. [February 2012]

Except for the pieces where SS3 is like the old Serious Sam, awash in enemy hordes, this Serious Sam feels almost more like the original FPS Duke Nukem' than anything else.

Serious Sam 3: BFE is a fast-paced FPS old school, for the love of PC gamers.

It's a lot of fun indeed. A lot of backbreaking, grueling, soul-destroying fun.

This game is the opposite of modern FPS. Enemies attack in hordes and the levels are labyrinths. Serious Sam 3: BFE is a game from 90's made with the tools of the 21st century. [March 2012]

With its awesome environments, outrageous creatures, powerful weapons, and insane level of challenging gameplay, there should be enough violent bloodletting to satiate the hardest of hardcore players.

Punishing some rambunctious horde of carrion eaters was never that entertaining. Serious Sam 3 moves to battle in all his glory, even though he stumbles over a couple of unfinished details and overkill difficulty.

A few weaker sections do little to tarnish the fun of this old-school rooted shooter.

Serious Sam 3: BFE does one thing: lets you kill HUGE numbers of aliens at a nearly unrelenting pace. But it does that one thing well. If that sounds like a good time to you, then I recommend BFE without reservation. For everyone else, this is great throwback to the way shooters used to be that is definitely worth a look.

I am extremely glad of Serious Sam 3's existence. It serves as a timely reminder of how shooters don't need to be highly restrictive rollercoasters that heavily manipulate the player in order to create intensity and epic spectacle.

You get quite a bit for the money, too, as the campaign is quite long, and the wealth of features, gameplay modes (including deathmatch-type play for those who desperately need it for some reason) and configuration options make this one of the most raw, brutal, and unapologetically fun PC FPS experiences you'll have had in quite a while.

It seems odd to slam Serious Sam 3 for a lack of restraint, especially if you've spent space arguing that it's not as mindless as it appears. So, a piece of advice, rather: play it in spurts, play it with friends in sixteen-player co-op, and shoot many monsters.

You will either love or hate Sam 3 based on what it does, and what it aims to do. It's a Serious Sam game, in every way, for better or worse.

A worthy successor. If you like rapid fire without tactics or much of a story, this one is for you. I found it a bit monotonous in the long run – but for a quick session of mindless fun, Serious Sam 3: BFE is perfect.

At the end of the day, Serious Sam: BFE isn't as much of a welcome throwback to old-school gaming staples as the original title was a decade ago. But, thankfully, that doesn't mean that it's a failure or a complete waste of time.

I can see a certain subset of nostalgic shooter fans having a total blast with Serious Sam 3, but you have to be pretty enthusiastic about old-school co-op shooting to get your $40 worth out of the game.

Serious Same 3 shines in the co-op mode. The singleplayer gets a bit boring after a while and the competitive multiplayer doesn't stay fun for long. The co-op is where it's at, letting you play with 15 friends in a very hectic game. The gameplay is great and stays true to the older Serious Sam games. The concept still works great, just don't expect a great story.

Serious Sam 3 is riddled with flaws, but there is so much flying bacon that you can fill an entire meat plant. It's a decent game that could have been better.

Serious Sam 3 might not be for everyone, but it's the type of game that made first-person shooters a genre all their own, and serious – at the risk of abusing the word – gamers should absolutely give this game, if not the whole series, a serious look.

One of the most beloved characters of PC gaming is back: classic gameplay, hysterical shooting and strafing and crazy enemies grant a lot of fun, but after a while you'll feel the repetitiveness of the mix.