Who asked for this?
Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is another title in the popular Serious Sam series. A series of first-person shooter games that I know absolutely nothing about. Only thing I know is that it’s real many and gives off Duke Nukem vibes and is like a survival, wave-based, shooter, thing. This title is developed by Crackshell and published by Devolver Digital. It looked quite interesting as it looks nothing like the original FPS games. No, this game is a top down indie lookin’ shooter of all things. I thought, “Hey, this looks neat. Might be like Nuclear Throne, or Gungeon.” But man, this game is, not very good.
Gameplay
As you can expect this game plays like, well, a top-down shooter. A slow and boring one. All you gotta do is hold the left mouse button aim mindlessly and press R and hold the right mouse button to reload or change your weapon. Enemies are pretty standard, you got your weak kinds that attack in packs, you got the big guys that deal lots of damage, and you got the weird one that runs at you and explode. You can go through a campaign which I payed little to no attention to or a survival mode which seems more like Serious Sam’s thing. Both of these modes have co-op. And though I wasn’t able to try out the function I’m sure it would be way less boring than going it alone. There is also Steam Workshop support so the community can make custom maps and all that jazz. Which can be cool but we’ll have to wait and see how many people actually bother. It can be hectic and interesting at times because it pretty much becomes a bullet hell and bosses are cool for the most part but Sam’s slow walking speed and limited tools just make it so awkward and weird to play. You’d expect it to be fast and and heart pounding but it’s super bland.
Music
I don’t even know what to say about the music. I mean, it’s music. It’s not very good music. It gets repetitive to such a point and boring to such a point where I just had to put the game down. There’s seriously nothing to say about the music other than it’s boring to annoying. I was expecting stuff that would be fast-paced and catchy tunes.
Presentation
This game has some very, very generic pixel-art. If you think generic, easy to make, and indie, you would think this game. Yes, the pixel-art is quite detailed and dense and looks nice. But it’s so bland and boring. There is absolutely nothing aesthetically appealing about this game, and that’s a shame. The game kind of tells you right off the bat that it’s gonna be loud, gory, hectic and hard. But the aesthetics of the game aren’t enough to convey the message. But the writing is, cheesy one-liners and all that fun stuff are included that could at least make me crack a smile every once in awhile. Even though it looks kinda generic at times some locations and areas do look very nice with the dense pixel-art. And some nice little animations make it seem like there was a ton of care put into these areas.
Performance
I’m pretty sure this game could run on almost anything as most indie titles do. There isn’t much to say other than if you’re interested and you don’t have a fancy computer you’ll still be fine. I ran it on a crummy little laptop perfectly.
Verdict
I was seriously expecting something that I could sink in maybe 6-7 hours into but this game has just so little to offer. The community made stuff is interesting but I don’t see it succeeding that much in that department. It can be fun with friends and since you can have so many people playing it could be a really fun party game. But at a base level the game fails to impress at almost everything. It’s like it’s almost there but just doesn’t quite have it yet. I feel like I’ve been way too harsh on this game. And that might be cause I’ve been spoiled by so many great top-down shooters that they just leave this in the dust. Either way this game doesn’t have huge faults but it just lacking everywhere.
I would give Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour a 5/10