Preview by: Mitch Dyer

Remember Duke Nukem Forever? Man, what a crazy thing that was, right? A decade in the making and it still couldn't live up to even the lowest expectations we had for it back in the day. It didn't quite know whether to thrive on its old-school ideas or to embrace the changes of the modern FPS. It landed somewhere in the middle and it sucked. Serious Sam 3: BFE, which brings about similar feelings to Duke Nukem 3D given its time and place, doesn't have time for any of this modern mumbo jumbo. It's firmly rooted in an older era, and I really hope it holds up for the entirety of the campaign.

BFE is relentlessly old-school, so much so that it wouldn't surprise me to learn developer Croteam stumbled across the design document in crate full of VHS tapes and a boom-box. Its ideas are decidedly Serious Sam, if only because its mindset is so narrow. Find guns, shoot everything, walk through a door. It's a simple structure that was effective enough in the three missions I played that it didn't distract me from the fact that nothing about this game is original. It's a modernization of the same ol' Sam, for better or worse. Mostly for the better.

Serious Sam hits on some things that bother me, particularly the frequency of death, even on lower difficulties. Trial and error works in the same way here as it does in Trials HD, one of my all-time favorites. The moment of unbridled rage when a group of screaming kamikaze jerks kills me lasts a fraction of a second. I'm dead, I'm angry, but then I'm reloading the checkpoint and trying again to burst evildoers into bloody chunks.

The combat is done in such a way that I kept forcing myself to try something different every time. Plan A might have worked, but it didn't, so let's move on to Plans B through Q before taking a stab at it again. The arenas are so huge that I'm able to circle-strafe around huge groups—sometimes up to 20 guys, I'd guess, it's far too fast a game for me to count. They're also lacking the cover I've come to rely on, so I'm often exposed, and absolutely, always on the move. Evasion is at least as important as aggression in the three missions I played (and by played, I mean failed at repeatedly).

It's so straightforward that it comes full circle to feel original. We're so bombarded by boring, me-too FPSs whose goal isn't entertainment through gameplay but through events happening to you. Those games definitely have their place, but the oversaturation of that market has numbed my interest in most games of its kind. Something about swinging a hammer into a beast's face and mindlessly mowing down dozens of enemies in wide-open areas is refreshing.

BFE is the cold shower countering the FPS genre's heat wave. I think we need this.