12/29/2023 0 Comments Serious sam 4 reviewsSam Stone works best as the lone gunman cracking one-liners to himself and throwing shade at poor Duke Nukem because what the hell else are you supposed to do after the world has ended? I just had a difficult time caring about any of these new characters, particularly because their player models look so generic and their facial animations imply excessive Botox injections, but at least they’re pretty much invulnerable as far as gameplay mechanics are involved so there aren’t any escort missions. It’s a bit odd having these guys following me around for several levels, and odder still is the introduction of new characters like the Orthodox priest Father Mikhail, because Sam’s strength has always been his nature as a de facto one-man army. It’s also weird to have so much effort placed on these characters and their camaraderie, as-spoiler alert-most of them meet a Redshirt’s fate about 10 minutes into Serious Sam 3. The trademark goofy humor is present and accounted for, and some of it is legitimately funny, but a lot of the jokes and one-liners either fall flat or outright made me cringe. Croteam is clearly trying to make these characters endearing as you see and hear from them a lot, with very mixed results. Sam “Serious” Stone and his platoon of eccentric misfits-Jones, Rodriguez, Hellfire and the rookie Kenny-work as an alien artifact retrieval team and general extra-terrestrial extermination squad. Sam 4 details the early days of the war against Mental’s forces and the invasion of Earth. To set the scene, Serous Sam 4 is yet another prequel it’s set a few years before Serious Sam 3, which itself was a prequel to the earlier games. There’s a lot to like here, but there’s an equal amount of valid complaints I have.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. That said, skipping a lot of the secrets and goofy joy of a typical Sam game, I still enjoyed my time with Serious Sam 4. This necessitated an exhausting marathon sprint to digest as much of the game as possible so I could get a clear idea for this review, and being forced to binge even more of Sam 4 than I had planned left a sour impression. To be fair this gargantuan patch appears to remedy a number of the graphical and AI bugs I’d been encountering, but it also corrupted all of my previous saves, nuking a lot of my progress and mandating I start over from an earlier level. Serious Sam 4 was already delayed a year and then an additional final month from its expected release last summer for a game so long in development, its current state is baffling.įor starters, I’d been playing the game for a week and a half when an enormous, 37 gigabyte day-one patch elbowed its way into my Steam downloads queue. At its core Serious Sam 4 has that old magic, but the surrounding details fall short and bring the experience down, and the headlining features that Croteam promised are either absent or severely cut down. Serious Sam, in comparison, is a straightforward affair: give me some guns, a steady supply of ammo, a series of huge, attractive arenas, and a bajillion and a half monsters to shred, and we’re golden. In the intervening near-decade, Croteam have done some incredible work, particularly branching out with the philosophy-puzzler The Talos Principle. This is what makes Serious Sam 4 such a hard pill to swallow. I didn’t think it would take nine years to see another main series entry. In comparison, and in spite of its flaws, Sam 3 was an oasis of defiant mechanics-focused shooting, an enormous, triumphant middle finger erected smack in the middle of the desert. I really enjoyed it, probably to the point of bias, and if you read my now-ancient review you can tell how frustrated I’d become with the focus-tested, games-as-service moneygrubbing in Call of Duty and its endless Yum! Brands tie-in promotions. The last entry in the series, Serious Sam 3: BFE dropped all the way back in 2011. Croteam’s shooter series hasn’t always made sense and it isn’t as insanely polished as, say, Call of Duty or Doom, but you’re at least guaranteed a competent, satisfying romp that straddles the border between cult classic and guilty pleasure. A sadly departed member of my high school martial arts club turned me on to this idiosyncratic first-person shooter series, and ever since, I’ve appreciated its unapologetic dedication to straight-up action, its satisfying mechanics and gunplay, and its delightfully odd, absurdist Eastern European sense of humor. I might not be the most diehard Serious Sam fan, but I’ve been playing his games almost since the beginning.
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