Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter
BANGER · Shooter · 2019
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $5.99.
- Length
- 6.4h
- Value
- $0.94/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 61 MB of memory, full OpenGL compliant 3D accelerator, 604 MB of storage. Windows only.
Serious Sam is a high-adrenaline single-play and 16-player co-operative arcade-action FPS and Gamespot's Game of the Year 2001!
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
It has never been cheaper than $0.59. That was July 2013. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 96 in the 14 years tracked, about 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.
Value puts it in the top 3 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 69 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. The nearest things to it, Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter ($5.99, scores 75) and Serious Sam Classics: Revolution ($9.99, scores 79), are both worse buys on this math.
$7.47 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $5.99.
The press gave it 87; the people who bought it give it 96 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
2 of the 385 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 94 percent of the 798 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 26 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 6.4 hours. Doing everything runs 13, 2.0 times as long.
Players
11 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
I originally played this on my late Grandfathers Xbox Original console. i must have been no older than 5. Amazing stuff.
Here is my SERIOUS review of this game Sam being UNserious while facing hordes of hundreds of enemies is the first thing to mark. weapon's design, function and sounds is SERIOUSLY one of the best and i am glad grow up with this masterpeice enemy's are just impossible to forget and they're all unique where you can also easily recognize them by color shape and size as an example you can understand when you see bunch...
Classic shooter. Boomer shooters now wish there were even half as memorable as this.
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.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/41050/serious-sam-classic-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 4, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.