Serious Sam's Bogus Detour Reviews

The soundtrack from Damjan Mravunac is really good and the art style and graphics are nice. But sadly the gameplay is just not there. It does not play like a Serious Sam game. And I think it is not even a decent top-down shooter. First major unforgivable issue: there is no quicksave function and there is only 1 save file for each playthrough. You can not pause the game and resume on another day. There are checkpoints, usually at the entrance of a new section of the level, but they are not marked for you to see. If you screw up and trigger a checkpoint, you will not be able to restore the game to a previous state. Also in order to load a save file you have to exit to main menu. Lack of manual saving is made worse by the levels being massive and long to complete. Everytime you die, the game does not reset and instead you lose a life and respawn at the last checkpoint, so you have to travel through the empty, completed parts of the level to get back to the action. You can win almost every fight by backtracking or shooting from outside the entrance of the room. You are rarely locked into a confined arena and you are never getting surprised by enemies behind or around you like in actual Sam games. Progress is continuously interrupted by minefields, where you have to repeatedly move in small steps, reveal and shoot 1 land mine at a time from barely outside its explosion range. There are a lot of weapons, too many, because none of them feel unique and situational. You can just spam whatever high damage gun you have and switch it out when you are out of ammo. All guns except pistols have a rather high damage and rate of fire so you will obliterate small-to-medium enemies almost instantly. Kleers are a non-threat, there is no fun to be had with them because they die so quickly. The enemies either stand in a fixed place or move towards you without avoiding environment hazards. Sometimes you are able to shoot them from afar and they just sit there. You can see what is behind walls and inside the nearby areas so you are never challenged by unexpected attacks when you enter a new section of the level. In some levels you can kill enemies behind a door before you open it.. There are a lot of spawners that print one enemy at a time every few seconds on the same point, as if they took ideas from the average Serious Sam custom map made by a guy with poor level editor skills. At least here you can destroy the spawners. This game would have been good if it had simply transposed the Serious Sam formula in a top-down perspective instead of trying its own spin on it. It lacks what makes Sam games great and fun, besides the cool music and scenery.