Preview: "Serious Sam"

There's a new first person 3-D action game in town, and it's name is "Serious Sam". Seriously. Yes, despite the less-than-serious-sounding name, "Serious Sam" is a Quake clone that hopes to single-handedly bring the genre (which has been headed down the proverbial toilet recently) back to it's roots -- fast action, engrossing gameplay, and seriously cool bad-guys.

"Serious Sam" has been developed by Croteam, a rag-tag bunch of twenty-something programmers from Croatia, who have built the game from the ground up during their spare time (just to prove how small of a team it is, design had to be halted when one of the members was required to serve time in the Croatian army). Surprisingly, the resulting test version (a full-fledged demo is expected in a few months) is a refreshing change from most new 1st-person first person shooters.

The demo version first shows off the very impressive graphics engine. All the major features of a top-notch, professionally-developed 3-D engine are here: colored lightning, fog, haze, particle effects, lense flair, reflections, you name it, Croteam has put it in, including state-of-the-art effects like bump mapping and diffuse shading. I was especially impressed, however, with the fog and haze effects, which are much better than the same effect in the Unreal and Quake engines.

All these special effects do come at a price, however, and you'll need a pretty hefty processor (or a great graphics card) to run the game without it slowing down. On my measly P2 233, with a TNT 1 card, things got a little slow at times. However, turning the resolution down from the default of 640x480 helped.

A good portion of this test is dedicated to showing off the engine, but the developers also have thrown in a demo level to give an overview of how the game will be played. The game is pretty standard FPS fair, obviously not complete, but has the few standard weapons (shotgun, revolver, double revolver, etc) and a few enemies to begin with. Right away, the game has a distinct Doom-like feel. You'll find yourself faced with multiple enemies coming at you from every direction, each behaving as real-life monsters (joke) would, thanks to the very impressive AI. More enemies appear when you pick up items or walk past certain triggers, keeping the player on his toes. The game is certainly challenging, leading the designers to describe Serious Sam as "an FPS for veteran gamers".

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