Google Stadia has finally lifted its exclusivity period on Serious Sam 4, allowing the game arrive at consoles. Those looking to snag a copy of it on their systems are going to be disappointed that Serious Sam 4, a game initially slated to release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, is not coming to those systems as promised. Instead, you’ll have only the option to play it on PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series consoles, or of course, PC.
In a period where getting your hands on a brand new gaming console is really as difficult as snagging the latest drop for any limited-run set of sneakers, this will hurt the first sales of Serious Sam 4. However, because of the hours I sunk in to the game, Now i realise why there isn't any last-gen port. The game is a beautifully unoptimized mess that is somehow fun, humorous, and perhaps, painful to bear.
“Shall we be held the man? Or am I the man?”
This is surely an extremely polarizing title, to say the least. Serious Sam 4 is really a first-person shooter which has the heart and also the gusto of the items helps make the franchise so great. You assume charge of Sam “Serious” Stone, a man probably in the mid-30s, who's basically humanity’s last hope. He bears the task of quelling the armies of Mental, a dark deity of sorts. The premise sounds badass on paper, but it's a lot more whimsical and hilarious with techniques that point out the old days.
Sam is pitted against hordes and hordes of enemies of Mental’s army, consisting of wacky and wild anomalies that provide as nightmare fuel or seem like references with other absurd enemies from other video games. While coming to you in droves, you’ll convey more than enough firepower to handle the threats because they come. In some instances, you’ll have sufficient firepower to defend myself against literal gods!
Serious Sam, despite the name from the game, isn’t someone to really be taken seriously— pun intended. Even with the intense nickname, Sam oftentimes cracks some cringeworthy, albeit hilarious one-liners. These one-liners and his other remarks oftentimes make references to other types of media or popular culture in such a hit-or-miss- method in which, whether or not the joke falls flat, it’s funny.
Sam’s a one-man army with a kill count higher than any Call of Duty veteran out there. Of course, he is doing so while literally sporting a white t-shirt with the bomb logo onto it, a casual set of jeans, plus some red Converse, making this game all much harder to take seriously.
All man, no cover.
Like mentioned earlier, Serious Sam is pitted against hundreds of enemies which are a part of Mental’s army. They come at you in droves, easily overwhelming you the moment you make a mistake. Since that’s the case, Sam brings more than just a pistol or shotgun. To an all-out war. To the aforementioned gusto, this really is all still preserved. Some guy who appears like an ‘80s action movie reject and throws one-liners at each opportune moment can somehow carry more than ten ordinance weapons on him without breaking a sweat.
Unlike a number of other conventional first-person shooter games, Serious Sam is all about mowing down hordes of enemies in most kinds of space sizes. This isn’t a game title in which you take cover, reload your guns, and watch for your health to recuperate.
Like every other game before, Serious Sam 4 is definitely an arcade shooter at its core. You’ll get all sorts of new weapons along your trip, with their very own dedicated ammo pools. You’ll carry a listing composed of over ten different weapons and gadgets. Many weapons should be familiar to the fans from the previous games such as the minigun, cannonball gun, rocket launcher, and much more.
This is also the kind of game where you can find health pickups. Sam doesn’t recover health passively like you would in a typical shooter where you have to be out of combat for a few moments. Pickups and inventory management really are a big part of the game, which still holds true.
“Double your gun, double your fun.”
A plethora of recent features happen to be included in this game compared to the previous three installations of the franchise. Typical Serious Sam games were mostly one-and-done arcade shooters where you pick up multiple guns, destroy your enemies, rinse and repeat.
Serious Sam 4, however, utilizes aiming down sights (ADS) a lot more, skill trees, having more cutscenes, and adding gadgets as a means of taking down your enemies. All the games before it were much more barebones, but seeing how this game has taken many pages from the AAA games in the industry, it needed to adapt.
It honestly seems like a mixed bag here. Once, new weapons in a Serious Sam game are always fun to make use of. However, the sport making use of things like ADS is one thing that doesn’t serve too much of a purpose. There are so many enemies to clear out; using ADS disrupts the flow of the game and oftentimes feels like a simple trap into death.
The skill trees really are a nice addition, though. They allow for many variety inside your builds. You can had opted for a melee build, though it is a rather risky one, or choose an all-out gunner build. The skill trees even permit you to dual-wield guns, even the more ridiculous things like launchers and miniguns. This is where it’s at in terms of the standard of living additions and new features in Serious Sam 4. The name of the game would be to simply gear up most abundant in powerful weapons and mow down hordes of wacky enemies, delivering hilarious dialogue on the way.
However, it appears as though each new addition is really a trade-off. The story is a nice addition to Serious Sam 4 because every other game before it just had minimal cutscenes. Farmville has full-fledged cutscenes, dialogue, and NPCs to really result in the player care. It does work at times but seems like a really loose and uninspired form of something similar to Borderlands.
Every character has their intro cutscenes along with a tiny blurb to give us an idea of what role they participate in the grand scheme of taking down Mental. The intros are basically the sport as Borderlands as well, using the freeze-framing and dramatic effects.
“Hey, didn’t I kick your ass two rooms back?”
One of the ongoing weaker facets of Serious Sam is that the game gets rather repetitive before long. You’re oftentimes traveling through derelict streets of a foreign country or ruins. Things begin to all merge in the first level unto the last. Enemy variety eventually starts to get stale.
The formula of significant Sam is actually in this order: encounter enemies, find a new weapon, fight new enemies, then a boss, and repeat. Obviously, there will be newer and much more powerful weapons to provide variety to your gameplay, along with funnily delivered dialogue.
Serious Sam 4 does definitely try its hardest to break from that monotony, however things get repetitive in other ways. There’s a lot more exploration on the way, like introducing the use of vehicles. However, the controls are so stale and slippery, it gets tiring to obtain these to even work properly.
“Seriously, would be that the best you can do?”
This game has had an exclusivity period with PC and Stadia for over annually and it has been quite an unoptimized game. Over time, it does appear to be the game has had a fair quantity of fixes implemented, however it still has a tendency to not be at its best. Even on modern generation consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the game has some noticeable frame rate issues, screen tearing, and rendering issues.
On consoles that boast stable frame rates of 60 and above and 1080p picture qualities, Serious Sam 4 does struggle to operate correctly. That isn’t to say that it’s prevalent all through. The game can definitely handle moments when hundreds of enemies are running at you, throwing projectiles, and growing to smithereens. It’s just that the cracks are visible and never something can certainly write off in the grand general scheme of things.
Finally, the possible lack of controller customization options makes the game rather hard to adapt to. There aren’t even presets in the game like there were in past Serious Sam titles.
The Verdict
Serious Sam 4 on consoles is really a beautifully fun mess. It’s more Serious Sam, which isn’t bad, but there are performance issues that can't be overlooked. The game has somewhat stood the exam of time, trying to adapt the options of games in the same genre, but it starts to create an identity problem for itself in the process. The game tries to maintain its arcade-shooter roots however starts to feel like a conventional FPS game, which it strays away from its core fanbase.
