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 $6.13. Price from Oct 20.
- Cost per hour▼
- $2.42/hr
- ReviewsS
- 93% of 9,101
- Critics
- 68 players 25 higher
- Genre rank
- Top 14% Shooter
Holding it back: Cost per hour
Watch this gameOne alert at $6.13 or less.
Time and effort
- Main story
- 6.2h
- To 100%
- 19.4h 3.1x the story
- Finish
- 11% reach the ending
- Achievements
- 35
Price and sales
- Sales
- 50 on record
- Typical cut
- 85% off
- Steam low
- $1.49 July 2013
- Sale every
- 45d last September 2026
Players and genre
- Online
- 20 now
- Recent reviews
- 89% 30 days
- Cheaper than
- 33% of its genre
- Better reviewed
- 92% of its genre
Price and player charts
The drop-off
66% start to 11% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
The value story
The value story
July 2013 is where it bottomed out, at $1.49. 50 discounts in the 14 years on record, a median of 85 percent off across all of them, roughly 6 weeks apart.
Its score sits in the top 14 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 67 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 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).
More about Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
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 puts about 11 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 6.2-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour. 3 of the 628 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to October 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 89 percent of the 1,268 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.
Buy now or wait
What drives the score
Grades: S best, D weakest
S is the best grade and D the weakest, judged as a buyer. ▲ raises the score, ▼ lowers it, ? is an input we do not have, • is a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
What players say
The most fun i've ever had in an FPS game so far! I've even got rare achivement by beating every single level record! You should definitely check this game out!
2 more reviews
I can`t say that the first part of Serious Sam gave the world anything new. No new mechanics, no new ideas, and yet people still fell in love with this game for something. Probably it gave players a chance to relax after a hard day, running around locations and destroying a mountain of enemies without thinking about anything. It`s hard to say anything specific. Run and kill enemies, and just like that I`ve described...
Serious Sam: The First Encounter - thanks for the childhood, but I'm not gonna play it now Bought it out of nostalgia. I remember as a kid talking with the boys about those headless kamikazes and skeletons with grenade launchers, arguing who was cooler - Sam or Duke. We took turns playing, laughed our asses off when he got torn to pieces. But I never finished it - not back then, not now. Launched it recently. The...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
About the game
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!
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, nVidia GeForce 7600, ATI Radeon X1600 (Shader Model 3.0 Highly Recommended). Windows only.
Cite this score
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter scores 69/100 on the BANG Score (worth it) as of Nov 8, 2026. Price last read Oct 20. 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-encounterReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Nov 6, price as of Oct 20. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.