Parents' Guide to Serious Sam: Tormental

This first-person shooter series has been kicking for a couple of decades, but exploring a new game genre is a first for the franchise. In Serious Sam: Tormental, the player has a top-down perspective on the action and strafes around small, tight arenas filled with traps, walls, and minions. Instead of a linear story with levels you play through and move on from, this is a "roguelike" game, meaning that if players die, they have to restart from the beginning. But levels always change their layout and enemy placement, which helps each rerun feel new. This is helped by the game's having dozens of enemy types for players to fight. Players will almost always discover something new, including weapons and abilities that can be customized with special attachments and upgrades. Despite these robust elements of gameplay, there are only five small worlds that can be traversed in less than 10 minutes each. Once you go through them all, you simply loop back to the beginning with tougher enemies to defeat until you die. Repetition sets in quickly, but even though the game has fewer levels than most roguelikes, it provides compelling, silly challenges along the way. These unlock keys to the final boss and modifiers that can increase your score at the cost of penalties, such as increasing enemy damage or limiting ammo.

Tormental may not distinguish itself with anything unique, but it feels well designed. The controls are snappy and punchy, with movement, aiming, and rolling being responsive and smooth. All of the weapons and their upgrades feel great and allow for different play styles. The only technical issue involves a slow, chugging frame rate when the action becomes heavy and chaotic, but this isn't frequent enough to be a major problem. Serious Sam: Tormental may involve nothing to write home about with its simplistic graphics and story, but it's got it where it counts with perfectly decent gameplay striking a surprising balance between quality and quantity.