Serious Sam 3

We’ve no idea how it’s happened. It shouldn’t have been like this but it is. You see, we’re about to say something very, very grandiose. Ready? Here it goes…

Serious Sam 3: BFE is probably the best first person shooter of the year.

There, we’ve said it. We weren’t expecting this. We were expecting a fun diversion from all the big time releases at most. What we actually got was glorious, bloody chaos.

Remember how everyone got excited for Duke Nukem Forever, but then when he turned up he quite literally blew it out his ass? Remember how it was an unfocussed, bad taste (and not in a good way), largely unfunny slog that tried to appease the old school crowd and the newer tykes, making a bloody Bosch of it all?

Well Serious Sam 3 saw all this and thought ‘Duke, what are you doing to yourself?’ He then ran out the gates guns blazing (Sam can carry loads of weapons at once by the way, because weapon limits are for pussies in armour), with none of the hype or expectation, shotgun making a great bloody mess of those headless kamikazes that run at you screaming ‘AAAAAAAAAAARGH.’

Set before the first game of the series, we find Sam on a mission in Egypt. Pretty quickly, his fellow troops are brutally killed, meaning there’ll be no waiting for comrades to open doors. The first level involves you going absolutely bloody postal with a sledgehammer, before you pick up your weapons. These weapons get gradually more explosive and ridiculous as the game goes on. You’ll need them too, as crikey, some of the bastards you’re up against are tough. You can’t just duck down for a bit and magically heal like in a real war.

There are contemporary concessions. Sam has to reload now, but that only makes things more thrilling when a giant pink scorpion bastard is firing at you, or the aforementioned headless bombers are legging it at you full pelt. He can also aim down the sights, but it’s not essential to do that. Serious Sam 3 is all about shooting from the hip, running backwards and screaming ‘DIE DIE DIE YOU ONE EYED PRICK.’ Beneath the dumbbell veneer, there’s a devious bugger of a game, out to actually test you, not hold your hand. Just try telling me you’re not grinning with delight or screaming with desperate frustration when an entire army of alien bastards are walking happily into your ammunition ejaculations.

A wildly enjoyable single player is bolstered by absolutely batshit 16 player co-operative play, that scales up the amount of enemies depending on how many are in your group. Add to all this some huge, tense boss battles (that are genuinely hard) and you’ve got one of the best things you could play this year.

It’s actually been a good year for first person mulching. It’s easy to forget bloody Bulletstorm came out near the beginning, and we’ve also had stuff like Hard Reset, Rage, FEAR 3 (seriously it was alright) and the War-boner twosome (MW3 and BF3). It’s to Sam’s credit that his rampage felt the freshest, purely by sticking to its traditional guns.

IT’S SAMTASTIC (massive apologies for that one).