For such a zany game you’d expect a lot more crazy weaponry like that and fewer off-the-shelf firearms. The only gun that feels like it has a real personality to it is the returning Cannon Ball, which is absurdly powerful and fires with different velocities depending on how long your charge up a shot, and if you just roll one out it’ll bowl over multiple enemies and roll around on hills. Three types of shotgun, and assault rifle and two miniguns, two sniper rifles, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher… almost none of it feels remotely distinctive. The actual gameplay boils down to moving from one giant, largely empty arena to the next, each time fighting enemy horde after enemy horde with an arsenal of straightforward, mostly unimaginative weaponry. 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.
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.įor 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. It looks good and still has that all important fun factor present to make playing it a blast.īut for older players, veterans of the series, it might not be worth spending nearly $22, when there are so many other important games either out or on the horizon.Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. You'll really need a microphone to get the most out of it, because the text chat "facility" leaves nearly everything to be desired.Īnyway, as far as introducing new players to the old school, constant blasting style of shooter that Serious Sam is perhaps the embodiment of, it's the best place to start out. Keep On Shootin'Ĭo-op is still great fun though and the game remains very challenging as you ramp up the difficulty.
But shave $12 off the price and we'd be laughing. It's a little overpriced (at least on Steam, as other places do the game cheaper) for what it is - an old game given a new lick of paint - and even with the addition of Achievements and all the bonuses being on Steam brings with it, it still essentially boils down to being an expensive nostalgic novelty. Of course, it's not Crysis, but, just like with the original, sheer beauty has been sacrificed for playability.īut, for $20 or so, is just this graphical boost worth it when you could just play the original and get the exact same gaming experience? Probably not, sadly. For some reason, it doesn't seem as radically beautiful as some were saying it was going to be, but it's pretty decent, considering the size and scope of the levels and the number of enemies zipping about the place. With as much imagination as went into the decision to just make the game identical to the original in virtually every way, the new engine has been dubbed the Serious Engine 3.0. And so it is in Serious Sam HD, where Croteam have spent a long time spitting on and vigorously polishing their old game, so much so that they created a new engine. Well, it was ambitious only in a geographical sense, because the actual gameplay was exactly the same.
Has It Really been eight years since we first locked, loaded and lobbed bullets around an alternate version of ancient Egypt with that most stern-browed of game heroes, Serious Sam? Ah, there was Serious Sam 2 a few years ago, but that didn't have the impact as the original, despite being more ambitious.