Serious Sam 4

I don't have much to say. It's a Serious Sam game so you know what you're buying. When you think of this game think of SS3 but with all the bad parts cut from it. It's not a weird trollish milsim for the first hour and a half. It's straight to the action. You start on a huge battlefield with what appears to be literally hundreds and hundreds of enemies. The shooting feels nice. Both shotguns are very reminiscent of classic Doom's shotguns and very satisfying. I mean, it's an SS game. It's a PROPER SS game at that. This one is way more in line with the classics (TFE and TSE) than 3, from the pickups to pace of combat. None of it is slow like SS3, not even in the same ballpark. Keep in mind before purchase that you will need a decent PC to play this game comfortably.

To be honest, before the release of SS4, I completed every game in the series just to be sure that I know basics about this universe. And now, after almost 20 hours in Serious Sam 4, I should warn you that this game feels like a fan-made spin-off of the series. It feels empty, soulless and ancient. Not "ancient" like another old-school series, but like another cashgrab from the developers that really don't care about Sam's future anymore. So many bugs, low-res textures and glitches after several patches, I saw all of this by myself. But all this is my own opinion, so how about financial success? Yep, the game failed to achieve good numbers, and now Devovler bought all Croteam. Will we see another Serious Sam? If it will be like SS4, I hope not. RIP Stone Sam....

I'm a long-time fan of Serious Sam and its japanese cousin, Earth Defense Force, when it comes to high-adrenaline arcade shooters. That being said, I cannot recommend in good conscience Serious Sam 4 due of how much of a rushed mess it is and this was my first game refund on GOG. I'll explain: First, the game has trouble to run even on a powerful machine (AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 16GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia RTX 2060, Samsung SSD 970 EVO) with hiccups on large encounters in High/Medium settings. The game also crashed on several occasions when trying to change the graphic settings or when manually loading a save. The game seems to not be much different to Serious Sam 3 visually despite the beefier requirements, however SS4 suffers of texture pop-ins. The difficulty pacing and level design is weird too. The game throws enemies at you that can be quite difficult to deal with the current arsenal you possess at the moment, such as the Scrapjacks on the first level or the coliseum arena fight. The developers rendered massive maps for levels that go easily above 30km² in size (especially the France level) but they're largely empty outside of the waypoints you're supposed to visit. There were also a lot of moments during the game where I thought "this is a secret" when it turned out to be just some awkwardly placed assets. Previous Serious Sam games didn't have this problem. The Legion System, that was heavily marketed by Croteam, ended up being nothing more than a slap in the face regretfully. This highlighted feature only happens in the prologue and the last level (before the final boss fight) and both sequences are scripted in that you're supposed to lose in order to progress. Too many cutscenes in my opinion and the side characters are rather annoying to listen. No possibility to keybind weapon slots or disable waypoint markers. Future patches may fix the bugs and other small issues but I think the game needs a complete overhaul to be fair. Soundtrack was decent at least.

Sam's finally back, Ladies and Gentleman! Since playing coop in the First Encounter I couldn't shake the thought, what would it be, if Serious Sam had actual NPCs to play with? Well, now I know. That very first stand off in a square with the entire team to support you is epic! Never suspected they'd actually do it! The banter between the characters made me laugh real hard. I know, it's a Serious Sam game, so it's supposed to be a one man show, but that added interaction between the characters is a cherry on the pie! The action, bar the first scene, still picks up nice and fast. While I didn't really mind BFE pace at all, this one lets you feel that Sam vibe a lot faster. The general responsiveness is what you'd expect from a Sam \ Doom \ Duke game. When modern games are considered, Doom Eternal seems the one you'd probably compare it to, though Doom has a lot more verticality (a stange thing to say about Doom, really, but that's where we're at these days), and Sam feels a lot more closer to it's roots in that regard, which is by no means a bad thing. Some things just have to stay old school to stay classy. The graphics really aren't something to write home about, but do their job just fine and are about what you'd expect. No revolutions there, but are they really necessary? If what you're looking for is a retro-style, but still modern shooter with lots of enemies, big guns and few things to get in the way of it, this is it! No, to the bad things: The lack of LAN option is really saddening, I was hoping to play coop just like in the old days, bad oh well, I think we'll manage. Also, the graphics renderers need a lot more work too, the game has a tendency to stutter here and there, something I did not expect from a Sam game, but we have to take into account how games are made these days, so I'm hoping an update to either the game, or the drivers will soon fix that, but as of today you'd be well advised to expect that.