Some decent lighting effects make the levels more true to life. All the environments in the game are drawn using clear, colorful textures that look good even when you get right up close to them. In between skirmishes, when you do get a chance to admire your surroundings, you'll notice some of the details in the 3D engine. Although the level architecture in Serious Sam is fairly basic-you'll quickly lose track of how many wide-open arenas you've fought through-such settings are perfect for the game's large-scale confrontations. Serious Sam's proprietary 3D engine renders large, wide-open spaces and indoor environments effectively. It plays like a shooter, but it's much more intense than most. Calling it mindless is selling it way too short. The action in Serious Sam is the highlight of the game. Suddenly it's over, and you'll hear yourself exhale as though you were holding your breath for all those minutes. Time seems to stand still during some of the more hectic battles-it'll seem like you're fighting an endless onslaught of foes, burning up all your ammo for all your weapons in the process. You'll also need to keep your ears open, as each enemy makes distinctive noises, and you'll often hear your foes before you see them. Even if you do know what's in store around the next corner, defeating wave after wave of monsters is never an easy task, as your reflexes, your precision, and your endurance will constantly be put to the test. Some battles seem to stretch on indefinitely, never letting up, only escalating and never giving you the opportunity to catch your breath. You'll use a majority of your weapons during each level. Fortunately, each weapon in your arsenal of more than a dozen is well balanced and useful, whether against certain types of foes or in certain situations. Serious Sam expects you to be constantly prepared to face off against dozens of different types of monsters, many of which require different types of tactics to defeat. Of course, Serious Sam has a completely different style-there's some real depth lurking just beneath the game's surface, but it's much more lighthearted and frenetic than Halo. An auto-aim feature in the Xbox version offsets the lack of precision associated with the analog aiming scheme, and if you've played Halo, then you know what that's like. Serious Sam plays much like any other recent shooter, but faster. Serious Sam on the Xbox combines both Serious Sam games for the PC into one package. More importantly, though, the Xbox version retains the original games' off-the-chart intensity levels, and Serious Sam-which was always an arcade game at heart-feels right at home on Microsoft's powerful console. Now Xbox owners get to experience both games joined at the hip, and with a new coat of paint and a few other twists for good measure. A follow-up, the aptly named Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, was released earlier this year, and it somehow managed to be even better, with a greater variety of far more creative levels. It was also a game that anybody could enjoy, and for all these reasons, GameSpot's PC side bestowed on Serious Sam: The First Encounter its highest honor: Game of the Year. It featured a great cooperative play mode, a surprisingly impressive 3D engine, and by far the biggest battles of any game in its category, thanks to the engine's ability to throw a seemingly limitless number of monsters at you at any given point. It looked like some mindless, throwaway shooter on first impression, but the game's good-natured humor, distinctive style, and insanely fast-paced, over-the-top, and nonstop action made it stand out from the budget-priced and major first-person shooters on the market. Serious Sam is a textbook case of "don't knock it until you try it." The original version of Serious Sam was quietly released for the PC last year, and at a budget price to boot.
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