Serious Sam 4

Gunplay is fun, story is dumb, characters shallow and humour's just gone. Wouldn't call myself a fan of the series, but playing Sam games was always AAAAAAAA blast. Those games never had an intricate story with twists and turns, but enough context was provided for me to care. The BFE was the best in that regard. So I wished they would marry the storytelling of BFE with game and level design of FE and SE. I would prefer no story at all rather than a poor attempt at it. The mood swings are the worst, it is not self aware in artistic sense. Should it be a comedy? A tragedy? A farce? Some political stuff here and there, what else is new?! Gunplay and movement are the best in the series. Unlike the level design. In most cases, there's no landmarks at all. Nothing to really catch the attention. Enemies attack as a blob instead of waves so difficulty is uneven. One moment you are overwhelmed, the other you feel lonely on a vast landscape. Music is fine. Nothing as inspiring as the War song from BFE, but there are some memorable tunes. The sound design is bad. Sounds missing, especially when enemies teleport in. Khnums no longer do "finger snap" before hitting you with those balls and stuff like that. After playing this piece of disaster, I went back and played the BFE, then FE, then SE. The differences were clear immediately. Enemies attack in waves and in manageable numbers. Even under this kind of constant pressure, there's time to think and pick the best tool for the job. To manage ammo, to make some strategical maneuvers. Sounds keep you aware about incoming threats at all times. There's a lot of memorable locations, especially in FE and SE. Those games are surprisingly immersive. Why throw it all out? I would be fine with just more of the same to be honest. And a cherry on top. They take your weapons of mass destruction away before the final level! Where you need them the most! So I didn't even get to use nukes. 4/10 - wait for patches and a serious discount.

I'm a big fan of the First Encounter, Second Encounter & Serious Sam 2. This installment lacks character & I suspect effort as well. It only partially feels like a Serious Sam game. I'll keep this brief: * The map design is terrible: SS maps have always been somewhat large. Here, they are large & very empty. Areas that you think you might find a secret are just baron. And I mean baron; devoid of life. This is supposed to be earth. Some areas you can clearly see they dropped the framework for an area & forgot the detailing. * The cut scenes & voice acting are garbage. The director didn't know if they wanted Sam to be some wanna-be Call Of Duty tough guy or the crazy Sam we all know. He ends up being terrible at trying to be both. Also, in stark contrast to the early installments: I never laughed once during my playthrough. * The gun play is almost perfect. A lot of the originals are here. They introduced a reload mechanic, which for me, coming from the first 3, I wasn't impressed. The assault rifle only made me miss the tommy gun. * The gadgets are just there. I hardly needed them. They feel tacked on to add "complexity". * The secrets are trash: Ammo or armor. Where are the easter eggs? * The modern interpretations of the classic mobs were cool to see. Enemy design I can't really fault. They're modelled well. * Boss fights are garbage. Again, complexity for the sake of it. I feel TSE's final boss is much harder & yet more enjoyable. * The music is really well written but while playing this, my wife said to me "That doesn't sound like Serious Sam". A lot of it just doesn't suit the game. Something went very wrong with this games development. I walk away from this one feeling very disappointed. I sincerely hope Croteam doesn't keep flogging this horse - it's already dead.

I am old enough to remember when penny arcades were a penny. You had light guns and BB guns to shoot things. One with the light gun was a bear that went back and forth. If you were older you could use actual guns to shoot targets. The thing was to shoot. Then the shooter video games appeared and you shot, but then they got into Action instead where you had to stride thru scenarios before you can shoot. Like Doom, you wander and wander and wander before you can shoot anything. They are okay, but though people think they are the greatest, I wanna shoot stuff. I found Postal 2 on here and boy, it was my ideal, you could kill and kill and kill again without much in the way of wandering. I tried SSam 2nd encounter years ago, but for some reason didn't like it. Then a few years later, got SSam 1st encounter and got into it, shooting tons of things. Got back into SSam 2nd with better skills and now SSam 4 which is the best yet. It is just what I wanted, a fantastic SHOOTER, you go from level to level without a whole lot of wandering about like a lost soul. Now I have to be honest, I'm OLD and I cheat. I don't care, I get to shoot and with the gadgets, I need to cheat less. My reflexes have never been acute and it has gotten worse with age. But I LOVE SSAM 4 a lot. If you like to wander around, don't get this, you will be bored. If you like shoot 'em ups, this is for you!!

So, after finishing the game on Normal mode: Pros: Great gunplay, lots of guns, lots of enemies. Feels pretty solid on this level. Plenty of enemy variety, not just reskins but actual thought out attacks. Well detailed models also. No bouncy platforms, or glowing enemies that need glory killing, actual ammo and gun combat! To be fair to the legion system, which may not have been what people were expecting, the end battle actually felt like a real battle. And in other areas there really were a lot of enemies. Cons: The NPCs/story. The story is weak but not important. The NPCs however are really annoying and the game could do without them (or in fact there unecessary social commentary that comes with it). The engine is not optimised. For a 40gb installer, and long load times, you would expect to not see textures going between different resolutions (even in cutscenes). Or being able to walk through 90% of the objects like trees and NPCs. Also noticeable is when viewing a skyscape, the houses and such like are just copy paste across, there isn't a lot of variation or effort put in to making it look nice. The humour has gone. Not once through the game did I crack a smile at any of the dialog. Its all forced and quite lame. The "one-liners" are just bad. Skill system is a total waste of time, if your using melee your already dead, and dual weilding is clunky, i.e. press a button to get second weapon up, then left/right click to fire each. That maybe more pro different weapon but dual weilding was so much simpler and easier in the originals, and with you needing to swap weapons a lot... So if Croteam put some effort into optimising the engine, sorting out some of the visuals and bugs, then it would be a solid base. Personally I would do away with the whole NPC part and the skill points, they really drag the title down. Combat is satisfying though.

Even if I´m a fan of old school FPS (like Shadow Warrior, Blood, Doom etc.), I have never been a true fan of the Serious Sam series. Back then, these games were somewhat extraordinary because of their graphics and huge environments, but never because of their gameplay. For me, there were much better games back then. However, I played through the First and Second Encounter. I didn´t like the third part, because it tried to copy games like Call of Duty too much while forgetting most of its origin. Anyway, I gave this one a chance as well. This one now looks more like the old ones and has good gunplay. Still, it´s not really a good game. The level design is so boring and generic; You enter a setting and will just see variations of the same setting over and over again. I big problem for me is that checking the environment carefully mostly is not rewarded! In a good FPS game, you´ll find armour, ammunition and other stuff in almost every corner. Not here. Yes, there are some secrets, but they are not worth mentioning. Another problem is that skill is not enough for this game - you´ll also need a good portion of luck. If you are in the wrong spot and a huge bunch of enemies appears directly in front of you, you might have no chance, even if you are a skilled player. I played on the “difficult” setting and stopped playing at mission 7 because it got so repetitive and boring. I often went low on ammunition, even if I collected everything that was there. This doesn´t suit for this type of gameplay. On the technical side, this game looks like from 2010-2015 while having ridiculously high system requirements. Story wise, the game has nothing to offer, but okay, it´s Serious Sam… I didn´t expect that. There are so many great old school shooters out there, e.g. Ion Fury, Dusk or Amid Evil. For me, Serious Sam 4 is not part of these. If you want good old school gameplay with modern technics and some new ideas, buy Shadow Warrior 2 instead. Or just wait for Shadow Warrior 3.