Recent reviews by Varanis Ridari

Far Cry 3 corrected many missteps with the previous game, and Ubisoft's first outing with the series on their own since Crytek departed to join Electronic Arts after developing the first title. Many people loved the tropical theme of the original Far Cry, even if the story was a bit hackneyed and the game play wasn't truly open world, just big sandbox-style levels with multiple objectives. Crytek would continue in that direction with Crysis, while Ubisoft would make a true open world first person shooter in Far Cry 2, using a fork of CryEngine called Dunia that they developed in house. Far Cry 3 uses a new version of that engine called Dunia 2, which is further optimized and enhanced to run better on different hardware specs than Far Cry 2, while also boasting better visuals, and overall Far Cry 3 seems to be a return to the tropical setting people missed from the original, while opting for a safer story about helping a local indigenous population free themselves from pirates that have taken over the place.

As Jason Brody, you are the "Jack Carver" of Far Cry 3, in the wrong place at the right time to conduct covert guerrilla warfare, this time to liberate an oppressed people from pirate baddies, instead of a mashup of Apocalypse Now and Red Harvest like Far Cry 2, where sickness and drug addiction coupled with morally-ambiguous profiteering had the unnamed silent protagonist of that game chasing down pills and pitting one African tribe against the other in an endless genocidal war. Here, you still climb towers to unlock segments of the map, but you also clear enemy outposts with the intent of liberating the island from the baddies one patch at a time, making all the various side missions the game puts you on to earn cash for upgrades and materials to craft items that much easier. A leveling system with a perk tree also turns up here, giving Far Cry 3 true RPG elements. Vehicles still take damage and need repair, but luckily weapons no longer jam or break forcing the player to scrounge.

Far Cry 3 has the best elements of the first and second games combined, although this particular "do a little of everything, and feel nothing about it" style of sandbox triple-A experience would become the norm for much of the industry, while Ubisoft themselves brought back deeper storytelling and improved moral conflicts in the player with the next entry, Far Cry 4. This is the best starting point for anyone new to the series, as it really does establish the template for all future main titles and spin-offs in the long-running open-world first person shooter franchise. Far Cry 3 has the best balance of visuals, fun, performance, and replay value even today. Yeah, the substance-light story of freeing the Rakyat from the likes of Vaas Montenegro and his human trafficking drug cartel may be a bit "80's action flick" for some people nowadays, but at least it doesn't leave you feeling depressed like Far Cry 2. My only issue is the wonky UConnect system, (which should have been retired when multiplayer was) because it makes the game crash or just fail to boot, something that never really got fixed, but doesn't happen in the later games.

Far Cry 5 is the notorious "Murica Simulator" of the series, which can send some people into quite the froth if they don't have any sense of self-reflection or humor. I know how ridiculous our social divisions and despondent attitudes towards our own history and future are, and I know that fictionalizing them into a first person shooter might have seemed like a really bad idea in 2016; but if you're able to get over yourself and just play the game, you'll see that the whole thing is really just one big pastiche of it all. From the fundamentalist Christian rhetoric laced with doomsday paranoia vibes that is the game's primary antagonist of Project at Eden's Gate cult, to the general ooh-rahs and star-spangled everything that the game's NPC's seem to be dripping with, Far Cry 5 will certainly give you a dose of "God, guns, and pickup trucks" that people on the outside of the country looking in seem to think comprises the bulk of our society. Sure, it may be in bad taste at times, but these sorts of weird militant religious cults have historical precedent, and have been the subject of fiction before. You just have to laugh at it, or don't play it. Case closed.

As for the game itself, the graphics are still powered by the Dunia 2 engine, but all the optimization for NVIDIA is gone because Ubisoft fell out of love with the now-monopoly of a company (which favors AI slop over graphics), and decided to throw the bones to AMD instead. I don't think it makes much of a difference unless you were wanting to use the glooby AI frame generation or scaling anyway. Being a game that's from 2016, I don't think anyone needs that to get good frame rate at higher resolutions, because the engine itself is just highly optimized to do what it does with big outdoor environments. Speaking of that, we move from savannas, lush jungles, islands, or exotic Tibetan mountain valleys to good old midwestern greenery. Far Cry 5 is set in Montana, so everything's old growth pine forests, corn fields, small towns, and corner gas stations. There is beauty in this game, and seeing these kinds of bucolic environments depicted with a dash of rural (and social) decay is in some ways more jaw-dropping than the paradise of games past.

