Serious Sam 4 Review

"Seriously, Sam"

Campaign

September 27, 2020 at 6:28pm
By Jason Stettner

This was certainly an interesting sort of experience. This is the fourth main entry in the Serious Sam series. It presents a world that has been under full siege from Mental’s hordes. You’re trying to fend off the invasion and do so with a bit of a misfit crew.

The campaign will take you to a few European areas to complete various tasks and prepare for a mighty final confrontation. A situation of which you see briefly at the start of the game. Nothing like facing a really long loading screen for two seconds, and then to get another long one off the bat. I’ll talk about that more later however.

This does just include a campaign, no survival mode or anything like that which would have been nice. You can play it alone, or with up a group of four players for coop online. I didn’t come across anyone while on Google Stadia, but it’s a nice feature to have. There are private match setups, server browsing and just jumping in which are good options for connecting with others.

The campaign does feature a decent selection of levels and a lengthy enough play time. There are also side objectives in each mission that you can work towards, among secrets too. That adds extra value if you’re after those types of things. If you want a good challenge there are a number of difficulty options and a scoring system in place as well to see how you’re doing.

Gameplay

This is a fairly aged feeling shooter. It’s definitely something of a different time that’s continued to be brought forward. It does feature some really great carnage and so many visceral scenes. The enemies pop into little bits and blood is always pouring everywhere, great gore for sure. There’s a decent variety of foes present, but they get repetitive after awhile.

That’s a lot of this one, just being tired at facing the same enemies in the same scenarios multiple times over. It just gets tiring, with so many overwhelming points throughout. Still, the sense of scale at times is just mind blowingly awesome. There’s a particularly insane battle sequence at the end that felt almost like overkill, still cool to see. You also get a variety of weapons to use here. There’s everything from handheld cannons that shoot literal cannon balls to a type of weapon that basically eviscerates anything it hits.

Everything from human standard weapons, to out of the box options and of course alien type guns as well. It’s one of those older style shooters, so you’ll collect health, armor and ammo off the ground which is fine. There are extra things to gather too, some will grant skill points to use for minor character improvements.

When it comes to the visuals it was hit or miss on Google Stadia. I was getting 66/16mb while playing and it was very blurry at times. That made is harder to shoot things in the distance, and at times I did face some performance problems. It seemed to be quite a demanding game so that makes sense. I also had my first Stadia crash which was peculiar for sure, just had to restart the game. Which brings me to loading, it’s very slow between levels.

Once you get in it all runs fine, but that gap between stages takes a very long time which I thought cloud gaming was supposed to help eliminate. On top of that, the game is also fairly buggy. There were many times where I couldn’t progress and had to restart checkpoints. There were enemies that got caught outside on things, or just didn’t show up. That made some areas tedious.

You do get to use some vehicles in this which were fun and more towards the end. A harvester, some mechs and the like. I should also mention the cutscenes which were a bit cringe-like in nature, but did set the stage I suppose. That’s another area of the game that I thought was weak, the areas you visit were sort of bland and uninspired. The levels all felt about the same setup wise, it really didn’t do anything too unique with them which fed into the whole repetitive aspect a ton. I will note that the destruction of smaller objects was cool to see.

The Conclusion

Serious Sam 4 is ok, it has some issues and feels limited in scope despite having some impressively massive battle sequences. It was really cool charging within what felt like thousands of enemies and allies at once.

Still, the performance definitely took a hit there and overall it wasn’t the best looking of experiences. It had some issues to it, and it felt very repetitive throughout. I would have liked some sort of extra mode, it just was the campaign and now I’m entirely done with it. You could go back for score or extra secrets I suppose, but nothing really entices you to do so.

It was a fine game, but nothing too special and quite forgettable. I thought it did have some wild moments to it, yet overall it’s just nothing too incredible. It’s alright, repetitive and at times bland in terms of what it presents. Satisfying carnage though, if you’re not being too overwhelmed.

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Serious Sam 4 Review on Google Stadia
Review Code Provided by Google

Rating Overall: 5.8