Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. And like all drugs, it can be dangerous to become reliant on it. Serious Sam, I think you have a problem and need an intervention. 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. 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. It’s just kind of strafing to the side.
For 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. 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. I love a good pun more than most, and this wore thin pretty quickly. 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.
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. 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 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. For such a zany game you’d expect a lot more crazy weaponry like that and fewer off-the-shelf firearms.
“
I will give Serious Sam 4 this much, though: the sheer variety of monsters you fight is insane in more ways than one. It’s a hodgepodge of dozens of different types, ranging from the most basic zombies and the iconic/obnoxious screaming headless kamikaze bombers to laser-packing alien soldiers, flaming mummies, galloping horned skeletons, weird little one-eyed beasts, scorpion-men with miniguns, charging werebulls, giant four-armed lizard-men, telekinetic witch queens, numerous direct Doom and Quake demon ripoffs, actual nosferatu-style vampires, and many, many more. There’s certainly some spectacle to seeing a swarm of a hundred enemies bearing down on you, and it gets chaotic quickly. However, this menagerie doesn’t make any sense as a collection of enemies in a single game, ensuring that the Serious Sam’s universe never feels like a plausible place.
Most enemies just run at you and shoot, but a few have distinctive behaviors to counter and can combine to be especially lethal. Dealing with a swarm of flying drones that force you to look and aim up means you’re not watching the ground, leaving you a prime target for charging werebulls or kamikazes. What’s smart about it is that they pretty much all make distinctive sounds so you know what’s coming before you see it, which is essential because more can teleport in at any place at any time.
Survival is all about juggling your guns to select the right tool for each target, whether that’s taking out a swarm of small enemies with a spray of bullets or bringing down a big one with concentrated firepower. Unlocking the ability to dual wield and hold a different gun in each hand helps a lot with that because you don’t have to switch between them as often and can double your damage output (it’s pretty satisfying to melt down a crowd with dual miniguns), but that comes at the cost of being able to use alternate fire abilities like zooming with the sniper rifle or using the powerful death ray attachment for the laser minigun.
“
You also occasionally get some consumable superweapons to break in case of emergency, such as a decoy that lures enemies away, time-slowing device, a portable black hole that sucks every enemy in range into oblivion, and… a syringe that restores 50 health. That one’s pretty boring, actually.
The problem is that this is just about all the depth there is to Serious Sam 4, and thus its protracted battles become tedious – you can only reduce so many enemies to red mist before you become numb to it, even as more and more of them flood in with the next in a series of waves. For me, that happened at less than the halfway point in the campaign, and even the introduction of a new weapon or enemy only livened things up for a few minutes before settling into the same doldrums again.
Other than that, the only other things you do in Serious Sam 4 are a few terribly boring vehicle sequences, some of which are literally just driving on an empty road for a few minutes without so much as a sweet jump to go over. Sometimes you get to drive a big stompy mech with unlimited ammo, which is fine but simpler and less strategic than fighting on foot. But by and large it’s just massive brawl after massive brawl, some of which seem to refuse to end.
“
I’m certainly not saying it’s easy – playing solo in the first half of the campaign, the sheer amount of enemies meant a lot of these fights took me a few dozen attempts on normal difficulty. (For that reason it’s very difficult to estimate how long the campaign is, but I’d ballpark it at 12 to 15 hours.) It’s very inconsistent, though: some areas shower you with health and armor pickups, allowing you stay in good shape if you remember where they are when you need them, while others are bizarrely stingy with them. With no way to restore meaningful amounts of health yourself (an upgrade that gives you health when scoring a melee kill gives you an insultingly small amount), that left me restarting again and again basically trying not to get hit at all.
It’s also counter-intuitive that the boss fights are actually some of the easier encounters – I never had to try those more than a handful of times. Without spoiling anything, the final boss fight introduces a couple of new mechanics that really should’ve been rolled out earlier. There’s more creativity in that one fight than in the rest of the campaign put together. The toughest fights are often found in the side objectives, which are clearly marked with signs that tell you exactly what reward you’ll earn up front.
It’s all just… fine. Challenging, absolutely, but uninspired and bland. However, there’s one area where failing to get with the times has really burned Serious Sam 4: there’s no drop-in co-op. You can — and really should — go through the campaign with up to four players, but you have to specifically load into a co-op game to do so. Many times I hit a fight that felt insurmountable and I wished I could call in a friend to help me through it, but that’s not an option. And it’s frustrating that co-op is so much easier simply because you can respawn into the action where you left off, whereas in single-player every death means reloading from a save. I was much less frustrated with the second half of the campaign than the first, and it was almost entirely due to playing with a friend.
That said, it’s extremely odd that a game that seems so geared toward co-op is built around a single protagonist character, and everybody else simply vanishes in cutscenes. That’s the kind of general sloppiness found throughout Serious Sam 4, and it’s hard to ignore when textures are popping in right and left and animation glitches are so common.