Gameplay is not much different from Far Cry 4, which itself iterated on the successful formula of Far Cry 3, as Ubisoft "don't fix what ain't broke". This time around there are no towers to climb for unlocking the map, and the map is broken up into three larger areas each with their own separate mini-boss and conflict raging that you can dip in and out of, each needing to be gradually secured one location at a time to earn "resistance" points that decrease presence of enemies while improving the morale of the allies you're trying to free. You still have individual outposts to secure, but the "Peggies" of the cult itself will push back harder the more you "free" an area by adding caravans of armored vehicles and helicopter surveillance. Gone is the XP system in exchange for a "challenge" system to unlock "perks" in slots that level up your abilities, forcing you to adopt different play styles to complete them, while crafting has also been reduced in importance to consumables, making the need to hunt much less. Otherwise, you still have an open world first person shooter where you wage guerrilla warfare against a despotic group, just one with flavor that hits much different than other games in the series.

What's to say that hasn't already been said about Skyrim? Perhaps the ultimate first-person (or third-person) action role playing game of its generation (and for many Mllennials, of ours too), The Elder Scrolls V: SKyrim falters only in its scaled-down scope from the previous entry. Some of this can't be helped because the province of Skyrim is just smaller in size than Cyrodil, which formed the bulk of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but also some of it was trimming of systems and streamlining of combat to get more people into the fold. I'd say the tactic worked, but I also have the unpopular opinion that all the lost attributes, major and minor skills. plus custom magic creation did bog down some of the experience in the previous game, however devilish it could be to abuse those mechanics in order to make godlike characters without needing to actually cheat. The most inportant thing is you can still play your way, with a fully customized character, and even though you technically no longer have classes to guide how your leveling progresses, you can still specialize into a tank or longbow sniper like all the previous games. This formless and limitless leveling system does mean that eventually you can have maximum everything, and will be that ultimate godlike character just from enough playing, but I don't think there ever was an Elder Scrolls game that you couldn't break somehow just with enough play time.

For the average player, they just want an immersive experience that is easy to pick up and hard to put down; they want an escape into another world where they can live out a fantasy, or just get from point A to point B and save the day before popping in another title to play. Skyrim delivered all that, plus an art style that has aged like fine wine to the point most people don't even care about the fact the engine under the game has more holes than a cheese grater, and was already a generation behind the competition when launched. All the myriad bugs and glitches train the player to save often, and although patches would ultimately get the worst offenders, there is still enough jank left in the game that people playing the game long-term will inevitably seek mods to correct what was left untouched when Bethesda moved on. Luckily, that same mod community has blossomed into one so big that we would end up getting entire DLC-sized expansions to the game, unofficial remastered graphics for those who absolutely need a 15 year-old game to feel like a bloated unoptomized modern one, and all for free. Honestly, I think some of the better expansion mods like Wyrmstooth, Falskaar, and Midwood Isle should be incorporated into the base game, but that's just me. The fact Tod Howard has spent those 15 years just re-selling this game back to us on different platforms while letting the community extend the life of the title indefinitely with this fan-made content is sort of telling that maybe Bethesda doesn't believe they can top it.

The bottom line here is Skyrim did what Oblivion and its predecessor did not, even if it is the svelte, streamlined "Elder Scrolls Lite" entry into the series compared to others in the series. That thing it did was get enough people invested in the game that the aforementioned community of content creators blossomed around it in the first place. Being able to play the game across three console generations, myriad PC generations, and now mobile nearly two decades later is also kinda neat. You can literally play this game forever if you want, and with official Creation Content or free mods to keep adding new adventures, it's probably still the single best investment in the genre you can make. The pending Beyond Skyrim mod content will also see every single province plugged into the base game with all their own quests, making the whole content of Tamriel playable in an "offline" Elder Scrolls game for the first time since the original entry. Some may argue for Oblivion Remastered, and it sure looks great, plays mostly the same way the original did with quality of life improvements, but you need to have ridiculously expensive hardware to run its shiny and resource-heavy Unreal 5 engine. Skyrim even in it's decked-out Special Edition with Anniversary Edition content download can basically run on a potato nowadays, so there's few people out there who can't play this game, making it even more essential if free-roam action RPGs are your thing.

