Overall most helpful review

Posted on: January 25, 2022

MischiefMaker

Games: 819 Reviews: 66

Serious Sam 4: The Second Encounter

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem is a standalone expansion to Serious Sam 4 developed by a group of modders-turned-pro with the help of Croteam. While shorter and cheaper, the level design by this team of enthusiasts is head and shoulders better than the frequently empty and barren level design of SS4. The central hook of Serious Sam is managing hordes of hundreds of enemies with basic AI like a first-person Robotron 2084. Circle-strafing and bunching up groups of enemies to provide the maximum splatter with a well-timed grenade toss is the name of the game. Like Serious Sam: Second Encounter, this game starts at a difficulty level aimed at someone who just finished SS4; do not expect any hand-holding. Long-running fans of the series will recognize variations of several famous rooms from previous games in the series. I just found myself in the famous pillar room from First Encounter, albeit with a Russian oil rig aesthetic. This really feels like a love-letter to the series. Also the Russian winter setting prevents the problem in SS4 of certain enemies and powerups blending into the bright and colorful bloomy backgrounds. I can't give much info on the technical side of things because I am one of the lucky few whose hardware let me run SS4 at playable framerates. Apparently it's a CPU hog, though I have heard that disabling depth of field and enabling prebaked lighting does wonders. I have never encountered a CTD bug never fixed in SS4, fingers crossed, so I'm going to say it's probably more stable than the original game. Imagine Serious Sam 4, but with most of the half-baked ideas cut out and just the excellent horde-shooting with some of the best enemy and weapon balance in the series. Then improve the level design tenfold. That's Siberian Mayhem. Highly recommended!

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Posted on: January 26, 2022

Doom3r

Verified owner

Games: 285 Reviews: 7

6 hours of fun

Basically it is very similar to Serious Sam 4 game with it's positive and negative sides. However unlike the other games it does not spend some time to slowly introduce you to the hoards of enemies and fun starts almost immediately. The things I liked: * Lot of the enemies; * Different weapons; * Lot of ammo so you can use the weapons you like (unlike recent Doom where you have only few bullets for every weapon and then you have to chainsaw some enemy to get more) * Tank * Walker robot similar to papamobile from SS4. Things I wish were done better: * Conversations animated not really good (models look like soulless androids, not real people) * Russian setting: while it looks kinda russian buildings, Igor Ledov, vodka, kalinka-malinka... but I wish there was a bit more to it like maybe some monsters inspired by the Russian tales, cartoon, etc. For example maybe have a harvester level similar to the one in SS4 but with the music whole Russian internet wanted for that level, maybe some reference to the Roadside Picnic book on the level with such name, etc..

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Posted on: January 26, 2022

idbeholdME

Verified owner

Games: 732 Reviews: 68

5 levels of mayhem and destruction.

First things first. You might think "5 levels? For 20 bucks? What is this..". But do not despair, the levels are quite expansive. Expect most of them to take over an hour to finish, more if you do some exploration and secret hunting. Levels are action packed and very well designed. Closed spaces or large open areas, the variety should keep things from getting monotonous. There are several new enemies, and all of them feel unique and bring something new to the table. Did you hate Marsh Hoppers in the Encounter games? Well what if they did not die in one hit, had a ranged attack and actively dodged to the side from your shots? Siberian Mayhem has you covered. Besides new enemies, there are also several new weapons. All 3 of them quite powerful and fun to use. Overall, the difficulty can be quite high. Don't expect introductory levels with only a couple of enemies and slow pace. This expansion starts strong and never lets up. But considering the massive power increase Sam received in Serious Sam 4, I'd say that finally, the challenge corresponds to it. One slightly annoying technical issue is how the game handles texture streaming. It loads them only for what you are currently looking at. And most of the time, it is quite visible how the game constantly swaps from low resolution textures to the full resolution ones. In a cutscene, 2 characters talking with each other will be loading their textures every time the camera cuts away and back. In game, you could be standing in place, turn 180 degrees, wait 1 second, turn 180 degrees again and you will be looking at a blurry mess of a wall that takes a moment look as it is supposed to. And this happens pretty much everywhere. I can't imagine the nightmare it would be to have this installed on a non-SSD drive. And one minor gripe, I hated the ending. I was expecting something in the vein of Jewel of the Nile for Serious Sam 3, where it would tie into the main game, but the ending basically voids everything you do in this.

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Posted on: January 27, 2022

TrickyTrack00

Verified owner

Games: 232 Reviews: 12

Yeah, that's what I needed

Basically more SS4 for those who want to shoot things and have some fun. And it's a pleasure.

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Posted on: January 26, 2022

EvilAxel

Verified owner

Games: 799 Reviews: 3

Great game, but has some tech issues

This game feels like an intriguing mix of fleshed out ideas from both the Red Day: Episode One mod for Serious Sam: BFE, apparently also made by the founders of the Timelock studio, and the original Serious Sam 4. There are both vast open spaces, that finally allow the game to show off handling hundreds of enemies at once, yet without being too empty to feel unnecessary or too big to get lost in, and a big variety of closed space encounters, both finely mixed together. While managing huge crowds is vital in vast open expanses, managing your own position is equally vital in those tight courtyards, streets and bunkers. It's easy to allow yourself to be boxed in if a mistake is made in the heat of battle, but the same is true for the enemies, and managing space to create bottlenecks for the ever-increasing crowd is a game of it's own here. Praise has already been sung by others for the scope, design and balance of each level, and it's easy to imagine how, despite ages old basic gameplay formula, virtually each encounter can be approached in a multitude of ways. With all due praise, however, this game currently suffers from the same techincal issues Serious Sam 4 suffered from at launch, such as uneven framerates, GPU underutilization (which can stay at 60% even during a framedrop even on a high-end system), and general lack of optimization. This is really sad, seeing how most of the similar poor performance issues of the base game have been fixed by now. However, there are rumors that more content, such as Survival Mode maps, is planned to be added to the game, along with performance patches. Let's hope the tech issues will soon be fixed.

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Highlights

Featured

Close, but not an exact hit

Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem

WELCOME TO SIBERIA

BEASTS OF THE APOCALYPSE

TEMPERED STEEL

AT HOME AMONG STRANGERS

SIBERIAN MYSTERIES

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