I've played this up to New Orleans on I Am Death Incarnate, and it's pretty
. I wouldn't play it on this difficulty, I only do this because I am a masochist and can do a better job at bitching about videogames when it's constantly fucking me over at a difficulty which is supposed to be the most challenging and requires you to know the game the best
Difficulty doesn't seem to change anything other than enemy accuracy and damage output as usual, enemies will still behave like dumbfucks when they don't have you in their sights with the finger on the trigger
You die ridiculously fast, 100 HP will go to 0 within a second
There are no Übersoldaten bulletsponges anymore, but the new cooler enemy types die too fast to be of any real threat as you can whip out two ARs with armor piercing and kill them under three seconds with dozens of spare ammo to boot, which is even more laughable when they try to pass those enemies off as the final fight in a level. Like there's some seriously cool enemy types here which can dash around the place and shoot projectiles, or others which can melt the cover you're hiding behind, but they are killed too easily and never get to be used properly
You get a ground pound which can be used to crash through panels in the floor to other areas, but it's fucking useless and the developers seem to forget completely about it later on
Performance is crappy here, while TNO ran at a steady framerate on medium-high settings, I had to go all low for this one to even get something playable, with some sections dropping to single digit FPS for no discernible reason
I feel like there's even less weapons in TNC than in TNO. Most of the time you use dual SMGs or assault rifle with a scope when the game throws so much hitscan in an open area at you that you are forced to play popamole if you don't want to die. Only when the situation is proper enough for you to use dual shotguns is the game any fun
I dig commanders, but there needs to be a limit on continuously respawning enemies if they're all going to be of the hitscan kind, just send in the robots which throw projectiles
I think the shit about the narrative is slightly overblown given how much of it is based on contextless cutscene snippets, while it is still quite similar in tone to previous games, though somewhat more egregious with the tonal inconsistency and making the nationality of diverse characters more pronounced by having them say something in their native language every five seconds while speaking English, like how the Finnish girl wants to build a sauna, which seems pretty :racist: to me. There's some deus ex machina shit in here though
Later on you get an upgrade which lets you ram through walls and enemies like the fucking Kool-Aid man, which combined with dual shotguns is about as fun as the game is gonna get with you sprinting around the goddamn place like a madman, would be better if ramming enemies wasn't so bloody clunky and if you could shoot while sprinting and if you got this upgrade from the fucking start
level design on the whole feels worse, less F.E.A.R. like arenas and more open battlefields or rubble that's confusing to navigate
some of the touted mini-bosses are ridiculously cheesable
Had I not been playing on the highest difficulty and dying frequently, I'd feel the game was more cutscene and non-interactive in-game cinematic than game
wouldn't recommend this though, will elaborate later
Serious Sam games look like classic FPS games, but their basic flat levels and bullet hell encounters with elaborate spawn sequnces, make them play more like shmups, or top down shooters, except from first person perspective.
I've always maintained that the Serious Sam games are just first-person tower defense games, except the tower is mobile. I don't think it deserves to be called an arena shooter in a derogatory light, some thought does go into enemy composition and environmental gimmicks. The chumps who wanted 'real' level design got it in the starting levels of BFE which fucking sucked until you got to the oasis and the game went back to being classic Sam