The beyond-obscure Killing Time by Studio 3DO was the last game I thought Nightdive Studios would ever tackle in a proper remaster, as there are so many more-popular and lauded old 90's and early 00's FPS games that I figured the general buying public would like to see first; but I am so very glad I am wrong. I've always thought this game was treated very unfairly by the passage of time, being developed as a 1st-party exclusive for the 3DO, the first 32-bit CD-ROM 3D-focused game console released, a system that technically never had 1st party hardware, and didn't have 1st party software when launched because the whole point was to be a shared technological standard like VHS was.

The even more-obscure PC version of this game was a completely different and arguably better game, more fully-realized; but as people found out when it got a port to Steam by IP owners Ziggurat, a game not without its glaring flaws It took a fan-made patch to get the original right for modern Steam users; and even then, there were problems due to the game's original CDROM dependency and the fact it was made in an era before hardware acceleration. There has never been any official patches, so the only commercially-available way to play Killing Time until Nightdive came along was fundamentally broken out of the box, like the abandonware it once was before Ziggurat picked it up.

Killing Time deserved better, but not enough people cared, so I never expected it to actually get any sort of justice in that regard, until now. If you want to learn more about the specifics of the original PC game, read my review on it I left there, as the rest of this review is about the differences between the remaster and the original. First thing's first, everything that was broken about the original Windows 95 PC release is fixed here in the remaster, full stop. The rest of the changes made to Killing Time via this remaster are aesthetic and gameplay tweaks to address flaws with the original game's execution, not technical hangups from being a PC game from 30 years ago. Nightdive smoothed out the wrinkles, and did a restomod on the engine using KEX.

The original game used a version of the "frankensteined" Doom engine, made from code Carmack wrote for the Atari Jaguar 64, with "Burger" Becky Heineman's BurgerLib to make it run Doom on the 3DO's 32-bit environment. This engine could therefore run directly under Windows 95 instead of needing DOS as Doom did. Now the whole thing is running smooth and up to 120fps in 4K under KEX. Beyond that, Nightdive chose to use the superior photo-captured actor sprites for enemies, weapons, and objects found in the 3DO version of the game, that the PC version couldn't handle due to sprite size limitations the PC had, even though it could render bigger, more complex level geometry.

This "best of both worlds" means you get the larger, more-detailed, and frankly more-fun PC game, using the sprite assets of the 3DO game, which had better sprite and video capabilities from its custom hardware than what PCs had at the time. Killing Time Resurrected is still the same insane hybrid of "metroidvania" branching non-linear level design on what is basically an open island estate, mixed with Sam Raimi-inspired horror comedy, an Art Deco look a decade before Bioshock did it, in-game storytelling (before Half-Life) through the FMV "apparitions" that appear throughout the world, and madcap mixture of ambient, jazz, ragtime, and opera music often performed by a real band.

In a rare stroke of luck, most of the original texture, video, audio, and sprite assets in their full resolution were available to Nightdive, thanks to old developers basically keeping all this stuff somewhere on old hard drives, floppy discs, and CD-ROMs, meaning the sprites and textures look uncannily high-resolution, even for a remaster. Seeing 3DO version's live actors in costumes used for the enemies and gun sprites move and fire in near-photorealistic detail, alongside environment textures that are either straight-up photographs or painted on, is a real treat. Combined with the proto survival-horror gameplay where all enemies and items are finite, and the usual run-and-gun Doom-style action, and this is one hell of a sleeper I'm glad more people will now get to experience.

