This must be one of the best installments of the Serious Sam saga, with a renewed interface and a lot of added lore, it goes a long way into Sam's history and experience, with the unmistakable humor that characterizes him and with new challenges, this installment will probably be the favorite of many.
Not sure why this game gets bashed. It's a damn good time. The guns feel great and the enemy variety make it a blast when the action is frantic. Best Serious Sam yet.
Unfortunately the game is not optimized well whatsoever.
At least not for the RTX 30 series GPUs
when I booted up the game, a prompt appear telling me that I did not meat minimum requirements
RAM : GEIL CL16-16-16 D4-2400 8GB x 2
Processor : AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Graphics Card : NVIDIA EVGA Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 12G
Bruh, excuse me ?
After playing with the game and the video settings, this game barely can go above 70ish fps.
Does not matter if you play it on low medium high or ultra
The 99% of my frame rate was most of the time 30ish or 40ish if I was lucky.
Because of that the game feels so not responsive whatsoever.
I know some people call 60 fps playable.
But I have been playing a lot of fps games with a 144hz monitor with a silky smooth sensation on my mouse, and this game is not one of them at all.
And aside from that, the game has a bit more color than SS3 but the contrast with blacks and whites is still as horrible or even worse than SS3, it hurts to look at white'ish surfaces that have light on them.
Overall, the game itself might be fun, idk.
But if you own a RTX 30 series GPU, avoid this game until they support those GPUs
Atm the last update that the game has received was in March of this year.
And it is clearly "kind of" optimized for GTX 10 and maybe RTX 20 series.
Pros:
- Guns are very fun to shoot with
- Dual wielding. Double the gun - double the fun
- Gorgeous dismemberments. Man, I love how enemies are blowing with lots of blood when I shoot them
- Awesome soundtrack
- Some secrets are really creative
- No need to know the previous parts of Serious Sam
Cons:
- Most secrets are hidden in a very predictable way. There are no hidden doors, moving walls like in classic Sams (TFE and TSE) so after a couple of levels you can find most of the secrets without much struggle
- No point in huge levels. There are a couple of them and at first I thought I would spend hell a lot of time to explore them inside and out but soon it became clear these levels are empty if you don't follow along the roads. The devs could make these levels like three times smaller and it would change nothing
- No point in vehicles (except combine which had its own fun game segment). They are just a tool to get from point A to point B on a huge map. No interesting game segments including vehicles (ramming enemies on bike doesn't count)
Neutral:
- Performance. The game was a mess on launch, I couldn't even get it started. Some time later the devs brought patch 1.07 which made the game much more stable but I could achieve the most significant performance boost only by tweaking game config params (found some thread on gog and steam forums about it). Without it I still experience fps fluctuations
- Legion system. Yeah it works but only in the first fight and maybe in the last one but in the rest of the game even on Serious difficulty most fights including not so many enemies as I personally expected. Good thing that in one of the patches the devs brought enemy multiplier option which can help to make Legion system to shine
Overall, despite a couple of moments related to performance and huge levels I'm very happy with the new Serious Sam. If you like horde shooters with cool guns I suggest you taking a look at this title even if you haven't played previous parts