Steam code provided by Devolver Digital
Serious Sam is a series that’s been part of the gaming industry since the early 2000s. After almost a decade’s worth of a hiatus, Sam Stone is back to battle some aliens in Serious Sam 4. While this game has had almost a decade of time to iron out the issues and deliver a fresh take on the series, it misses terribly and feels like a game that came out at the wrong time. Once a great series with its own style and gameplay seems to have fallen short of what it could’ve had going for it in this new entry.
Story
The story centers around Sam as he travels throughout Rome to save the world from the aliens invading earth. He and his team of comrades will fight and outtalk their enemies while sending them packing with a bullet or two. The tale soon takes Sam and his team across the land to find the Ark of the Covenant which houses an ancient weapon.
My opinion of the story is that it didn’t do anything for me in the slightest. The characters’ lines are cheesy, cringy, and pretty dated. The characters all have their 90s action hero attitudes but it ultimately felt out of place. Maybe 10 years ago this would’ve been funny but in the world now, toxic masculinity isn’t really something people think is cool anymore. Besides the cringe-inducing dialogue, the story follows a generic route most of the time with nothing unique going for it.
Gameplay
Gunplay is the bread and butter of the series and is what most fans come back for with each installment. Serious Sam 3 came out in 2011 and unfortunately, it seems that not much has been improved on since then. While we get game series’ that reinvigorate themselves like the Doom franchise, Wolfenstein, and Call of Duty, Serious Sam 4 does absolutely nothing to propel the series into the future.
Nevertheless, you run around each level completing small objectives whilst taking on hordes of enemies. You’ll take them down on the go and other times, the game will lock you in an area until all waves of baddies are depleted. Sometimes these areas were fantastic because of the difficulty that the game throws at you with the dozens of ongoing cannon fodder. Other times it would just be boiled down to pure laziness on the developers’ end because they couldn’t wrap up a level or area in a different way.
Besides main quests, you can pick up optional side ones along the way on most levels. Taking advantage of these side quests allows you to see more of the levels as well as giving you the chance to get additional resources. These can come in the form of health packs, ammo, armor, gear, and even skill points. Besides the benefits I’ve laid out, they also add a little more to the story.
As far as collectibles in the game go, there aren’t any. Instead, you can pick up different weapons, gear, and skill points. These 3 ingredients are what made me push myself through the slog that this game threw at me. The weapons really are fun to use and some are ridiculously powerful against the hordes. Most of them were pretty unique in the way that they’d inflict damage and it was fun to get used to each one and find my favorites.
I enjoyed the gear pick up, most notably was the drink that Sam could take which would make him a killing machine for a short burst of time. There’s also the more generic C-4 type of things as well as some holograms you can use to distract enemies. I really didn’t find myself using these all too often as they alsways got lost in the shuffle compared to the laundry list of weapons I had at my side.
There’s a simple skill tree that you can build up over the course of the game as well. Sam will come across these purple orbs and upon crushing them is granted a skill point. The skills give you varying things like dual pistols or enemies dropping pickups. Nothing too revolutionary but it all feels like it fits in well. The dual pistols was really satisfying on PC. I loved using both left and right clicks to control each pistol independantly.
Besides shooting loads and loads of baddies, the game slightly breaks up the flow with some vehicle segments. I honestly wish that these had made a bigger presence in the final product. You can shoot down armies in the Popemobile mech, drive around the French countryside on a motorcycle, and chop up the invaders in a wheat harvesting machine. I loved these sequences and unfortunately, they didn’t play a large part in the story at all and really only made their appearance towards the end of the game.
The overall gameplay loop is very basic. It does fit in the overall franchise of Serious Sam and I think that people that aren’t expecting too much will like it. I, on the other hand, had higher hopes for this game based solely on the love that I have for the franchise. It feels like the devs were going for newer ideas and somewhere along the line were told to draw it back a bit. That overall hurts because I can see the greatness of the game hiding underneath a cheap and lazy “finished game”.
Visuals
Visuals is a 50/50 for me. I absolutely love the styles of the creatures that I got to fight. A lot of them felt unique and new to me. Some very much so are derivative of Doom and other shooting games but most of them had distinct stylization that really looked peculiar. The handling of the graphics to bring them to life, now that is where the ball was dropped.
The animations and environments in this game look abysmal. This would’ve been a game I would’ve expected to see on the latter end of the PS3’s lifespan. Characters are ugly, have a sticky look to them, and their animations are as stiff as a board. Everything in this game looks under-developed. The characters, environments, and everything in-between. I can’t believe that they actually felt that this game was ready to sell in its graphical state. I mean, I know that bad graphics don’t break a game but come on. There’s a 9-year difference between Serious Sam 3 and 4 but both look graphically similar.
Audio
When thinking about the audio, there wasn’t anything I could really say negatively about it. Enemies sounded creepy and weapons punchy. The voice actors did a decent job but aren’t going up for any game awards. It hits that “b movie” aesthetic and doesn’t try to reach above it.
Replayability
Unless you’re a die-hard fan of the series, I can’t see anyone really feeling the need to pick this up and play again on their own. There is a co-op mode to play the game and I can see a lot of people having fun with that. The gunplay can be amusing but anything beyond that is up to the players’ opinion of it. For me, it’s a hard pass.
What It Could Have Done Better
I’ve already beaten you over the head with how dated the game feels in its characters, visuals, and story so I’ll spare you the retread. The first few levels were an absolute bore and really impacted the way I felt for the game from then on. Most areas you’ll go through felt too closed in. This was a complaint with Serious Sam 3 and it really comes back in full swing on this one. I never really felt like I had a big battlefield to skirmish in. It was really disappointing.
I also noticed that the levels felt really disjointed. There were a lot of dead-end areas that felt clipped in or forgotten. I thought that maybe there was supposed to be something there and it had just been blocked off or completely removed. This isn’t something that I’ve seen in games in a long time. It didn’t really impact the game itself but did make it feel cheap.
It wasn’t until the last quarter of the game that it felt like it was really taking off. That doesn’t mean that it was perfect though. One level alone had me use 3 or 4 different vehicles throughout its path. There aren’t many times you get to use vehicles so it was extremely weird to use most of them in one sitting.
The devs bragged about having up to a thousand enemies on screen at once but it’s really a joke and pretty misleading. One of the times you get to experience it is in the first moments of the game but it’s pretty much scripted. You see it again in the final battle, and while it looks epic, it’s just a wasted opportunity. The game had a great chance at utilizing the big areas known for the series and filling them with enemies but instead, it just teases you and leaves you starving for more of the good bits.
I had a couple of crashes that happened out of nowhere. There were a few times that the game would glitch me through its blocked areas which made getting through parts a little easier. Enemy AI would get stuck in hilarious areas and would pile on one after another leaving a path of easy targets. I’d also experienced an issue where my game would be coated in a weird color. Once it was brown and really only lasted a few moments. Unfortunately, I experienced it again towards the end of the game but this time it was pink and lasted an entire level and even death wasn’t an escape from this bug.
Verdict
Serious Sam 4 is a game made for die-hard fans that don’t want much change in the series’ formula. Fans that did expect an evolution or fresh take on it will be sorely disappointed. While this title does have some fun weapons to use, that’s the long and short of it. It’s a generic feeling game with not much pizazz to bring it to a full realization. If you miss the late 2000s then this is the game for you.
