Serious Sam 3: BFE Gold Edition

I have a soft spot for games that know exactly what they are and commit to it without apology, and Serious Sam 3: BFE is one of the most self-aware arcade shooters you can load up today. The first few levels will test your patience. Croteam opens with corridor-heavy ruins and a modest weapon selection, and if you arrive expecting the full circus immediately you will raise an eyebrow. Stick with it. The slow build is a setup, and once the open Egyptian arenas start spawning hundreds of enemies at once, the game shifts into a register that modern shooters have almost entirely abandoned. The loop is elemental: trigger a horde, backpedal, manage your arsenal, survive. No regenerating health forces you to hunt down scattered pickups and dig into secret areas, some of which hide weapons like the Lasergun and the Sniper Rifle that never appear in normal level flow. The sledgehammer replaces the classic knife and chainsaw with three attack modes, vertical strike, 180 spin, and full 360 sweep, which gives close-quarters moments a tactile weight. Ranged options include a double-barreled shotgun, a minigun, and the AS-24 Devastator, a crowd-control grenade launcher that is as unhinged as it sounds. The Gold Edition bundles in the Jewel of the Nile expansion, which adds new missions and one extra weapon, plus the Bonus Content DLC which tacks on a scoped variant of the Devastator, a new player model, and the full original soundtrack in multiple audio formats. That is a complete package. Multiplayer is the headline feature the series does best. Up to 16 players can tear through the campaign in Standard Co-Op, Classic Co-Op, Coin-Op Co-Op, Beast Hunt, or Team Beast Hunt modes, and four-player split-screen still works locally, with support for multiple keyboards and mice on a single machine, which is genuinely rare. Survival mode offers dedicated wave-based arenas for solo or group play. The competitive PvP side is the weakest link: stripped of the overwhelming enemy pressure that defines the series, it feels sparse and underdeveloped compared to the co-op offering. A Beast Hunt match with friends, though, is a different story entirely. Where the game earns criticism is honest: repetition is structural, not accidental. You will encounter the same Kleer Skeletons, Gnaars, and Beheaded Kamikaze runners in configurations that grow in number far faster than they grow in variety. The score adapts beautifully to the chaos, heavy guitar and pounding drums escalating through boss encounters in a way that feels genuinely tuned to the carnage, but the visual palette stays mostly sand-coloured across the campaign's twelve levels. Critics at launch split roughly where the Steam reviews land today: fans of old-school FPS design rate it very positively, while players expecting evolution from earlier entries found the repetition more grinding than meditative. For the right player, none of that is a disqualifier. If you have spent time missing the era when no cover, no hand-holding, and a full carry inventory were standard expectations, BFE delivers that contract completely. The level editor and Steam Workshop integration mean the community has been extending the game for well over a decade, which at this point makes the content ceiling genuinely hard to measure. Come for the chaos, stay for co-op.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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