Nightdive also made some changes to the level design itself that may feel controversial to some, but in my opinion was sorely needed. Many areas (especially inside the mansion) seem copy-pasted with clusters of samey tightly-packed rooms and narrow hallways, probably done in a hurry to meet a deadline, or thought to make combat more challenging by adding claustrophobia or jump scares as you literally run past enemies squeezed into these spaces. Nightdive used original concepts to re-do some of these spaces, removing clusters of rooms and replacing them with more-open areas that have furniture, kitchen counters with more space to walk between, and still fit it all within the same footprint of the original maps.

Other areas actually increased in complexity as some of the copy-paste room design made entire areas skippable as there was nothing there but another room like the one you just passed, as was the case with several of the cave and tomb areas outside the mansion, or in the sewers beneath. Again, levels were tweaked to be more varied, navigable, while still having the same footprint; they even added a cut area called the Bathouse of Osiris, and relocated the cave network that was there to a different part of the map. Some of the crueler puzzles or jumping sections were removed or redone, and a vault of unearthed development goodies were tacked on. I'd say this is the definitive version of Killing Time as we should have always had it, and not your typical "boomer shooter", which is what I've always loved about it.

This is quite probably the most ambitious and innovative early first person shooter that nobody has played. The story behind this game is about as convoluted as the gameplay itself, so bear with me. Originally The 3DO Company wanted a port of Doom, and the developer Art Data was supposed to make a port from the original source code since Id Software decided it wasn't going to do ports themselves for consoles after making one for Atari to release on Jaguar 64. Well, Art Data ended up being all bluster and no man power, so one solitary programmer named Rebecca Heinemann took the source code and the code for the Jaguar 64 (which had a similar architecture to the 3DO), and made the port "quick and dirty" in just 10 weeks.

Considering Rebecca had already worked with 3DO via her own company (Logicware) on a console port of Wolfenstein 3D and the 3DO console version of Killing Time with Studio 3DO, it only made sense to have Logicware handle this PC version of Killing Time as well. Make no mistake though, this is NOT a backport of a console game onto PC, but rather an entirely different, expanded, and tougher version of Killing Time than what appeared on the 3DO. Now that we have all that out of the way, here's what you get: A fully free-roam non-linear first-person survival horror game with a save-anywhere feature, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Already, we have much more than the typical shooter built on the Wolf3D or Doom engine (or one of their forks), since back then they were all called "Doom Clones" anyway.

The original 3DO version of Killing Time was also technically open-world too, but with a very limited, maze-like map design, and thus could be beaten in a handful of hours. Novel use of ghost apparitions appearing as transparent full-motion videos that playback as a means of storytelling was pretty novel, and it would be years before we saw things like Doom 3 or Bioshock do similar storytelling tricks with in-world voice logs, videos, or ghosts. Killing Time PC also used the same hacked-up Doom engine (by Heinemann) from the Jaguar 64 port, and thus had a few features not in vanilla Doom, like silent instant teleporters. Logicwear and co-developing Studio 3DO used these silent teleports to piece together the entire game world into one massive map, with seamless transitions from one area to the next instead of load bars or screens,

This includes floor-over-floor architecture, which would normally be impossible with the Doom engine, since crossing a threshold between two areas triggered a silent teleport from one area to the other, and all you see is the act of walking through a connecting hallway or flight of steps. We wouldn't see this in the Doom engine again until the GZDoom sourceport added it in 2006. If all the technical innovation isn't enough, the art style is a blend of Art Nouveau and Art Deco that feels like La Belle Epoque meets The Great Gatsby, which was novel then, and still a rare sight now. The game's puzzling choice of live studio music covering jazz and ragtime standards, mixed with the usual moody horror synthesizer fare is pretty unique, if not downright goofy at times, but it's all coated in a glaze of faux-Egyptian vibes meant to fit the aesthetic of a atory about a cursed island and Egyptian water-clock, so it's all part-and-parcel.

Is it really different than all the commercials, public service announcements, and period 1930's/40's music played in Bioshock's undersea city of Rapture? If anything, that cheeky camp-meets-creep atmosphere was done here first. Without spoiling much of the game's plot, finding all of Killing Time's completion-necessary keys and items. revealing what happened on the Island of Mattinicus, and breaking the curse will take players about 15-20 hours depending on how much they die or how many times they get lost, which really isn't bad for a game from 1996. The endgame is truly harrowing, and resource management is important as there is only a finite amount of everything (enemies/ammo/health) in the game, so nobody's blaming you if you need cheat codes on at some point here.

