Serious Sam 3 BFE XBLA Review

‘Serious Sam 3: BFE is a glorious throwback to the golden age of first-person shooters where men were men, cover was for amateurs and pulling the trigger made things go boom. Serving as a prequel to Serious Sam: The First Encounter, Serious Sam 3 takes place during the Earth’s final struggle against Mental’s invading legions of beasts and mercenaries.’ A port of the PC version Serious Sam 3 BFE has hit XBLA.

Once upon a time a first-person shooter didn’t need to be intelligent blockbuster hit with big budgets about honor or duty. No siree a tried and tested formula of big guns with bigger explosions, blood and guts, adrenaline filled music with sound effects to boot and hordes of aliens with intergalactic PCP habits hell bent on ripping your head off and $#!&ting down your neck was all that was needed! Oh a really serious badass protagonist always helped. Well Sam Stone is a badass indeed and anything but PC. The games opening cinematic finds you in a chopper over familiar sandy territory with Sam enlightening his pilot that he should be ‘doing blow off a stripper’s ass right now’. Welcome to Serious Sam 3 BFE, the opening cut scene sets the flavour of this first-person shooter throwback.


Gameplay kicks off when an attack on your chopper dumps you onto the rooftop of Cairo apartment block with nowt but some stylish driving gloves. Attacked by a Gnaar and with no weapons to hand its Queensbury Rules time. Well Muhammad ‘I’m hard’ Bruce Lee you are, cause this fist fight ends with you pulling your opponents eyeball out and chuckling ‘You want to be more careful, you’ll put an eye out.’ Yep the classic humour is here, maybe not as much as other Serious Sam games but still here. This satisfying first kill is all down to the newly implemented melee move, a swift press of ‘A’ will pull the eye from Gnaar’s head, a heart from a Beheaded Rocketeer’s chest or the head clean off a Kleer Skeleton.


Melee kills are good but Serious Sam is all about the guns. There are over a dozen weapons available to despatch the bad guys with. All the golden oldies are here and some new ones, the Sirian Mutilator is a ‘Bulletstorm’ inspired energy leash that tears mobs apart. Multiple Mutilators in co-op will even take down the biggest of bosses. This amount of fire power on your body is going to cause problems. With your weapons mapped to the eight directions on the D-pad, multiples in some cases, swapping can sometimes be a pain in the ass when combat is in full swing. This is something you get used to as you play more. Plenty of ammo is found stacked around levels and only an itchy trigger finger will find you without a fully loaded stock of weaponry.

Guns win prizes only when used correctly and for that we need cannon fodder. Serious Sam has plenty of varied, albeit stupid, enemies who must be attracted to Sam’s man smell because they keep coming and I mean keep coming. You can spill the guts of over twenty of Mental’s minions, from Gnaars to the Sirian Werebulls. You want bigger then there are the bosses, Scrapjack being my favourite. A gigantic meatsack with a cannon for an arm and a house sized hammer in the other. More detailed than previous iterations the enemies look great in SS3. Combat against the hordes is set amongst a back drop of varied open environments that range from the alleyways and streets of Cairo, through Egyptian temples to abandoned military outposts and more. These impressively open areas look good for the most part, there is some repetition evident but this is only obvious when combat stops and you take a breather. There are linear opportunities to explore beyond the story with the inclusion of secret areas. Sometimes frustrating to find with precision platforming needed, they can be left out but for the achievement fiends there is one for finding X amount.

Blood soaked frantic combat is the staple of Serious Sam and it is delivered in a heap load throughout the campaign. Killing is a simple affair and how you fight in game depends on what is bearing down on you. Headless Kamikaze can be dispatched in groups with a single well timed shot if you kite them around the area to form a bunch (achievement maybe?). However it is an uneven bag of tricks, with periods of sheer madness followed by periods of alien siesta that left the environments feeling quite lonesome places. I did play through the campaign on normal though (for the review honest!) and these lulls in combat will likely be a welcome break at higher difficulty levels because even on ‘Normal’ death comes again and again and again. But that’s why we are all here right? Luckily you have a quicksave option at your disposal, something I overlooked for the first two levels! Quicksaves and checkpoints come with a game freeze, albeit a brief one, and in defence with everything that was going on screen at once I never experienced any framerate loss so the save freeze was a moot point. Serious Sam 3 BFE campaign really finds itself when you play it in co-op, unfortunately the original PC sixteen player co-op support has been whittled down to a less than impressive four person affair, but what you don’t know you don’t miss. With enemy count going through the roof I found co-op far more enjoyable than just me playing against the hordes. Games were easy to find and for the most part I had no connection issues.


