Serious Sam Classic: Realm of Thoth | Hermopolis - Serious 100%

Last normal map of the set. It was made by Maska, which means it takes at least an hour to beat, is visually beautiful and full of small details (like those chimes at the beginning), has some interesting gimmicks and pushes the engine to its limits. Maska always tries to impress the player with some cool stuff, but the gameplay usually suffers because of that. That is not the case in this map as the fights are very well made (for most of the time). The first fight is definitely the most difficult one, you don't have a lot of health and there's no way to restore your armor, so you have to be very careful with your movement and weapon choice. It's strange to have the hardest fight at the very beginning, it makes the rest of the level feel slightly underwhelming in comparison. Gameplay in the middle section is good, but nothing to write home about, just your standard encounters, made well enough to entertain you throughout. Ammo balance is non-existent, which is a shame after two levels where it was done correctly. There's a small fight in the underground section that teaches you the ground shake mechanic, it will be used during the final boss fight in the next level. The highlight of the map is obviously the scorp room. It's an absolutely stellar setpiece and a great gameplay encounter, very challenging too. The only gripe I have with it is that the stone floor in that room is tagged as "stairs", which makes the movement feel horrible. That's actually a problem in a lot of places in this map, regular floors should not have the "stairs" flag. The aqueduct fight is also good, but the real standout is the final fight. It's a huge arena with lots of different structures, but the enemies almost never get stuck, the waves are big and demand your full attention if you don't want to get cornered, you need to constantly move to replenish resources, it's just an awesome fight all around. Especially impressive to see this done in Classic, as I think it is much harder to do large encounters there. There are some bugs in this level. The door to the temple after placing the feather doesn't work and I had to cheat to go past them. You can see the switch markers in Secret 9. There are no multiplayer-only spawners in this level, 1525 out of 1541 is the maximum kill count. Two Kleer spawners in the temple after placing the feather have no templates set, and there are two unused ambushes in the small temples right before the final arena. 0:00 Start 1:17 Secret 1 7:58 Secret 2 15:08 Secret 3 19:32 First switch for Secret 4 20:50 Second switch for Secret 4 23:49 Secret 4 25:13 Secret 5&6 (one secret counts as two) 29:03 Secret 7 35:15 Secret 8 44:06 First switch for Secret 9 44:27 Second switch for Secret 9 44:46 Secret 9