Serious Sam's Bogus Detour

A pretty decent game. Challenging, ton of weapons, enemies, secrets, boss fights, skills to upgrade etc. Everything is there. Would be a lot of fun. But it is bogged down by the outright terrible save system. Every time I stopped playing it was because of checkpoints being far and few between. Fight a big battle, explore for 10 minutes after and then accidentally step on a mine which kills you and you can do it all over again. No thanks. It gets super annoying super quickly and is the reason I stopped playing the game. Also, when you load a save from the main menu, it does not even have enough decency to properly remember everything from when it saved. Pickups will be missing, enemies will have different weapons, some monsters spawn again, that experience pickup that dropped before does not now... Losing progress to a bad save system is NOT fun. All could be easily solved by just having a quicksave/manual saves option instead of the pseudo-retro 1-ups (which disappear after every level by the way). I reloaded after every death anyway so it got too annoying to bear by level 4. A real shame because the game itself would be quite enjoyable. Can't give more than 3 stars for that reason.

Imagine a dual stick shooter with humor, ultra fast action and really fun and hard. now fuse it with serious sam, gauntlet and add some hammerwatch to the mix. What you got is this precious gem. very addictive, fun, challenging and customizable. In fact, you will laugh with the jokes, and even more if you like the story of the world like me.

I was very disappointed that this game doesn't work on LAN. The game is quite fun but much more fun with friends. No LAN support kinda ruins this game's potential for a LAN party option where the original games in the series worked flawlessly over LAN with no internet connection.

The shooting mechanics of this game are pretty good, there are lots of weapons, and the usual lineup of Sam enemies. Big explosions and things getting turned into meaty chunks. The combat part of the game is good and satisfying. They've also crammed some RPG mechanics into the game, which let you spend points on things like faster reloading or higher maximum health. It's fine but it doesn't offer enough variation to warrant a second playthrough so it is mostly pointless and out of place in a Serious Sam game. However there are a few things that really let this game down. First is the movement speed, which is painfully slow given the size of the maps. They have added in a dodge/roll move, which is on cooldown, so you will be constantly spamming the space bar while walking around to try to go a bit faster. Avoiding these sorts of degenerate mechanics is why we play Sam games in the first place, so it is disappointing that they didn't just increase the movement speed. This is made worse by the lack of a map, this is a problem because the levels are large and labyrinthine, and filled with doom-style RGB keys and doors. You are expected to backtrack and also know where things are. The mission log will say something like "go to the library", but you have no idea where that is. I probably spent 20% of my time in this game fighting and the rest just walking/rolling around. Then there are the minefields... patches of invisible mines that you can shoot but only once you have approached to within a short distance. These things absolutely kill the pacing of the game, as you are forced to inch forward slowly clearing away mines. There's not just one or two minefields either, they put them everywhere, in almost every level. Finally there is no way to save the game, only checkpoints, which is bad for obvious reasons. But worst of all, if you finish a level and then quit while at the level select screen, it doesn't save your progress. It only saves when you start the next level. Very obnoxious design and caused me to lose progress more than once. All this caused me to give up on the game about half way through, it was simply too much work to get to the fun shooting parts of the game.