Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (Beta) – Steam Backlog Bonanza

For what will probably be the last game in the Steam Backlog Bonanza, the 35th one on the list, I played a shooter called Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (beta). I have no idea how I got this game. I have a bunch of Serious Sam games, but I don’t remember buying any of them, and since Blaugust is over now I don’t particularly feel like doing the work to look it up. School’s out! For. EVAH!

Anyway I haven’t played Serious Sam very much, but I remember the games being pretty dumb and fun, if you like super-fast twitchy shooter games with heroes stamped out of the Duke Nukem mold.

“Fusion 2017” seems to be a collection of all of the previous Serious Sam games packaged together with a new graphics engine, or something along those lines. When you run the game, you choose which Serious Sam game to play from a menu. I chose Serious Sam 3 BFE. I think I may have played a little bit of it before, but I don’t remember.

It’s fast. It’s dumb. It’s really fast. It’s very dumb. It’s amazingly fast. I had to turn the mouse sensitivity down to almost zero so I could even have a chance of steering my character straight. The default running speed feels like you’re driving a car at full speed, and if you hold shift you can sprint even faster than that. The weapons are straightforward shooter weapons, and the enemies explode in gory gibs.

There’s a story of sorts, but it’s really dumb and it doesn’t matter. It’s just an excuse for “Sam” to say dumb things that are kind of funny in an over-the-top corny way.

There are a whole lot of settings and options to tweak in the menus. You can actually choose whether to play with a first-person or third-person camera, which is highly unusual for a shooter. I ended up going with a third-person camera, because those are less likely to give me motion sickness, and this is a game where that’s definitely an issue to contend with.

It’s a shooter from a bygone era, a throwback to Doom-style games where you just run and gun as fast as possible against the waves of enemies that bear down upon you. There’s not much more to say about it. It does what it does pretty well, if you like that sort of thing.

Will I play more? Highly unlikely. It’s way too fast for me, and makes me slightly ill trying to keep up with it. But it’s fun for a short time.

Live Stream - Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (Beta)

Stream Production Notes: Probably the last live stream for a while. Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Everything seemed to work. I’ll have more to say about the month-long streaming experiment another time.

Previously on the Steam Backlog Bonanza: BioShock 2 Remastered.