I'm done with Serious Sam's Bogus Detour.
If you're familiar with Hammerwatch then this game comes from the same devs, and is almost the same type of game, a Gauntlet clone that evolves into a twin-stick shooter as Serious Sam takes on hordes of monsters in Ancient Egypt, Troy, Greece and finally the Moon! The usual assortment of monsters return from various SSam games such as Kleers, Marsh-hoppers, kamikazes, Werebulls and Mechas, but sadly the only new additions are generic enemies like turrets, soldiers, armored kamikazes (uh-oh) and those ugly plants from Hammerwatch.
Sam also gets his usual toys to play with, but the new arsenal consists of a railgun, a weapon that fires spinning sawblades that bounce off walls (and are required to solve a few puzzles) and an electric gun, plus a super-secret "Ooze Gun" that seems to mostly be an area denial weapon. (And there's even a melee weapon upgrade if you can find it.)
What sets Bogus Detour away from the other Serious Sam games are the RPG aspects - yes, you heard that right. Sam now gains levels which earn him stars which equal as skillpoints. Every level gain earns Sam three stars, but more stars can be found in-game in deviously hidden areas. These skill points can be spent on abilities such as boosted health and armor, increased ammo capacity and power-ups to a few weapons. Not a balanced system in any way (way too many skills involve boosting the pistols) but seasoned ARPG players should quickly spot the good abilities.
There's also the multiplayer and level editor to play with, but I didn't bother much with those. I think, however, that both will help to keep the game alive and kicking for years to come.
Bogus Detour is a fun game to play, but what lays it low is the "Death by a thousand cuts"-syndrome. There are far too many little things wrong with the game that need to be fixed before the game can be considered worth your money.
# Due to the dimensons of modern monitors players are put at an disadvantage when fighting vertically, as monsters will often attack from off-screen where you can't see them.
# All the weapons have the wrong quickslots! Melee weapon and pistols share the No. 1 spot, but then shotguns get No.2 (when they're normally No. 3) and so on. The Serious Cannon is at No. 6 for some reason. This really screws with veteran SSam players.
# Monsters are dumb as bricks, they either run at you or hold their position to shoot at you once they see you.
# In order to make Kleers "stand out" they've added a "stun attack" to it, which slows down Sam severly if it connects. Worse than that it prevents Sam from firing for a few seconds, meaning that a stray Kleer that manages to pounce on you can easily be the death of you!
# There's a secret level that requires a force field to be disabled. Unlike the rest of the entire game that tells you everything you need to do, the game is strangely silent about what you need to do to take down the force field itself. (Hint, there's a camera on a tripod nearby that Sam can carry about. Point it at blue forcefields that are in your way to disable them.)
# The final boss is an utter cheesefest. Two giant mechs that stomp around raining bullet-death upon you in a circular arena. At the edge of the arena are 8 pillars. Once you've dealt enough damage to the mechs, out comes an never-ending horde of Engineers that run to these pillars and not only throw up a shield around one (or both) of the mechs, but also repair it! This means you have to hunt down every last Engineer at the pillars (and they love to use the pillars for cover) before being able to attack the mechs again, and hopefully you can blast enough health off the mechs before the next spawn of Engineers comes in! This gets real tiresome superfast.
# The game crashed at the final level far too often for me. Make sure you have the most recently patched version as they're working on this as we speak.
# Illogical gameplay designs. You start each level with 3-4 lives. More lives can usually be found in the levels, but they don't carry over into the next one... the lives counter resets to the default if you have surplus lives.
# Saving is done via checkpoints, and this is probably the biggest gamebreaker of them all. You cannot see these checkpoints, you cannot re-trigger them to save your progress, and worst of all they're tied into the lives counter. If you run out of lives in a level you have to restart from scratch!
Overall, this is a game that needs a little more time in the oven. Give the devs a little time to patch it up and address glaring issues, and also give the community time to come up with good user-made campaigns. Round up a couple of friends and you should have one hell of a fragfest on your hands.