serious sam hd - melee & pistols only (serious difficulty) - sand canyon

played on: 19th of january, 2025
rules:
only the pistols, the knife and chainsaw are allowed in combat
other weapons are allowed for utility purposes (rocketjumping, prop demolition, etc.), just not for actual fighting
saving and loading is allowed (this challenge would be incredibly tedious otherwise)
the second rule is because some of these are fights are flat out impossible without cheese
---------------------------------
sand canyon:
tougher than usual, but still rather easy compared to the later maps.
harpies aren't much of an issue, they move slow enough to outrun, their projectiles are too slow to be threatening and they can be 1 shot by the knife.
bulls can be a pain in the ass, they like to spaz out sometimes and if there's several of them charging you they can block each other and steer straight into you. there aren't enough of them for that to happen here though.
first real challenge is the marsh hopper fight. normally these guys aren't too bad since you can just grab that secret tommy gun and rapid fire them to death, but both the knife and the pistols have terrible crowd control, so a lot of the marsh hopper fights will have to be cheesed going forward. they can be kited by going around in circles, but if there's too many they start bouncing off of each other and slamming into you, so that will only get you so far...
this marsh hopper can kinda be cheesed - if you stay on the left or right of the arena half of the marsh hoppers won't wake up.
i guess you could also rocket jump up to the little rooms where the marsh hoppers spawn, but there's no need for that, there aren't that many of them here.
there's also that hallway with marsh hoppers. you wanna spawn in the gnaars and get the hell outta there before the marsh hoppers spawn. kill the gnaars (and make sure the hoppers don't see you), then you can go for the hoppers. you can slowly peak around the corner to divide them up, but i managed to do it the hard way this time...
rest of the fights aren't too bad. if you're trying this at home get used to kiting kleers and checking around corners, the first encounter likes spamming them on serious.