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Mainstream video games have almost always followed the 'bigger is better' model. As the years pass, we want greater production values, bigger studios, more ambitious concepts, hundreds of VFX and modelling departments, celebrity voice actors and scriptwriters. Video games have replaced Hollywood, with GTA 5 earning more than $7B in profit - that's almost 3x the higher grossing movie of all time, Avengers: End Game.
To sustain this hunger, video games are becoming more and more pricey. Spyro 2 cost me £14.99 on release date in 1999. Now, the newest Modern Warfare 2 costs £59.99 (which doesn't even include all the multiplayer content - that costs extra). However, keeping up appearances is perhaps not all it's cracked up to be. The smash hit Dark Souls was produced up to 50% cheaper than its contemporaries, and to give an extreme example, the initial build of Minecraft only required 6 days of manpower to produce, ultimately becoming the highest selling game of all time.
Serious Sam's success is directly attributable to modest means. Appearing in 2001, the game released for $19.99 RRP in North America, challenging the established $49.99 price tags of its contemporaries and offering a budget friendly shooter. The concept of the game was straight-forward: no elaborate story, complicated scripts, Hollywood voice acting, or hundreds of side-quests. Instead, it aimed to do only a few things, but to do it well.
Serious Sam's gameplay revolves almost entirely around horde combat. This is the idea that there's a craft, almost a science, to overwhelming the players with extreme numbers of enemies while also keeping it fun, balanced and thoughtful The game pits you against hundreds of enemies (1,000+ across a whole level) and challenges you to move precisely and tactically eliminate certain threats first.
For example, suicide bombers require urgent action and must be eliminated before they reach the player. However, what if there's a stampede of bulls running at you too? This forces the player to calculate the threat level of each enemy in accordance to the amount of potential damage they can cause you, as well as time you have available to react to each one. In this case, the suicide bombers may look the highest priority, but the stampede of bulls are bound to reach the player first.
But what if a walker is added into the mix? It has a high damage output, but can be dodged relatively easily, as long as you have time to pay attention to its attacks. Do you? You might need to kill the suicide bombers first to give you time to think about that...
Movement is essential here, and for the most part it feels fast and responsive. Sam can jump and dodge incoming attacks and you don't have to worry about stamina. One slight is that switching weapons on a controller can be quite challenging due to the high number of weapons. The weapon wheel is awkward to use, and Serious Sam could learn much from Quake and GTA 5's weapon wheel system which is much more streamlined. This causes you to frantically scroll through weapons at times, putting you at a slight disadvantage in a game which is exceptionally difficult, even on the "normal" setting.
However, if you hold your nerve you'll almost always get a thrilling and fair fight. Serious Sam looks absolutely gorgeous with superb lighting, texture detail and gore effects while offering a 100% rock solid 60FPS in all situations - impressive given the hundreds of enemies often on screen. Although some open environments feel a bit destitute, Serious Sam packs a lot of secrets into its low number of buildings and interiors and I found it genuinely challenging to seek them all out.
Overall Serious Sam, ironically for a game based around horde combat, simultaneously proves that less is more. It seems fitting that, 20 years later, the game is still finding its way into cheap festive sales (I bought the game for £2.19) while providing the same joy and challenge that it did for gamers back in 2001. This is a really easy game to recommend to FPS veterans and, if you can handle high difficulties, is an absolute blast to play.