Tying this all up is an impressive array of audio, be it the dirty industrial music that picks up as a new wave of beasties bears down on you, the battle cry that they make or the sound effect which accompanies every satisfying gory kill.

Overall Serious Sam 3 is unlikely to win praise for deep character development or acclaim for it’s in depth storyline, but it doesn’t try to conform and be something it isn’t and in today’s quagmire of endless carbon copy first-person shooters is a good thing. What it is and what it does is be an old-school shooter with the simple ‘dumb can be fun’ formula wrapped up in a tidy XBLA title. Oh and there’s more…



Serious Sam 3 BFE comes with some day one DLC (hush in the back) The ‘Jewel of the Nile’ DLC thankfully has nothing to do with Jack T Colton. Picking up somewhere in the middle of BFE, Sam is after some well deserved R&R, ‘think massage, steak and hot tub’ or something in that order. Turns out there are some other things that need doing and what not blah blah blah, time to spread some more guts about the place. The DLC campaign is a shorter event than SS3 campaign with a total of three playable levels, though they did feel bigger given the sheer size of the open environments you’re playing in. Playable in co-op also this is much the same affair as the main campaign with some added weapons and a really difficult to find key… The DLC adds a multiplayer suite (including the classic co-op & coin co-op locked in BFE) which includes Deathmatch, CTF, Last Team Standing and My burden along with others.


If fist pumping is your thing and you think cover is for pussies in du-rags you’ve come to the right place. There is plenty of fun to be had with the game and the DLC, it’s not new and you’ve played it before but it is good. With a 1200MSP price tag apiece and 200 and 50 gamerscore respectively, there is a chance this game could be cruelly over looked and that wouldn’t be right. Try the demo and give it a go.

Nice review dude. You address pretty much everything people could want to know about the game.

I love Serious Sam, and I want to pick this up, but I just can't get over that price. 1200 is not too bad for one, but paying double that to get the whole package doesn't sit right with me. I'll probably wait until a deal of the week to pick it up anyway because I don't have money to throw about right now. Booo!

I agree! The price puts me off. It makes me feel like i'd be a mug to buy it. It's a shame as I love big Sam. I guess i'll stick to my original Xbox version. It never gets boring anyway!

Very good review though mate! It answers everything I was wondering about this latest outing for old Samuel.

Good review fella.

I've never played this before, but if it's on a good deal of the week I might be tempted. I'm a bit of a tigh ass when it comes to games and 1200ms is usually my max for a game. Paying that twice is a bit ouch inducing.

Nice review. I much prefer FPS games from the old days, I rarely enjoy recent ones so will definitely pick this up at some point. I have to go back and finish the first two games before I touch this though so I may jut wait for DotW. I know 2400 seems expensive but considering it isn't selling for any less elsewhere, such as Steam - £29.99, it's still a good deal and I would have paid it if I was going to play it soon.

I was playing a bit of this last night with a mate and thoroughly enjoyed it like all the Serious Sam games. Slayer does have a good point though as the actual game plus DLC costs aroudn £40 on steam so your actually getting quite a deal, though it may not seem like it when compared to your usual prices.

Great review as ever though Tree, keep up the good work!

SS the first one the pc was funny but the second encounter on pc and ss on the 360 was just a bit dull and too fucking difficult


will be deffo giving this a miss

great review treemunkey but you must have deep pockets to be paying 1200 msp for this!

I am hoping that Serious Sam 2 gets ported at some point, because that was a blast and hey, why not have them all?

Both the game and the DLC have been reduced in price to 800M$P each.