Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (beta)

My first thought when Serious Sam Fusion dropped into my library was that it looked like one of those launcher gimmicks nobody actually uses. I was wrong. Croteam built this as a genuine unified platform for three of their classic FPS titles, pulling Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 3: BFE under one roof, along with their respective DLC and VR counterparts, all launched from a single application without ever hitting the desktop. For anyone who has bounced between four separate Steam installs trying to keep settings consistent, this is an immediate quality-of-life win. The underlying games are exactly what they have always been: high-speed, non-regenerating-health arena shooters where Sam Stone sprints through Egyptian pyramids, jungle temples, and medieval castles blasting relentless waves of Kleers, Werebulls, headless kamikazes, and giant mechanical bosses with a toolkit that includes a shotgun, minigun, rocket launcher, and yes, an actual cannonball cannon. There is no cover system, no regenerating health, no slow-walk cinematic nonsense. You collect health and armor pickups scattered around the map, dodge projectiles by strafing hard, and make peace with the fact that Normal difficulty might still embarrass you on a first run. The enemy sound design is genuinely clever, each enemy recognizable by its audio cue before it even appears on screen, which matters a lot when you have 80 enemies bearing down from three directions. For co-op groups, Fusion is where this package really delivers. Split-screen is included, online co-op works cross-platform across Windows, Mac, Linux, and SteamOS, and VR owners can join sessions alongside flat-screen players. Unified server browsers pool TFE, TSE, and BFE lobbies into one list, so finding a populated server is no longer a game in itself. The "is it fun for four people at once" answer is yes, loudly, especially on Survival mode or a co-op run with lives limited. One caveat worth flagging: the default classic co-op setting ships with unlimited lives, which some veteran players find deflates the tension considerably. Switching that off manually before your first session is recommended. The Steam Workshop adds hundreds of community maps and full mod campaigns, so the content depth for a returning group is substantial. On the technical side, Fusion brings 64-bit executables, Vulkan and DirectX 11 support, multithreaded rendering, texture streaming, and a lightweight save system that writes progress almost instantly to Steam Cloud. Controller support is full and properly mapped for Xbox, PS4, and older DInput devices. The games run cleanly on modern hardware, though Apple silicon users should be aware of a fullscreen crash bug that requires a workaround on newer Macs. Development on the Fusion platform itself stopped around 2019 as Croteam shifted focus to Serious Sam 4, so do not expect new content or major bug fixes going forward. Some minor physics and hitbox quirks compared to the original standalone HD versions persist, and the beta label has never been officially retired. If you already own any of the supported Serious Sam titles, Fusion costs you nothing and upgrades the experience across the board. For new players, this is the most coherent way to start the classic series, assuming you can handle old-school difficulty design and arena combat that has no interest in holding your hand.

Riley · Scout Team

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