serious sam hd - melee & pistols only (serious difficulty) - memphis sewers

played on: 20th 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
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sewers:
this one's also pretty underwhelming compared to dunes or the mountains. it's also not very difficult for the most part, in fact i even managed to beat the par time by like 4 minutes...
right, so you start by falling into a pool of water, you'd normally get sent down pretty far, but if you just hold space you'll land right on the surface.
I guess i should talk about the fish. these fish are actually the toughest non-boss enemies in the game in this challenge. i'm not joking, these guys will you fuck up if you're fighting more than 2 at a time. they move like 3x quicker than you do in the water (even if you're crouching on the floor to swim faster), they have an undodgable hitscan attack that deals 30 damage, it sends you flying too. if you're fighting a bunch of them you'll just get tossed around like a ragdoll and die within seconds...
normally they're not too much of a threat since they only have 30 health, but the pistols just don't fire quick enough to kill crowds of them, you need to be really careful with them.
anyway, the map. it starts with you falling into a pool with 3 fishes, get out ASAP, those fish will kill you quickly if you spend too much time in the water.
now you can either go upwards or swim down to find a secret, i decided to go upwards.
00:35 if you're going upstairs there's a bunch of gnaars. also the railing lowers down in the entrance you just took, but you can crouch under it.
after that is a bunch of low intensity encounters, not much to say about those. there's a locked door that needs to be opened by flipping a switch in the water.
2:57 for some reason, there's this giant fish inside the water. it doesn't move or attack, but it spawns a bunch of regular ones when it dies. problem is though, you need to hit it with enough damage to pop it and the pistols don't do enough damage to kill it. the knife will work, but then the fish that spawn out of it will obliterate you. i have 200 health and 50 armor and the fish kill me in like 3 seconds...
4:55 i tried again with a bit more armor, but it still wasn't enough. eventually i just skipped it...
(i skipped a fish fight in the moon mountains too, for the same reason)
5:40 anyway, after the locked door is a bunch of marsh hoppers, but in manageable quantities.
9:40 there is this one annoying secret here. a wall lowers down and there's a 200 armor pickup inside of it. however, 3 reptiloids also spawn on top of it. i tried just rushing in as soon as possible, but that didn't work. the reptiloids have a really strong melee attack that i never noticed outside of this challenge.
12:12 what you need to know is that only the middle one actually raises the wall, so lower its health as much as you can, then kill atleast one on the sides and then you can kill the middle one to spawn in the armor.
there's also a red scorpion that spawns in later, but there's enough cover to where you can just knife him to death.
12:40 after that it's an underwater with a bunch of fish, but you only fight 1 at a time, so there's nothing to worry about down here.
and yeah that's the entire map...