Now for the bad news: This game is utterly broken out of the box if you buy it from Steam, because publisher Ziggurat entertainment only purchased rights to the game (much like Art Data did for Doom), but never got any source code for a proper remaster. Instead, there was some "quick and dirty" done to the Killing Time PC version to remove the need to run from the CD-ROM, ironically just like "Burger Becky" Heinemann did years ago to Doom in order to get it running on the 3DO, which makes a game like KIlling Time PC - that was only ever coded originally to be compatible with WIndows 95 and run from a CD-ROM on period hardware - limp along with frequent crashes due to whatever Ziggurat did to circumvent these requirements, if it even launches at all.

Luckily, there is a community-made fan-patch you can get that replaces the garbage compressed versions of the FMV and audio tracks done by ZIggurat (to remove the need for on-demand CD-ROM playback) with ones taken at higher resolution from the original CD, plus a litany of fixes so Killing Time runs on modern hardware-based renderers and even has mouse-look (making controller emulation infinitely easier too). Yeah, you're still stuck in 640 x 480 mode, and will be stuck with a stuttering 20fps if you select to play the game at it's original hardware speed. (so that modern framerates don't break the enemy AI or physics since \they're hardcoded to frametick), but at least you can actually play the game you pay for here with the patch.

Honestly, I've played the game at full 60fps speed and the only thing that gets to be tricky is the jumping. All this just further shows proof that someone like Nightdive Studios needs to bring this severely-underappreciated and neglected title over to their KEX engine for a proper remaster, given nobody in my lifetime will be interested in remaking such an obscure title from a dead developer, originally released for a dead console manufacturer. Abandonware or not, Killing Time is one of the most-interesting classic FPS games out there.

Serious Sam 4 arrives nine years after the previous installment, which itself was a back-to-indie digital-only release across consoles and PC due to 2K Games kicking Croteam to the curb after the big-budget Serious Sam 2 failed to deliver on the promise of the hype generated by the original Serious Sam titles. It's simply the way of things that Croteam took what everyone loved about Serious Sam TFE/TSE/Xbox and upped the ante with the sequel, which proved to be too much I suppose for "serious" gamers unable to laugh at themselves or their games; there's some irony deep within if you care to go looking, although I'm not heading down that train of thought further. Serious Sam 3 then was a knee-jerk away from all that, returning the series to its tech-demo roots by basically being a playable showcase for the engine, and taking stabs at the expected gritty realism of what were then the dominant FPS lifeform of military shooters. The hardcore "gamers" got what they wanted, feeling like a Dollar Store Rambo instead of the coddled man-children they usually are. while the rest of us were left wondering why we were roaming for long stretches across beautiful, but mostly empty environments devoid of the usual Serious Sam secrets or Easter eggs as we slogged from one big fight to the next. Serious Sam 4 does seem to double-down on that particular element of the last game, so take heed if you are a stickler for pacing or wasted space in game environments, but also note that this time around, they're just one of the game's many meta-jokes.

If SS3 was a tech demo for The Talos Principle, then Serious Sam 4 is likely another tech demo for that game's pending sequel, or just anyone that wishes to license the insanely-capable Serious Engine 4. The game does seem to make fun of both itself and it's 9-year-old sequel by being a prequel to a prequel, detailing the very beginning of Serious Sam's fight against Mental, injecting a scary amount story to boot. In fact, the big-ticket joke of Serious Sam 4 is "this is a triple-A game" because once again, a Serious Sam game gets major funding and publishing in both digital and physical formats, just like 2K did with SS2. Since Devolver Digital was very happy with the turnout of the HD remasters and SS3, they pumped considerable resources into SS4 and final product makes light of that fact by having an actual attempt at both a cinematic score, character arcs, tragedy, and set pieces. Some of it is literal trolling of other genres, which some folks too busy being "serious gamers" may miss and instead cite as faults; examples include a 60 square mile overworld map literally just used as a single linear level (a nod to Alan Wake that one), except letting players actually roam for hours off the beaten path to no avail if they want. Having the entire castle of Carcassone rendered in detail and cordoned off in sections just to make into a Serious Sam level is also some kind of dual-purpose tech demo display and joke about level design, with all the areas explorable even if most of them have nothing in them.

