When the evil prevails, Sam will be there to balance the situation.
Serious Sam 4
Developer: Croteam
Price: $40 USD
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
The Serious Sam saga has been known for being comparable to Doom,while featuring an admirable use of humor, albeit a bit forced and repeated. While this prequel of Serious Sam 3: BFE was slightly delayed, it’s now possible to buy, download and play what may be the best Serious Sam game yet.
The core of Serious Sam 4 resides in, what is true in every Serious Sam game, the enemies, battles, weapons and music. Mixing all of these classic concepts with a new element called the Legion System. This system was created specifically for Serious Sam 4and allows for massive amounts of enemies on-screen at once, in frantic, fernetic, wave-based combat. The chaos really begins at the mid-game, once the arsenal of weapons has become available. Exploring the level environments is very important since each level contains a maximum of 10 secrets that range from skill points, weapons, accessories and more.
In classic Serious Sam, fashion Serious Sam 4 has no restrictions on framerate, which means, if your PC can support it, you can play with 150 frames-per-second. The way that the Legion System has been created, it is able to run and render large quantities of enemies without needing to consume the expected amount of system resources. This can be a bit of a downfall on lower-end machines; If you don’t turn on the visibility of FPS from steam parameters you will have a hard time wondering why it’s consuming that amount of resources.
In terms of optimization, the developers released a 30GB update the day before the official release, changing a lot of character animations that needed to be fixed yet also adding new animations which still seem a little rough.
Despite some minor issues, I’m very happy with the performance of the game and managed to run things mostly at 60 FPS when coming up against one or two hordes of enemies, and while things would occasionally drop to 40 FPS, it was only during moments while fighting more than 300 enemies at the same time; all of this running on a i5 7400 CPU , 1050ti 4GB GPU and 16GB ram.
Serious Sam 4 has A LOT of settings that can be configured by the player. Things can be played with a controller, and a setting for aim assist can be enabled, but that’s something that I don’t recommend since, to me, Serious Sam has always been a PC franchise, and using the keyboard and mouse is actually easier and less of a pain to play with. My favorite setting is being able to disable the health bar of the enemies, making the game way more enjoyable by removing the hundreds of health bars that can take up the screen when enemies are all over the place.
Another setting that it’s worth mentioning is the option of enabling damage numbers, a fitting option to enable for players that enjoy the looter shooter, or shooter RPG genres.
When it comes to music, the tracks in the campaign reminded me of the music used in the multiplayer of previous Serious Sam games like BFE. A big issue for me was how a lot of the music repeated throughout the game for different boss fights and environments. It was a big disappointment not having unique music for different encounters and levels.
Now, the strongest component of Serious Sam is the amount of enemies that can fit on the screen at the same time, being comparable with the Doom experience. The game starts with what looks like a world war between species, fighting thousands and thousands of enemies till an eventual inevitable defeat.
Sadly, those enemies not always do what is expected of them, sometimes I found enemies stuck in a position where they wouldn’t stop doing circles or just standing in the same position. While some of these issues were fixed in the day one patch, they are still present, and encountering them ruins a little bit of the experience.
I also encountered a problem after non-stop fighting for three levels. My trigger finger started hurting. This might just be a byproduct of my personal habits or setup, but I felt like it was necessary to take a break after every couple of levels to give my finger some time to recover. The amount of enemies ends up being a bit of an endurance challenge for the human body, especially on the harder difficulties.
Serious Sam 4 isn’t as linear as previous games in the series. There are secondary quests within levels to obtain exclusive weaponry and make the character strong as hell. Once a level has had every single enemy dispatched of you are able to freely explore the environment which turns out, is pretty detailed.
The Final Word
Despite any flaws, Serious Sam 4 has made my day. It’s been a while since I played a game where there was so much humor and action at the same time. I love having modern options to the classic PC shooter experience. Serious Sam 4 still has a long way to go when it comes to releasing a bug-free experience but is still a very enjoyable experience even after running into glitches, janky cinematics, and overall mediocre optimization.
Review Score: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
