The big joke about Serious Sam is that he’s not serious at all. Well, he’s serious about kicking ass, because he (meaning you) can literally take on a thousand enemies single-handed and come out with only a few scratches. He’s not serious because he’s been fighting the forces of an alien overlord named Mental (yep) and he’s been doing it while wearing cheesy orange sunglasses and making ridiculous quips, some of which are actually funny (in one of our favorites, after destroying a giant alien warship and roughly 300 of its minions, Sam says “Yeah mother***er! How you like my planet taste?”). Aside from Sam’s wannabe Duke Nukem attitude, the Serious series is known for balls-out cra𒈔zily designed enemies and its penchant for throwing absurd numbers of them at you.

BFE𒁃 achieves the latter with not much of the former. Whereas previous Serious games gave you things like (allow us to quote our review of Serious Sam 2): “clockwork rhinos, mutant footballers, three-headed flaming hounds… witches on broomsticks, Orc-carrying gyrocopters… zombie stockbrokers…” BFE sports a few strange leftovers from previous Serious games, like the iconic headless kamikazes, who run at you screaming while carrying a bomb in each hand, but other than that the enemies have become extremely generic Doom knockoffs: fat ogre-dudes with rocket-launcher arms, cyber-demon mechs with, uh, rocket-launcher arms, scorpion dudes with Gatling-gun arms… man what’s with all the weapon arms? The enemy design, for the most part, is totally uninspired,😼 which is bizarre considering inspired enemies are one of the series’ hallmarks.

Similarly, while Serious 2 took us to all kinds of lush and colorful environments, BFE returns to Egypt and just lingers there like an unwanted party crasher. The ENTIRE game is a series of brown textures – sand, brick buildings, and so many brown Egyptian ruins that playing this game may make you forget there are any other colors in the rainbow (hey, brown’s in the rainbow, right?). Again, this is such a weird stylistic choice because Serious Sam is supposed to be the respite from “modern” shooters. It’s supposed to be an old-school throwback to when FPS games were about nonstop killing and endless circle-strafing or running-backwa✃rd-and-strafing.

The good news is that gameplay-wise, BFE does in fact fulfill those aforementioned promises. The shooting mechanics feel smooth, solid, and full of enough impact to rattle your jawbones. Plowing through enemies with shotguns, miniguns, rocket launchers, and of course the cannon (like, an actual cannon from a ship) is addictive, triggering primitive crags within the brain where your simian self says “Huh, huh, that there done blowed up real good.” As Sam always does, he al𝄹so encounters hordes the likes of which you’ve never seen. Put it this way: on one le꧃vel our bodycount tallied at over 1,100 kills. One level.