When the game isn't poking fun at it's own pointless scale and budget values, it's bringing back the wackiness of Serious Sam 2 in very subversive ways, with ridiculous guns like the Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher (FRPCL), or letting Sam do stuff like drive a wheat thresher through crowds of enemies in a field of screams, or operate a bubblegum-colored mech through The Vatican. Being both visually stunning and having one of the most-epic soundtracks of probably any game to date, Serious Sam 4 does actually put those triple-A dollars to use, while still being Serious Sam in every meaningful way with the pop culture references, one-liners, and frenetic combat of 1,001 enemies that need mowing down with overpowered weapons that typically don't require reloading. All that extra level space is put to some good use in the form of side-quests, a new addition to the game as well as returning the copious secret areas and collectables from the first and second game to the mix. At least in Serious Sam 4, all the extra empty environments are totally optional to explore, rather than just have the player walking endlessly from one arena to the next like SS3, and you do get the random Easter egg too. Actually doing the side missions rewards players with upgrades, and the game also has a skill tree, likely another joke poking fun at the face nearly every game has RPG elements in it now, which you get points to upgrade by finding little weird purple balls filled with happy gas.

My only beef with the upgrades in the skill tree is they unlock abilities Serious Sam once possessed by default in the previous games, like dual-wielding or performing melee attacks on enemies of any size. Reception to Serious Sam 4 was rocky at first, because the die-hards still held hope that Croteam would dive 20 years back in time to deliver a rehash of the first game's vibe, while people who never understood the appeal of Serious Sam still could not understand why people like this series; but there was an added issue this time around: bugs. This game should have just waited out for a full 10 years from launch of the previous title and taken the time to address what appeared to be a litany of instability and visual anomalies in the game at launch. Many people were comparing poor old Sam to Duke Nukem Forever, although in the years since, Croteam has both patched those out and added even more secret content to make the levels even more explorable. All told, this is almost a perfect fusion between the visual fidelity of SS3, with the humor of SS2, plus the classic weapons/enemy balance of the first Serious Sam, including the return of the green "slow-light" lasergun. After taking classic shooters, space operas, and military shooters down a peg, Serious Sam's piss-take on the phenomenon of "Triple A gaming" is equally madcap and still a lot of fun, Is this the best one yet? I don't know, but it certainly feels the most expensive, while still just being hours of holding down the fire button while backpedaling or circle-strafing.

Serious Sam 3: BFE came out at a time when some folks probably figured the franchise was dead, as Croteam was kicked from former publisher 2k Games. The former had released the Triple-A Serious Sam 2 to lukewarm sales, after parent Take-Two Interactive had bought Gathering of Developers (which published Serious Sam games prior) and took the game to consoles in the form of the singular Serious Sam (2002) for Xbox, which combined both installments of the PC series with a toony makeover. Take-Two then farmed out development of a console-exclusive game for PS2 and Gamecube (as neither could handle the original Serious Sam), while Serious Sam 2 was in development for the next generation.

Instead of being on that generation, it got back-ported to the original Xbox. which only exacerbated sales issues as most folks just held out for an Xbox 360 port that never came, and the PC version tanked when gamers saw it was patterned after the toony makeover of the original game in its Xbox port. Toony to the extreme and very silly, Serious Sam 2 is now a cult classic, but was a sales bomb. Fast forward to 2010, and an HD remake of the original "TFE" and "TSE" episodes of the first PC game were released using a new version of the Serious Engine, as digital-only for consoles and on PC via indie publisher Devolver Digital, effectively taking Croteam back to its roots as an indie developer too.

