True, I am a real SS1 acolyte and I didn't care that much for SS2 because of its sacrilige towards the holy tenets of straightforward arcade style slaughterfest from the first instalment - in particulat the addition of manic nigh-ludicrous holy-crap-this-is-confusing rooms that, at the end of the day, were more annoying than they were fun. As such I was psyched about SS3 prior to its release when it was marketed as more of a follow-up to the first game. Well, like many, I installed it first thing after its Steam release last night and so far I've put in around 4 hours of gameplay. Here are my likes and gripes so far (I'm hoping they'll change!):

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+ I can sprint to move almost really fast
+ The game has lots of secrets
+ Difficulty seems reasonably balanced on Serious
+ Killing the Kleer and the Gnaar feels pretty good and dodging the Kleer is of particular nostalgic flavor

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- Graphically all I can say is the game is "too good" for a SS game and not good enough for a top-end title. Admittedly, much of this has to do with the stylistic choices by the design team (eg not really the engine)
- Performace-wise my 460GT runs it nicely on High, but I can't turn it up to Ultra and it takes annoyingly long to load on my i7 960 with 16GB of RAM. I would think Skyrim has more to load and does it 4-5 times faster and runs perfectly on ultra while also looking better
- There are things that are far from optimized that I'm really dreading as these hint that there are either not going to be truly epic battles or I'm going to need to attack my gfx options at one point. I'm talking about you, secret room full of barrels that blow up and grind my framerate to a halt due to smoke particle overfill
- In many cases level design is downright annoying. If you're going to do this, give me a damn map or actual versatility. *Khm*, running around (and looking for mostly boring tuck-away secrets) in the city. I know the first game wasn't overly brilliant either in this regard (actually, in restrospect most of the secrets were really good), but at least it was unique and you always knew where you were, because the levels were simply less confusing.
- Quite honestly, to me the choice of weapons is rather perplexing. I can deal with the hammer, but S&W instead of the Colt. Really? Why would you go stylistically so far off target if the past 2 games worked. I'm not playing CoD or Battlefield here. Gimme some flavor!

- How come I ain't sprintin' by default? And how come most rooms are to scale and my character actually moves slower indoors? Just make the damn buildings larger like you did in the past!
- Too many secrets, most of which are too pointless, too easy or too confusing. To me, this is actually one of the biggest problems as I can adapt to the design, I can adapt to the weapons and I can adapt to new gameplay, but I can't think myself into liking 17 tuck-away secrets in a level that has 50 rooms with 4000 nooks and crannies. So far there've been a number of nice secrets and only one really neat SS1-style secret that I've encountered (it's got to do with a No Entry sign).
- No available shortcut for the Statistics screen that I can see while Nectrisca is completely pointless and is invoked by the middle mouse button. Meh? Why would they separate the two in the first place?
- Enemies all to often keep coming in one at a time even on Serious difficulty. Seriously not fun.
- Okay, I can run through vegetation (trees, that is) and some less important geometry. Okay.
- Collision detection feels funny - I keep sliding off stuff when I shouldn't and I keep getting stuck behind stuff I shouldn't (eg chairs). I guess it helps that these are breakable.
- Speaking of which - if you're going to add that much non-static (breakable) stuff, damn well better add some physics to at least some of it! I'd rather there was less breakable geometry, though. Makes me want to break stuff too much, which leads to actually breaking stuff, which leads to disappointment, because there's never anything inside stuff (well, sometimes there's something behind it - hint, hint).
- What's with the save limit counter in the Statistics menu? Is that the new measure of hardcore?
- For now the last thing that is scaring me is how much damage Scorpions and particularly fall damage do. This is really really scary only 4 hours in as it directly implies I can't be bounced around by bulls or anything like that, there won't be any cool vertical navigation and, most of all, large crowd dynamic is going to be much more less arcadey (since stuff can kill me so fast). "Cover is for pussies," the trailer says? We'll see about that...


So yeah, my first impressions are relatively meh-like (not strictly negative, but kind of "but... but..."-ish): I simply can't figure out why they've gone so far off the mark here and forfeited so many of the features that made the first games special (over-sized geometry, bouncing around/jumping down from ledges, having fewer but cooler secrets, having more unique weapons and FAR better/unique level/art design).

As a sidenote, Croteam also seem to be really proud of their engine. So far I'm yet to see a truly compelling reason why (I mean it works for this game, but it's like they're trying to compete with the likes of CryEngine, iD Tech and the Unreal Engine). Not to be crass, but I don't think the Serious Engine currently (3.5) lives up to these standards - at least based on this game.

What are your first impressions?

I like the Serious Sam franchise a lot. I hope to be able to play it soon. Sadly, I haven't had much time to enjoy it.

1 - but I can't turn it up to Ultra and it takes annoyingly long to load on my i7 960 with 16GB of RAM.
2- How come I ain't sprintin' by default? And how come most rooms are to scale and my character actually moves slower indoors? Just make the damn buildings larger like you did in the past!
3- For now the last thing that is scaring me is how much damage Scorpions and particularly fall damage do. This is really really scary only 4 hours in as it directly implies I can't be bounced around by bulls or anything like that, there won't be any cool vertical navigation and, most of all, large crowd dynamic is going to be much more less arcadey (since stuff can kill me so fast). "Cover is for pussies," the trailer says? We'll see about that...

1- No SSD? That's what you deserve! Ok, seriously... are they still using uncompressed textures?
2- Agreed. That's just poor.
3- I say falling damage is for pussies. Borderline sad.

As a sidenote, Croteam also seem to be really proud of their engine. So far I'm yet to see a truly compelling reason why (I mean it works for this game, but it's like they're trying to compete with the likes of CryEngine, iD Tech and the Unreal Engine). Not to be crass, but I don't think the Serious Engine currently (3.5) lives up to these standards - at least based on this game.

Let's see... ID is actually nowhere as important as it used to be. Unreal has demonstrated to be able to adapt and scale quite well. CryEngine is ... on the right track at the very least. Serious Engine? With limited amounts of products produced which work the same (and to a certain degree, they look the same) I believe there's evidence the SE don't quite live up to the comparison. I rank it over XRay (STALKER series) however, that thing in totally broken IMHO and the amount of "modding" supported is close to zero AFAIK.

Oh, one more thing - any game that has helicopter bosses in it, gets my stamp of retardation. Doesn't that get old already?