The minigun is a great way to bring the house down at parties.
If you want to coordinate with your teammates and be challenged by the game, you definitely want to be playing on Standard of Coin-Op mode. But for my money, the real fun in the game is had when you play on Classic mode with fifteen other players. It’s pure, unadulterated chaos. It’s like playing DOOM with God mode turned on, and yes, it’s mindless, but it’s an absolute riot and has to be experienced to be believed. It’s so much fun, that even though I needed to turn this review in, I replayed the entire campaign mode in one sitting prior to finishing this writeup.
Even though the combat in the campaign mode can feel a bit like survival modes in other games, Croteam has included a separate Survival mode with two maps, and it’s about what you’d expect. I had some fun with it, but the real draw is the campaign.
Everything’s not all wine and roses with the co-op, however. While the online play is mostly stable, I was never able to have a lag-free play session, which led to some frustrating deaths. Additionally, more than once I ran into bugs that made completion of a level impossible. Luckily, it’s possible to restart a level via the in-game voting system.
Ultimately, Serious Sam 3 is a really fun shooter, but I can’t help but feel Croteam could have mixed up the formula a bit. While the co-op is the star of the show, the singleplayer experience doesn’t shine nearly as much solo and definitely suffers from a case of having done it all before.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Team up through the campaign with up to 15 other friends for frantic, old-school shooting action.
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.