Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter

Pick up the game if you loved the original or have a thing for retro shooters, otherwise you'll probably want to stick to modern shooters to get the most play time bang for your buck.

For me Serious Sam never has been a “serious” game – and it won’t be ever.

As it is, for all the added beauty and inherited class, I don't think there's enough freshness or sophistication here for that to happen.

What needs to be remembered is that this isn't a brand new Serious Sam game, but the original in new clothes. As such it feels a little dated compared with modern releases. It's undoubtedly fun and relentless in its strive for all-out action, but with a recommended retail price of £18, it feels a bit light.

For all its simplicity, there's no denying that Serious Sam HD has enough old-school charm and addictive gameplay to make it a worthwhile purchase for gamers that just want to get some killing done the old fashioned way: with a portable ship cannon, gatling gun and four-barreled rocket launcher in your pocket.

Serious Sam? Stylish shooting & smashing of sh*tloads of supermutants. Story? ...sucks. [Issue#187]

It looks and feels like the original game, which is not necessarily a good thing. If you haven't ever played a Serious Sam game before and are looking for some crackbrained and wicked coop-action, you may give it a chance. But if you are more interested in a good story, great level design, lots of variety or at least some gameplay improvements over the original Serious Sam, you should definitely look somewhere else.

Sam is eager to bring ultimate mayhem over the legions of his enemies. If you do not own the old game and hate lifting your trigger finger take a shot.

For 20 bucks, I think it’s a bit much to ask to be playing the same game again, this time on steam with achievements.

Looks good...not enough is new. [Feb 2010, p.83]

As long as you aren’t expecting anything revolutionary, Serious Sam HD will deliver its classic action gameplay with a graphic boost. Just for fans of brainless shooters.

Serious Sam HD is a nice multiplayer shooter for the meantime. However, not more.

Yes, just like in 2001 this game can be fun and will be remembered for consequently reducing the game until there’s nothing left but shooting things. In a way, that’s simple and honest and worth playing – once. This is a modern version, but graphically not up to date.

Quotation forthcoming.

At first, Serious Sam HD is a nostalgic experience, complete with familiar locations, low-poly monsters and terrible cinematics. The illusion is short-lived, though, because this 3rd generation Serious Engine remake lost all its original charm – as if it’s not a remake at all, but a poor clone.

This game goes along, unfortunately.

A shot for shot remake of the original - and therefore one of the most pointless makeovers of the year.

It's great to have Sam back, but it hasn't whet our appetite for Serious Sam 3. [Issue#28, p.57]

I love the deliberate left-field designs of the monsters, and there's a purity to the way it approaches first-person shooting action that I wouldn't want to change, yet the game is so brutally intense that my frayed nerves and trembling hands can only handle it in half-hour chunks at most. Maybe that's Serious Sam's fault, or maybe I'm just not serious enough.

It’s really hard to criticise a game that is actually very good. But the principle stands. It is frankly immoral to demand money for something that has simply been regurgitated. Thus Serious Sam HD is a reprehensible example of commercial greed, and for that deserves our eternal scorn.