Serious Sam's Bogus Detour

Serious Sam returns with style. Furious, crazy, brutal, and just as he was from the very beginning. Different point of view and beautiful style fit well and it does not matter whether you are fans of the series or not. Anyone will enjoy this uncontrolled massacre.

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour explores new sides of Sam’s over-the-top approach to FPS gaming while staying true to the essentials of the saga.

Crackshell has managed to drip every ounce of Serious Sam and rework it into the twin-stick shooter formula with immaculate imitation of the first-person shooter its based upon. Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour looks great, plays fantastic and has enough challenge to offer something for even the serious fans of Serious Sam – it is literally those games portrayed into a different genre. Even if you have never touched a Serious Sam game before, this pixel 2D shoot-em-up is an amusing blast of arcade entertainment on your own, but an absolute bucket brimming with joyous madness when you bring friends along, making it an easy recommendation for people looking for their next 90s action fix.

As far as co-op experiences go, Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is up there with the best. Even in single player, you’re in for a damn good ride.

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a surprisingly large shooter that takes the long-running arcade FPS and translates it perfectly into a new genre. The gorgeous pixel art is well detailed and animated, and can pack a ton of critters on screen at once without any issues. Blasting through an area, painting the floor red with the remains of a vicious horde that couldn’t quite stand up to a rocket launcher, is basically what I pictured games would turn into back in the Genesis/SNES days. It’s got fast action, tons of weapons, a huge variety of creatures and a handful of bosses to use them against and firepower flies everywhere when the encounters heat up. Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour may look different from Sam’s usual outings, but 2D fans will have as much fun checking out the excellent pixel art as series fans will tearing through enemies both familiar and new.

The game is pure fun until it becomes painstakingly difficult. The problem is not even the difficulty level itself, it’s the fact that when you fail, you have to restart the whole huge level and you lose all the character progression you achieved on it. Poof! The last 40 minutes never happened. [09/2017, p.60]

Your enjoyment of Serious Sam's Bogus Detour is going to depend on your enjoyment of overly difficult shooters and your need for multiplayer. If the idea of having to traverse very large levels with the distinct possibility of starting all over when you lose all of your lives infuriates you, then this might not be the best game to play. If you want to engage in co-op or adversarial multiplayer, then make sure to convince friends to buy it since the online population is more interested in creating stages and mods than actually playing the core game. For everyone else, Bogus Detour is a solid shooter that is challenging, engaging and worth checking out.

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a seriously fun game bogged down by a couple of serious problems. If you’re a big Serious Sam fan, have online friends to play with, or you’re just looking for a challenging twin stick shooter, then this game is worth its $15 price tag. Just be aware that the multiplayer is pretty much dead, some of the game design needs a bit of polish, and there’s not much content outside of workshop maps.

Bogus Detour is a quite enjoyable spin-off, particularly in its multiplayer mode. We think fans of the series will like it, even if it is a little bit simple and it doesn't take any risks.

Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is a good twin stick shooter that derives much from the past of the famous FPS.