Game:

Serious Sam 3: BFE (2011)

Duration: 2:03:19

545 views

17

I've gotten a lot, and I mean A LOT of requests to check out this mod, and after playing it I don't really know how to feel about it. It's clear from the moment you boot it up that like "A Breakfast In France", there's a lot of passion and thought that went into this remaster, but it's also one of the most frustrating experiences I've had in recent memory.

Let's start with the elephant in the room... why is this a semi-blind run? Initially when recording the blind run, I continuously died to the first arena fight where you pick up the Autoshotgun and every 2 or 3 deaths the game would crash. I said some... regrettable things, and decided it was best to scrap it entirely and start fresh. After starting fresh 8 times (mainly due to crashing), I decided it was no longer a blind run since I was somewhat familiar with the starting area.

So what’s wrong with this mod? I think it ultimately boils down to these 3 issues: Performance, balancing, & compatibility.

Let's start with performance. I know SS4 isn't exactly winning any awards for optimization, but damn this mod is laggy! I tried lowering all of my settings but the mod still ran like ass and every death was a gamble as to weather or not the game would crash. I know that there's not much the author can do to boost performance, but it makes navigation and combat harder than it should be and greatly hinders the experience.

Balancing I’d say is hit & miss. The reworked weapons feel good in some fights but in others they feel underpowered. Of course the performance issues contribute a lot to the felt difficulty, but I honestly think some of the fights on Serious Difficulty are borderline unbalanced. The main offenders are the Autoshotgun fight (which makes up about 70% of my deaths and game crashes), the Portal Too side objective fight, and the final fight. I get that the map needs difficulty spikes but these fights don’t feel balanced around the reworked weapons and AI tweaks.

The final issue is with compatibility. You more or less have to disable all of your other mods if you want to play this mod. It's not a deal breaker but it is pretty annoying.

Alright, I know I've been pretty harsh, so let's talk positive. As I mentioned in the beginning, it's clear that Serious Sacor is passionate about this rework, and it shows in the amount of freedom the player is granted to explore the castle and unlock all of its secrets. As you explore, the castle opens up and grants players new areas to check out and new routes that can be used for backtracking. It may be a bit daunting at first, but it's incredible how cohesive the whole experience is.

To put it simply, it's incredible how much detail he managed to cram into this thing, and it's even more impressive that in most cases the detail serves a purpose; weather it be for unlocking a secret or for helping guide players to new points of interest. It's something I loved about his rework of "A Breakfast In France" and is something I continue to love in this map.

Currently, I have a love/hate relationship with this map but it's leaning more towards hate if for no other reason than the poor optimization and that stupid Autoshotgun fight. If this mod ran smoother and if some of the fights were rebalanced to be a tad bit more fair on Serious Difficulty, I'd say this is a masterpiece and a must play, and even though in a lot of aspects the mod is being held back, I'd still urge you to try it (if for no other reason than to share my pain of dying and having to restart the game hundreds of times because it keeps crashing).

Sorry Sacor for being critical. I still love your work and will anxiously await your next project.

Thanks again for watching and as always, stay Serious!

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