Once again, though, ‘that’s what Serious Sam is’ just doesn’t cut it these days. It’s hardly going to win an award for writing – it’s a Serious Sam game, meaning everything that happens is tailored specifically to set up a bad joke and give the players a reason to shoot more stuff. It’s about Sam’s team of generic freedom fighters trying to overcome their addiction to awful, obsolete one-liners long enough to hunt down a MacGuffin they need to stop the big bad, which we already know fails (being a prequel to a prequel). It’s no surprise that the story is uninspired, too.
Yet, sadly, it’s clear absolutely no attempt was made to breathe some life into the environments and I often felt like the same, generic locations could have been built out in no time using the Unreal Engine, or other similar tool. We want more developed, interesting worlds. It’s simply no longer reasonable to ask players to run for ten minutes across a map (even with the old-school FPS movement speed) that is void of anything interesting or interactive, just to set the scene for a big fight – that’s not how games work anymore, it’s not enough. Many game design choices seem to have been stunted by what is ‘classic’ instead of what is good. I remember pointing out that I couldn’t ‘ping’ an item for my teammate, and although not totally necessary I found that to be just one of many missing quality-of-life features present in most titles these days. All this against boring backdrops and huge, open, but totally empty areas paints a pretty bland portrait of a relic of a bygone era. Or worse, a hundred screaming Kamikazes – another franchise classic that start off funny but quickly become noisy irritations. I mean, there are a good amount of different enemy types throughout the game (although I couldn’t tell you if any of them are new), but when forty Kleers appear every fight, they get old fast. Still, whilst the large array of weapons are certainly fun to play around with, the mindless combat and absence of meaningful abilities or maneuverability makes it easy to feel the grind, especially because of how many of the same types of enemies spawn at once. Using a shotgun to sidestep and take down bulls, taking advantage of the lock-on function of the rocket launcher to blast the long-ranged heavy-duty enemies, and saving the rare area-wipe grenades for those especially intense situations is where Serious Sam 4 does its best work.
It is way more interesting to have to try to survive many of the insane fights and the different benefits of each weapon play a significant role, whereas co-op makes them feel interchangeable. Due to this, I wholeheartedly recommend playing solo, which I went back to do out of sheer curiosity. Instead of overcoming the challenges by trying and trying again, it’s very easy to just kind of give up and keep respawning, taking out a few more enemies each time, chipping away at the armies of the alien lord Mental (who still doesn’t show up in this latest iteration). For some reason when playing in co-op there’s no death penalty outside of the respawn timer increasing, making it impossible to lose. Even the worst games can be a great laugh if played with a buddy but somehow Serious Sam 4 doesn’t quite get that right, either. My main playthrough was done entirely in co-op. Next to that giant, many, many games fall short but SS4 isn’t even in the running. The shadow from Doom (2016) was already daunting but then Eternal somehow still managed to beat the odds and take it further. There is a complete lack of innovation or interesting development, either in the story or the gameplay, and might I remind you Doom Eternal came out this year. Instead it’s stale and completely outdated from the very first level. Serious Sam 4, on the other hand, is nothing like that.
Serious sam 4 genres series#
It makes everything seem fresh and the sheer volume of enemies, something the series is particularly famous for, feels even more exaggerated when you’re actually standing there, face-to-face with the onslaught. Originally titled Serious Sam: Planet Badass, I wonder if they were worried people would think it was just a spin-off, or a VR collection where the franchise has found some success in the last couple of years – and with good reason! Mowing down fields of aliens coming from all angles with a massive array of explosive weaponry is an awesome time in VR. After nine years, Croteam are back with a new main-line Serious Sam game.
0 kommentar(er)
