![]() The acting is hokey and the animations are not particularly modern in cinemas. That being said, the game is still fun as all hell and definitely not something to be passed over with nary a backwards glance.įirst off, there’s the obvious. There are several reasons for this and they have a noticeable impact on gameplay. Serious Sam 4 feels like it doesn’t have the same sense of identity that other titles in the series had. Frankly, they’re all over the place and for a good reason. Now, there’s been a lot said about Serious Sam 4 already and it’s hard to contend with the sheer volume of reviews and opinions. This time around though, Sam has a whole team to support him and various characters back him up on a few of the missions. There are story segments at every level and on side missions as well, and everything is fully voiced as usual. It also features more cinema sequences than ever before, weaving a more complex (though not too complex) narrative than any other game. This is probably the most realistic looking Sam yet, as you’d expect on a new engine this many years later. Croteam decided to stick with the more realistic look of Serious Sam 3 here, rather than the cartoonish and slightly exaggerated style of previous games. However, the recipe has been shifted somewhat. Now it’s nine years after Serious Sam 3 and courtesy of publisher Devolver Digital, there’s a new entry into the franchise – Serious Sam 4!Īs you’d expect from a Serious Sam game, there’s a juxtaposition of comedy and massive battles throughout the game. Ever since that first game, the franchise has continued to toss more and more tongue in cheek dialogue and vicious battles at gamers. The guys over at Croteam have been throwing massive hordes of enemies at us FPS gamers for almost 20 years now and they’ve been doing it with style, pizzazz, and one-liners that whole time! The original Serious Sam game was an absolutely unexpected treat filled with a bevy of hidden areas, secret weapons, spawn traps, and vicious battles. Serious Sam 4 is a finished game that you will be able to enjoy without worrying about any Serious bugs (did you catch that?).Serious Sam has been kicking around for a while. ![]() Other than some performance issues, I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs. Changing Serious Sam 4’s API doesn’t restart the game, so kudos to the developers for figuring that out. There is also a DX12 option if you are interested. With Vulkan, I was experiencing screen tearing, so I went back to DX11. However, you can change your API to Vulkan for a 10FPS boost. A day one update seems to have addressed some of the performance issues, but can still be an issue on certain missions. Reducing the graphics setting helped a little bit on these levels, but not by much. It’s also weird that a level where there are 100,000 enemies does not affect performance, but a random normal mission will tank your framerate. This is a big problem in a fast-paced shooter. In one particular level, my framerate went as low as the high 20s. There were some specific parts in some levels where my framerate would tank to 50 or even into the 40s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always like that. There could be 200+ enemies on screen and I was still able to play without lag or stuttering. For the most part, I was able to play with 70FPS, and the number of enemies on screen didn’t affect my framerate at all. From my experience, optimization is a mixed bag. ![]() My hardware felt a little short of the recommended system requirements. I played Serious Sam 4 on a mid-range PC with an i5 9600k paired with a GTX 1070 and 16GB of RAM. I can’t thank the developers enough for bringing back some of the original Serious Sam tracks to rock out to. ![]() ![]() The soundtrack greatly compliments the situation you are currently in. The music then ramps up when you are fighting aliens. When you are exploring, the music is slow and sets the mood just right. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to fight so many aliens if it wasn’t for the music. The music of Serious Sam 4 is much better than I initially expected. SS4 had some big shoes to fill here, and it did the job amazingly. I remember listening to The Grand Cathedral (Corridor of Death) as a child continuously. The music of the original Serious Sam games was downright phenomenal. I didn’t expect this from a Serious Sam game, however, I appreciate that it’s there, Kudos to Croteam for this. The map design was massive and stretched to three to four kilometers. There is one particular level where I spent more time exploring the map than actually doing the mission. ![]()
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