Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem Review

I played this expansion around the time it came out and really enjoyed it. I saw a sale for the game on PS5 a few weeks ago and decided to buy it despite me beating the game so recently.

I still do really enjoy the game despite some of the techincal hiccups on PS5 like the game crashing when loading it up for the first time which only happened once for me, and the load times can be very slow. One lengthy load time to get to the start menu, and then another one just to load the game, and some slow down and framerates drops here and there, but the game ran sloppily on the PC I originally played the game on too even if it didn't have the aforementioned crashing issues.

One thing that did stand out to me more this time around is that I decided to play the game on normal difficulty and this is something that always bugged me about SS and I thought the recent games would fix is that normal difficulty is basically hard mode and easy mode feels like the intended difficulty for anyone who doesn't know the map layouts, every enemy spawn, and knows where all the enemies attack you from.

This might get me a lot of scrunity but playing Sam on easy mode really does feel like the ideal way to play if you don't want to die over and over again or get overwhelmed by how chaotic the game can be. I was playing on normal difficulty for the first few hours and I was just miserable, maybe the game is supposed to be bring back the difficulty of a classic shoot em up but in 3D but there are so many enemies on screen and you get hit from all sides, and your health bar gets torn to shreds so quickly that it leads into so much frustration. I reach a point where my weapon aresenal was too small, and ammo was way too limited for my shotgun and then had to defeat a super large group of Kleers in a closed space where the grenades on the shotgun would make you take damage due to splash damage and then I lowered to easy since I was just getting sick of dying to much.

Easy mode essententially makes you a tank where you can take so many hits from all sides to the point where it actually makes you feel like the "badass" that Sam Serious Stone hypes himself up as. I feel like just give normal mode easy mode health and I wouldn't be complaining this much. That or have melee kills provide more health back or have enemies drop more health or items upon death. It feels like any of these fixes could make Sam better to play on normal or higher.

I reached a point where I tried to play it normal one last time, and then I was getting attacked by a mutant helicoptor, I reach a door where it died and it autosaved and got me save trapped where I kept dying over and over. I reloaded a previous save and played on easy and then never looked back. I have some issues with games like Painkiller particularly it's awkward optimization but it's difficulty in the base game always did feel more balanced compared to Sam even if Painkiller doesn't have nearly as big hordes and arenas that SS does.

Also, why does the game have enemies giving health upon melee kill and them giving ammo and health drops skills in the skill tree? It's so out of place in a game like this since they are something you'd just expect to be there when playing any game of this type.

Now with the difficulty aside, I still really like the game. The damage animations when you kill the enemies is some of the best the FPS genre has to offer, the weapons themselves all feel great to use and fun to fire, and like SS4, the amount of guns you have is still impressive since now you got access to weapons from from the Second Encounter like the Sniper Rifle and from 3 you have a dedicated mid range weapon with it's own ammo not connected to the mini gun like the assault rifle or in Siberian Mayhem the AK-47.

The levels are nice and varied and the game gives you over the top and varied hordes early on, you killed so many enemies with the variety of weapons you have in SM that short length feels justified and beating the game is fuffling rather than hollow.

The enemy hordes towards the end of the game are so massive and crazy that it even puts some of the ones in the base SS4 to shame and that is an accomplishment since SS4 has some crazy and over the top hordes in it's own right.

The vehicle sections like the tank and mech are welcome pace breakers and don't take too long to the point where they overstay their welcome.

Overall, difficulty issues aside, Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem is still a ton of fun and I really like playing it...as long as I am not playing on a difficulty that is above easy.