Challenging, absolutely, but uninspired and bland. The toughest fights are often found in the side objectives, which are clearly marked with signs that tell you exactly what reward you’ll earn up front. There’s more creativity in that one fight than in the rest of the campaign put together. Without spoiling anything, the final boss fight introduces a couple of new mechanics that really should’ve been rolled out earlier. It’s also counter-intuitive that the boss fights are actually some of the easier encounters – I never had to try those more than a handful of times.
#Serious sam 4 genres upgrade#
With no way to restore meaningful amounts of health yourself (an upgrade that gives you health when scoring a melee kill gives you an insultingly small amount), that left me restarting again and again basically trying not to get hit at all. (For that reason it’s very difficult to estimate how long the campaign is, but I’d ballpark it at 12 to 15 hours.) It’s very inconsistent, though: some areas shower you with health and armor pickups, allowing you stay in good shape if you remember where they are when you need them, while others are bizarrely stingy with them. “I’m certainly not saying it’s easy – playing solo in the first half of the campaign, the sheer amount of enemies meant a lot of these fights took me a few dozen attempts on normal difficulty. Unlocking the ability to dual wield and hold a different gun in each hand helps a lot with that because you don’t have to switch between them as often and can double your damage output (it’s pretty satisfying to melt down a crowd with dual miniguns), but that comes at the cost of being able to use alternate fire abilities like zooming with the sniper rifle or using the powerful death ray attachment for the laser minigun. What’s smart about it is that they pretty much all make distinctive sounds so you know what’s coming before you see it, which is essential because more can teleport in at any place at any time.Survival is all about juggling your guns to select the right tool for each target, whether that’s taking out a swarm of small enemies with a spray of bullets or bringing down a big one with concentrated firepower.
Dealing with a swarm of flying drones that force you to look and aim up means you’re not watching the ground, leaving you a prime target for charging werebulls or kamikazes. Most enemies just run at you and shoot, but a few have distinctive behaviors to counter and can combine to be especially lethal. However, this menagerie doesn’t make any sense as a collection of enemies in a single game, ensuring that the Serious Sam’s universe never feels like a plausible place. There’s certainly some spectacle to seeing a swarm of a hundred enemies bearing down on you, and it gets chaotic quickly. It’s a hodgepodge of dozens of different types, ranging from the most basic zombies and the iconic/obnoxious screaming headless kamikaze bombers to laser-packing alien soldiers, flaming mummies, galloping horned skeletons, weird little one-eyed beasts, scorpion-men with miniguns, charging werebulls, giant four-armed lizard-men, telekinetic witch queens, numerous direct Doom and Quake demon ripoffs, actual nosferatu-style vampires, and many, many more. “I will give Serious Sam 4 this much, though: the sheer variety of monsters you fight is insane in more ways than one. Every once in a while a decent gag lands, but just as often the script will inexplicably turn completely serious with no punchlines to it and it feels bizarrely out of place. I love a good pun more than most, and this wore thin pretty quickly.
#Serious sam 4 genres series#
We get a series of stiffly animated cutscenes in which Sam Stone and his military buddies fight to overthrow an alien overlord in Europe by… finding the Holy Grail, because why not? Sam’s voice sounds like he’s gargling liquid Duke Nukem as he and his allies rattle off an endless barrage of barely funny one-liners, constantly workshopping their comedy out loud.
It’s just kind of strafing to the side.For whatever reason, there’s a story that attempts to justify all the weird carnage you’ll cause, and it’s just as much of a jumble as the battles. It layers on a few new ideas like dual wielding and a skill tree, at least, but while Doom has reinvented itself for modern times, Serious Sam seems to revel in neither moving forward nor backward. Sure, 2011’s Serious Sam 3 felt like a goofy throwback to a simpler time, but in 2020 Serious Sam 4’s brand of non-stop run-and-gun shooting feels downright archaic. Serious Sam, I think you have a problem and need an intervention.
And like all drugs, it can be dangerous to become reliant on it.
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