Serious Sam Collection

Genre: Compilation / First-Person Shooter

Players: 1-4 Co-Op / Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Split-Screen / Local Wireless)

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Review:

Serious Sam Collection is a Compilation of multiple First-Person Shooters in the Serious Sam series about a testosterone-fueled man sent back in time to fight inter-dimensional aliens and save humanity. This collection contains Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter (originally released on PC in 2001), Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter (originally released on PC and Xbox in 2002) and its Legend of the Beast DLC, and Serious Sam 3: BFE (originally released in PC in 2011) and its DLC Jewel of the Nile. Each of these games has been released on numerous platforms since they first came out, with this collection of remasters released across multiple platforms in 2020, including Nintendo Switch. It bears mention that this is not a comprehensive collection of the Serious Sam games – it is missing Serious Sam 2, Serious Sam 4, and numerous spin-off games like Serious Sam: Next Encounter. However, fans would probably tend to agree that the games included in this collection are generally seen as the highlights of the series.

Here is what I thought of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Grade
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter	First-Person Shooter	1-4 Co-Op / Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Split-Screen / Local Wireless)	C+
tl;dr The original Serious Sam looks great in this HD treatment, with good framerates and nice textures (on character models that are pretty low-poly by today’s standards). The gameplay is also delightfully old-school, though some elements haven’t aged as well as others – sudden auto-death traps, enemies that spawn right behind you, and some empty wide-open areas that make traversal more tedious than it needs to be. Despite these flaws, this game still remains a classic of the genre worth playing.
Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter	First-Person Shooter	1-4 Co-Op / Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Split-Screen / Local Wireless)	B-
tl;dr Much like the first game, this is a solid port that brushes up the visuals of the original while mostly leaving it the same. The gameplay this time feels more balanced (though it still has those tedious empty open areas), but there are also more graphical issues, like some very noticeable pop-in on things like foliage. Overall still a solid old-school First-Person Shooter, though.
Serious Sam 3: BFE	First-Person Shooter	1-4 Co-Op / Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Split-Screen / Local Wireless)	B-
tl;dr This is a much more modern entry in the genre that marries the classic-style FPS gameplay with some more modern sensibilities (like aiming down your gun’s sights using the left trigger), and overall the environments and enemies are much more detailed here, though this experience is marred by graphical flaws – namely, it suffers from frequent, distracting pop-in, in-game cutscenes stutter terribly, and some game areas suffer nasty framerate issues. While I think this is an overall better game than either of its predecessors, it’s a worse port.

The short version is this – this is a series that got better with each successive entry (at least, as far as the content included here is concerned), but the more current the game in this collection, the more broken the port to Nintendo Switch is. The First Encounter is an outstanding port, but the game design really shows its age with some frustrating elements that haven’t aged well. The Second Encounter fixes some of the issues that the first game had, and the visuals are more detailed, but that detail shows its seams a bit more. Serious Sam 3 looks and plays great, but performs abysmally on the Nintendo Switch, with some pretty nasty graphical issues that make its otherwise nice graphics seem like they’re held together by duct tape and bubblegum (perhaps Sam is using the bubblegum that Duke is all out of?).

This becomes even more apparent when making use of split-screen multiplayer. Each game in this Compilation supports both local wireless and local Split-Screen multiplayer… sadly though, no online support, which seems like a huge omission. That disappointment aside, the good news here is, players are provided tons of wonderful multiplayer options, from various deathmatch modes to full four-player campaign multiplayer in each game, and plenty of options in each game mode for how to set things up, including a wide variety of screen orientation options.

At the very least for The First Encounter and The Second Encounter, it seems like the multiplayer modes work like a charm, making this a great compilation to enjoy some old-school fun blasting away interdimensional aliens with friends. However, in Serious Sam 3, multiplayer only exacerbates the game’s performance issues – adding more players turns the game into a nightmarish slideshow with horrendously bad framerates and nasty pop-in happening everywhere. That the game’s creators thought this was ready to release in this state is pretty jarring – it’s a horrendous mess.

One more thing to note here – this collection does not make use of the Nintendo Switch’s unique features in any way. You cannot use gyroscopic motion control, nor can you use the touchscreen in any way. Unless you desire to play these games in portable form, there’s nothing the Nintendo Switch version of this Compilation offers that you can’t get in other versions.

Please understand, there is still a lot of fun to be had in Serious Sam Collection. For the first two games, while their graphics and design show their age, they still have a lot of fun action, old-school charm, and great multiplayer play to offer. And while the third game is a technical mess of a port that runs poorly and becomes a shoddy broken disaster when playing in local split-screen, it is nevertheless the best-paced and most enjoyable game in the series if you can gloss over this port’s flaws. If you’re a fan of First-Person Shooters, and if you can tolerate the flaws I detailed above, you’ll still find this to be an excellent collection of First-Person Shooters with a retro-style feel to them that’s ultimately probably worth the $30 asking price. However, know that the third game in particular is going to perform worlds better on other modern platforms.

tl;dr – Serious Sam Collection is a Compilation of the alien-blasting First-Person Shooters Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 3 BFE, along with DLC for the latter two games. This isn’t a comprehensive collection, the first two games run well but show their age in multiple ways, and the third game has some severe performance issues due to a shoddy port job. There’s still a lot of old-school fun to be had, and the multiplayer options here are impressive (unless you want to play online or play Serious Sam 3 in Split-Screen multiplayer), but know that the Nintendo Switch version of this collection comes with some severe compromises.

Grade: B-

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