A short, simple, relaxing, and unpretentious exploration and photography game. You basically walk around completing basic tasks, listening to soothing music, helping out eccentric characters, and reveling in the childlike charm that permeates the experience from top to bottom. It seems like every inch of the game is brimming with good humor and lively direction. There are no fail states, complex mysteries, or challenging puzzles. It's just clean, simple fun. For anyone looking for a break from more serious and demanding games, this game is simply a great choice.
I frankly never expected anything more than pleasant mediocrity from Serious Sam. It's essentially a series consisting of the same extremely basic and dated design presented as a parody that stopped making sense over a decade ago. Very open spaces. Ridiculous recoilless weapons. Intense and frantic action. An astronomical body count. Bad jokes. You turn off your brain and drown any critical thinking on your part with the primal satisfaction of destroying thousands of enemies. That simple. And SS4 is exactly that. And nothing more than that. It's so bad it's good. Any illusion that previous titles were considerably better than this one is simply a stretch. The games never had interesting level design or presentation. And they always remained at the bottom of the barrel when it came to originality, polish and depth. If is worse than SS3, maybe it's because it's pretty much the same game and there hasn't been any substantial leap in quality. Neither visually nor mechanically. Under ideal conditions, it's still fun. And if you're mentally ill enough to laugh at these jokes, even better. In terms of performance, the game still doesn't run as smoothly as it should. Texture pop-ups are still constant and some framerate drops with explosions seem unavoidable (Or on purpose? I don't know at this point). There's nothing here that justifies how poorly the game can run at times. Serious Sam 4 is a excellent mediocre game. An unbalanced mess held together with silver tape and hot glue. It's only worth it if you can get a good discount and you feel like racking your brain with this videogaming equivalent of junk food.
