Horde Shooters: A lost genre

[exile360]

I recently purchased Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter on GOG and it got me to thinking about the fact that we haven't seen a shooter like this in a very long time.  Modern shooters spend so much horsepower on lighting effects and super pretty graphics that they can generally only display a very limited number of enemies/opponents onscreen at a time, often relying more on stealth and realism than arcade action and high speed fun.  On the opposite end we have games like Serious Sam as well as the PC game based on the film Starship Troopers (a beautiful, insane, challenging and fun game, at least in my opinion) with massive numbers of enemies swarming, over the top weapons and fast movement while you battle wave after wave of attacking enemies who are also often armed to the teeth.

I miss the more arcade style of gameplay and overall silliness games like this offer.  Such games are usually very self aware and never take things to seriously.  They aren't known for the most compelling stories and character dramas or the most realistic military style gameplay, but what they do offer is a high impact, rapid-fire game that has more in common with Contra than Call of Duty.

 

[Sentoryn]

Free on Steam 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H39rTuFJgYA

[Amaroq_Starwind]

Makes me think of Unreal Gold.