Serious Sam 4

 


With Serious Sam 4, yet another almost 10 years have passed since the previous game. Will Croteam have learned from their mistakes in previous games this time? Is this the game where they set the record right?

SS4 uses a much updated and advanced engine, thats clear from the moment you start playing. The graphics stand out in a way previous games didn't. First of all whats instantly striking is that you're no longer surrounded by monotonous yellow enviornments, the game actually is really saturated and colorful. Greens, yellows, red brick walls, it has a really varied color pallette that gives it a really refreshing change from previous games. I think the first bit of the game takes place in Italy or something like that.

The levels here are whats my main concern, because like all other SS games my main complaints basically came down to the level design. Well hows the level design here?

It's funny, actually, the first few levels are almost nothing like Serious Sam levels. They play more like Call of Duty, linear levels. There's not many huge sprawling landscapes, but instead its a lot of small corridors and little villages like you'd see in more typical shooter games. You know what? I think its better, atleast this time. Unlike the previous game, where it had an incredibly slow boring start, Serious Sam 4 gets off the ground pretty fast. Before long you'll already have a Shotgun, ninigun, rocket launcher all sorts of shit, fighting bosses, being introduced to a bunch of new enemies. Most of the original enemy roster is back here in full swing, but you have some new enemies which mostly consist of, weirdly enough, almost like Left 4 Dead zombies. You have these typical zombie type enemies that run and growl at you and eat you, and you even have like the Left 4 Dead bloat thats just some big fat monster and you shoot it and it explodes guts everywhere and pukes at you. I don't mind these new enemies, but it is pretty weird how sometimes it feels more like you're playing a zombie game than Serious Sam!

Other new enemies are these vampire teleporting guys that don't really do much than just teleport around when you get close and shoot balls at you, they look pretty cool but theyre kinda annoying to fight. Atleast they add some more variety though, no real complaints. Most of the other new enemies are like humanoid soldiers straight out of Call of Duty. It's pretty cool that you now have typical first person shooter gunfights against human type enemies in more linear enviornments, it feels like a more typical modern shooter, but I don't mind it. You've got all sorts of other new enemy types, they all work pretty well and I don't have any complaints, one more worth noting is this jetpack flying orange guy that shoots rockets at you he's pretty fun.

So back to the level design. Yeah the first quarter of the game is more like a COD campaign than what you expect from serious sam, and I actually like it. Theres no bullshit or confused where to go. Actually this game introduces a objective marker. It will show you on the screen where to go now. It will also say in the top left what your current objective is. I don't care how unimmersive it is or how it doesnt let you explore as much or whatever,  fuck it, GREAT change. So rarely are you ever confused what to do in this game, its just nonstop progress and good pacing for the most part.

The first quarter of the game has you going through countrysides and palaces of Italian locations, very colorful and exciting, but then around quarterway through the game it starts throwing all of these vehicle sectons at you back to back. Like first its a 20 minute long Mech section that just sucked and was filler, then you have this weird gigantic open world level where you drive around on ATV's and motorcycles, its like a map out of ARMA or something its just this huge open world map where you kinda just drive for 20 minutes doing nothing, then come across another driving section this time in a farming harvester. Like wtf? Why is there suddenly so many bullshit vehicle sections. You ride in a harvester for another 20 minutes and thankfully thats the end of the driving sections. It just felt weird and out of place, but atleast it didnt last long.

After that you start to enter these countryside Medevial castles and like Transylvanian old villaes and stuff and its pretty awesome. The game starts to get really hard on the last quarter of the game like probably the hardest its ever been and you start to get more of the classic Serious Sam style arenas where they spawn wave after wave of enemies at you and you have to survive. Also, like typical Croteam fasion, the bulk of the game has fun short levels like 10-30 minutes, but then the last few levels all start taking 1 hour long each. It wasnt that bad this time, but why do they keep doing that shit? just keep it consistent across the board.

One of the last levels in particular is worth poinitng out. It's this snowy antartica place where you go inside a big freight ship and its almost like the first ship level in COD4. It's unlike anything else in the Serious Sam franchise and it was a cool change of scenery and the graphics were awesome. Too bad its the shortest level in the game, only like 15 minutes.


Aaand then the last level. And guess what, I called it. I said as I was doing the last level that guess what, its going to be 40 minutes of battling nonstop hordes of every monster possible, then we'll finally get to the boss, and the last boss is going to have some bullshit gimmick and dwindle all our lives down in a matter of seconds. Was I right?  Yep. We got to the last boss,it started giving us this new mechanic like grappling hooks and jumping around on this huge boss to do something we couldnt figure out, and within a matter of seconds we lost all our lives and had to start the level again. Fuck off Croteam. Why do you keep having awful last bosses? What the fuck were they thinking. So we just put it on easiest difficulty and speedran back to the boss. Turns out you have to grapple around ontop of this giant boss and jump into these jumping platforms and fly around looking for these purple crystals on the boss to grapple hook onto and destroy with C4. Its incredibly janky, glitchy, unintuitive, and just awful shit. Also theres dozens of these flying robots shooting at you the whole time that ruin your life. Its a mess. Really shit last boss, just as shit as Serious Sam 3's last boss, or worse.

