>Serious Sam Advance
>April, 2004

I was not a fan of Serious Sam to begin with and this game did not win me over. The game alternates between being a slideshow and a slower slideshow. Aiming is incredibly inprecise, in fact I would almost always strafe to fine tune my aiming rather than using the d-pad. If you hold down B you get more precise aiming, however that also makes you walk very slowly and also holding B and pressing L/R makes you switch weapons so you can't strafe while holding B, which makes the whole button basically un-useable except in a few circumstances. On top of this rapidly tapping B also switches to the next weapon, which means that if you try to hold B and press L to go to the previous weapon, if you don't wait a second before letting go of B or pressing L or R, you'll be switching weapons again. I was constantly miss - switching weapons in the midst of action, it's a real mess.

Even if the engine and controls issues were fixed, the game is still very average at best. Most of the game is just a succession of rectangle rooms with a few enemies spawns one after the other. In the second half of the game they very often hand out backpacks which refills all the ammo of all weapons so you barely even need to watch your ammo. Also if you use a level password you'll start the level with full ammo and also all weapons previously available, even if you had missed said weapon yourself (this actually saved me in the end because I hadn't found the nuke which is mandatory to use for the shit the end game pulls).
There are a couple of level design segments that are actually good and that's about it.