They were clearly but a tease for Serious Sam 3, which had been in development since 2007; but due to fallout with 2K Games and parent Take-Two, never got the full physical media release and marketing push that the first two games had on consoles. Once again as digital-only releases for Xbox 360, PS3, and eventually their next-gen replacements, Serious Sam 3:BFE almost went unnoticed by some, although eventually got some media attention for controversy surrounding its new "gritty realistic" look, even if that didn't effect gameplay really. As a prequel to Serious Sam, BFE stands for "Before First Encounter", and shows the events leading right up to Earth's destruction, necessitating Serious Sam's journey back through time.In place of ancient Egypt, we have modern Egypt; and in place of toony HUD elements or cheeky munchin announcers screaming "serious damage" at your ears, we have heavy metal music and Hollywood action film dialog.

Perhaps most noticeable, is the return to the enemy assortment found in the original games, with all the bizarre goofy parody enemies from the second game gone. Weapon assortment is much the same as the original game, with revolvers being replaced by a Desert Eagle, the Tommy gun replaced by an M16, and a sledgehammer for melee. Reloading is now required for many more guns than just the basic infinite pistol, and Sam can now sprint. Other than that, it's the same wide open spaces and hoards of enemies to mow down as before, so fundamentally this is still Serious Sam as you know and love, just aesthetically more realistic. Some criticism can be lobbed at the game's pacing and level design in spots, as Serious Sam 3 at times feels emptier than previous games, just with gorgeously-detailed environments and cinematic exhibition to help you forget that all you're doing at times is walking to the next sandbox full of spawning enemies to cut down.

The thing to understand about Serious Sam 2 before ever playing it is that this game was not really meant as a sequel to the original PC releases of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Those games were more or less spoofing the look, feel, and even the episodic distribution model of old 90's first-person shooters, which were quite fresh in memory by its original release date of 2001. What Serious Sam 2 was meant to be rather, was a sequel to the original Xbox combined adaptation of those first two games, simply titled Serious Sam. Take-Two had picked up Gathering of Developers and decided it needed a first-person shooter on the console, and for whatever reason, developer Croteam saw fit to amp up the silliness of the original games with a toony makeover of both the protagonist, and the HUD elements.

Those who've done A and B comparisons of the Xbox Serious Sam with the original "TFE" and "TSE" Serious Sam PC titles won't notice much difference in the level designs outside the removal of some areas (with particularly cruel traps and platforming elements toned down or removed); but they will notice wacky power-ups, extra lives replacing save-anywhere features, and a game tooled to both look and feel like a high-action send-up of classic first-person shooter gameplay. It is to all that, which Serious Sam 2 is effectively a sequel, to the point they use game footage from the Xbox game rather than the PC titles. Serious Sam for Xbox sold so well that Take-Two ended up farming out development of a PS2/Game Cube title as well, but that's another story. So to wrap up, if you like the toony goofiness and almost arcade-like style of the Xbox Serious Sam, then this is an even more demented and ridiculous escalation of that.

In execution, this means smaller, more detailed and colorful levels optimized better for the Xbox than PC, since now we're tackling what were then triple-A shooters like Halo 2, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and similar such titles that all eventually saw ports to the system; we also get vehicular sections, mountable turrets. duel-wielding weapons, grenades, and a futuristic, interplanetary storyline as Serious Sam chases down pieces of a medallion - that like the Triforce from Legend of Zelda - must be united to defeat the evil that is "Mental" from the first game. This is of course even though we technically we haven't left the past, just entered worlds beyond Earth thanks to the Sirian technology unearthed in ancient civilizations from the first game. The borderline-offensive racial caricatures that represent the alien species of each planet haven't really aged well, but I'm not sure if this is really poorly-concealed racism or just Croteam taking stabs at George Lucas' Star Wars universe and its thinly-veiled stereotypes.

Either way, you get more insane hair-trigger action, almost like a bullet hell meets a classic FPS; more absolute ridiculousness, including graphical settings meant to parody other games (try turning the bloom or lense flare to "glaring" and see what I mean), more terrible jokes, and the wackiest ensemble of both weapons and enemies you'll ever see in a first-person shooter; this includes launchable suicide bomber parrots named "Klawdovic", and zombie stockbrokers with shotguns. Perhaps the Mel Brooks and David Zucker levels of wackiness were just too much for the average gamer in 2005, as Serious Sam 2 tanked in sales, ending the series' brief single-entry tenure as a triple-a franchise under Take-Two Interactive. Croteam would go back to being an indie developer, release The Talos Principle, then eventually claw back with the grittier Serious Sam 3: BFE. Still, I have a soft spot for this zany shooter, and maybe you will too.