Now some big new additions to the actual mechanics are, guess what? Skill trees. Side quests. Gadgets.

So its got a skill system.
Hows it work?
Well you just play the game normally but sometimes you can come across crates that have this purple thing that you pickup and it gives you a skill point
Then it opens up a skill tree and its actually pretty small. The right side is all about melee kills which is pressing E on enemies and getting a little animation killing them, pretty ignorable.
The left side is about dual wielding weapons mostly, and general combat stuff like being able to sprint while reloading. So obviously pretty much everyone is gonna gravitate to the left side.
The skill tree seems like it only has like 20 choices overall so its really not that big of a deal.

But it is crazy how the game has dual wielding now. It does change the game a lot, like its almost mandatory that you get the dual wielding stuff because some sections towards the end are just insanely hard and dual wielding helps a lot. The dual wield mechanics are fine, you seem to be a bit less accurate when you use it so its fairly balanced. It looks rediculous dual wielding chainguns and assault rifles though, I'm not sure if i actually prefer it being in the game or not. That's basically it for the skill tree. You have some novelty skills like being able to ride the bull-type enemies like a vehicle but I never got it or thought it was that big of a deal.

It's strange to see skill trees in a Sam game, because its like this is the kind of game thats supposed to get away from all that shit, but I don't mind how its done here because its so out of the way and you can't really screw it up its just like a nice little bonus feature you get to screw with infrequently. No real complaints about it.

Whats newly introduced also are Gadgets, which you can hold Q to bring up your weapon wheel which shows all your guns and gadgets. Gadgets are crazy things like Black Holes, Nukes, Slow motion, Fast running speed etc. The black hole and nukes do what you'd think, basically annihilates anything in view. The graphic for the black hole is pretty satisfying and looks good sucking up all the monsters. You get these fairly frequently and its almost a nessessity that you use them on some of the later sections because it becomes so challenging. I don't really have any complaints about this either, except for the fact that half the game I kind of forgot about them. Maybe they could have put little icons on the HUD to remind you which ones you have? The controls to view which ones you have and using them are kinda clunky. You can also find portable medkits now too, which is kinda questionable, but atleast they made the game challenging enough to warrant it.

And the last new crazy addition: Side quests.
Yep thats right. You can come across paths in the levels that highlight in blue that its a side quest, shows you what reward youll get, usually gadgets, but sometimes keys that unlock extra parts of the levels that give you more pickups. We did as many of these sidequests as possible cause they were kinda fun and had goofy little side stories and cutscenes. They usually just involve going into some arena and killing everything, or hitting a switch, or key etc. No complaints about the side quests either, they were mostly all fun and good and nice little discoveries worth exploring for. Because not always you will come across them on your own, you sometimes have to explore to find them.

Last things i'll touch on briefly are the overall weapons. Most of the weapons are back from previous games and are as good as ever, the general roster is the same its always been except this time as you progress the campaign you can pickup permanent upgrades for some weapons which add new abilites. For example late in the campaign you get a upgrade for the Laser that adds an ability to right click and shoot a straight beam that destroys everything, also for the rocket launcher you get ability to lock onto enemies. I thought it was a neat addition, nothing too crazy or involved though.

The general enemy designs are overall good, but some questionable art design choices. Like I mentioned previously the zombie things in the orange jumpsuits just look out of place, some enemies in particular the one eyed monster guys look inferior to previous models in the series, but overall the models and textures are great for the monsters and theres a large variety, but still mostly keeping to the classic roster, not going off the rails like SS2 quantity over quality.

And finally the cutscenes and story. Actually this might be the most entertaining cutscene and story of all the Sam games, the characters here are pretty memorable and silly. You have this priest guy, this conspiracy theorist nutcase, Hellfire the woman side kick, and Sam which is more wisecracking and glib than ever. It makes for a good mesh. The conspiracy theorist guy in particular says some hilarious shit , all the typical tropes you'd think of, but it just works. A lot of the cutscenes in the Italy section are laugh out loud funny with some of the characters. You see a lot of different action scenes like out of a action movie, moreso than previous games, in previous games a lot of cutscenes are just people standing around talking, but here you get to see all sorts of action frequently. The writing and jokes were more hit than they were miss.

I'm not sure why so many people hated this game. Maybe just because its buggy and has bad optimization? It ran pretty poorly for me but I'm not going to talk much about that, I'm reviewing gameplay. Though I did year that for years Croteam were hyping the game up with this "Legion" system which was supposed to be this gigantic thousands of enemies warfare, but in reality you only see a glimpse of it at the beginning of the game, and at the very end. Maybe 10 minutes total of gameplay. That apparently really disappointed people, but for anyone who hasn't bought into any hype or marketing advertising campaigns I don't see how it would be relevant.
Overall its one of the best Sam games in the series, which isn't something I  thought I would say

7/10