Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
Worth it · Shooter · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $14.99, a BANGER if it drops to $6.12.
- Length
- 6.2h
- Value
- $2.42/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 84% over the last 30 days against 93% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, nVidia GeForce 7600, ATI Radeon X1600 (Shader Model 3.0 Highly Recommended). Windows only.
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is a visually upgraded and fully Steam supported remake version of the original high-adrenaline single-play and 16-player co-operative arcade-action FPS which was Gamespot's Game of the Year 2001 and which scored overall of 87% on Metacritic!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
July 2013 is where it bottomed out, at $1.49. 50 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 85 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $6.12 BANGER line 48 times.
On value it sits in the top 14 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 66 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 91 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Serious Sam II ($9.99, scores 78) beats it on value, while it beats Serious Sam 3: BFE ($29.99, scores 57).
The press gave it 68; the people who bought it give it 93 percent. A 25-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 11 percent of players ever finish it. On a 6.2-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Players rate it 93 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 84 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 4 of the 623 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 89 percent of the 1,262 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 17 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 6.2 hours; clearing it takes 19, which is 3.1 times the campaign.
The drop-off
66% start to 11% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
46 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
It's Serious Sam, the HD remaster is great. I remember when Serious Sam FE first came out and I was AMAZED on how beautiful it looked at the time and the HD version pushes it further.
as a masive serious sam fan this is the best thing they made and cool and this s my favorite sam game :D
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Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter scores 69/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/41000/serious-sam-hd-the-first-encounterThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.