Serious Sam deserves a special place in gaming history, particularly that of the first-person shooter, as a game that continued to evolve along the lines of the 90's originators of the genre when the rest of the crowd was heading into more-tactical territory that slowed down gameplay in favor of grit or immersion. Instead of doing that, Serious Sam made a clear tongue-in-cheek play at the increasingly "serious" nature of the genre by being anything but actually serious. Decades later, and people who just discover its sequels look at it as a relic of a time it was actually not a part of, because it blends so perfectly into the conventions of that time.

Perhaps a bit too early to call itself "retro" when it wasn't even a decade removed from Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, Serious Sam instead can be seen a bit of a send-up on what were then conventions in the genre: massive waves of enemies with mindlessly-aggressive AI that you mow down with a near-endless supply of bullets spewing from guns that never need reloading. What it does differently from the Dooms, Dukes, and Quakes it parodies is dispense with any notions that it is anything more than mind-numbing fun. No pretentious storylines (although there is a story so to speak), and minimal exploration elements to disrupt from the blasting.

What this means for a modern gamer looking into Serious Sam is you won't have endless backtracking for key cards or sometimes poorly-hidden secrets to dig up, just vast oceans of real estate that make up the games levels set in very colorful environments chock full of fun easter eggs you only have to find if you want a laugh (or some guns a bit early). The Serious Sam Classics Revolution is really just a modernized launcher for the original game that was split into two episodes when first released, supporting modern xinput controls and having more-robust graphical options in-game you'd normally need config file edits or mods to change in the original vanilla game.

I personally toss on the The Xbox mod available in the Workshop for this game, to make guns, character models, and HUD elements resemble the toony forms of the original Xbox port, which was a better look for an already-silly game than the attempts at realism found in the OG PC release. Enemies and environments are completely unchanged besides shaving down the levels to fit on the Xbox, and you don't get the power-ups or combo-scoring found in the Xbox port even with the mod pack on, but the overall feel is the same as the Xbox port, which I think is the superior way to play the first chapter in this series. Any way you take your Sam, it's sure to be serious!

As someone who had played the original God of War trilogy on PS2 and PS3, I was a bit apprehensive on how Sony would continue into "the next generation" with an effective reboot of the series. Gone were a lot of things I enjoyed about the original games, including the twin chain blades (I won't spoil when they reappear). Sure, it looked gorgeous, was added to PC so you don't have to fight scalpers for PS5 consoles, and probably has some better performance features than the PS4 version had, and thus held an awful lot of promise; but was it worthwhile to start over in this universe? The answer is: yes, but with a caveat.

For starters, this is more of a gameplay mechanics reboot than a story reboot, as it technically continues the journey of an immortal God of ancient Greece that has lived beyond the fall of his kind's dominion over the world. There are now more Gods and different Gods, varying of course by region of the world per the cultures that worship them, and Kratos happens to have made his way to Scandinavia, where he shares space with the Aesir Gods of Scaldic folklore. He also has a son, and for a time -had- a wife, recently deceased. The game begins with a father and son journey to scatter her ashes atop the highest mountain of Midgard.

So same old Kratos, new place and new journey. Gameplay-wise, God of War (4) dispenses with most platforming mechanics entirely, but has some climbing and mild puzzle solving like the original. The biggest change is the over-shoulder camera similar to Dead Space and the combat very reminiscent of the Batman: Arkham Aslyum games, plus an RPG-like system for weapons, skills, armor, and more. The son Atreus becomes a fighting companion as well, and the whole game is laid out like a 3D Metroidvania of sorts, with branching realms, locked areas, and reasons to explore. Now all we have to do is hope Sony cares enough to bring the sequel to PC, instead of leaving this one game an orphan like Epic and Microsoft did to the singular Gears of War PC port.