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.
