The impact of everything that you do is dialled right up to 11, and so, even the weakest guns feel viscerally overpowered. What sells the experience is the feedback from the carnage. It is shallow, but it’s exactly what the Serious Sam fan would want. For the overwhelming majority of the game, you’ll be entering arena environments, getting an escalating range of powerful guns, and then blasting away at increasingly powerful swarms of enemies. The environment design does make a little satirical nod to that stuff at times, as there is the occasional barrier strewn around as per modern shooter best practice, but you’ll never make use of them. I like how it does away with cover mechanics, stealth sections, and, for the most part, AI. Serious Sam doesn’t expect you to be particularly precise or skillful, but you do have to be very nimble and be able to gun while on the run, as the hordes come at you from all directions and, if you stand still, you will be swamped. Blistering speed and loud bang-bangs is order of things in Serious Sam, with massive hordes that frequently attack in waves and, for the most part, can be dealt with by pointing in the general area and squeezing the trigger. What is far more serious (I was always going to get that pun in, deal with it), is the chaotic, visceral nature of the combat. Unlike other efforts to “parody” shooters (hi Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior), Serious Sam veers away from being funny-via-offence, and while if subsequently comes across as though a child thought they would make jokes about their favourite shooter, there’s a charm about how childishly silly and bright it is.
Sam is a joke, the narrative is a joke, the other characters are jokes, and there’s even a Christmas mode in this game which is an absolute delight (and a joke). It’s a game that’s all-too-aware of how fundamentally silly the shooter genre is, and it plays things up with great panache. That is what Serious Sam has always been about, of course, and Serious Sam 4 is no different. It’s a big, loud, dumb example of the genre, and yet while people seem to like that when it comes to demons from hell, they suddenly shift tone about it when it’s all done in satire. Serious Sam tends to get criticised for things that we celebrate in certain other shooters. Thankfully, once the game actually starts, it’s bliss. It’s blatantly poor optimisation, and I was worried about what I was in for. Here I was watching an extended loading screen on the PlayStation 5 and, while these things don’t typically bother me, wasn’t the whole “no more loading times,” a big deal for the console? If I can play Ratchet & Clank and Demon’s Souls with seamless loading, I don’t see what excuse Serious Sam has. At first, Serious Sam 4 is disappointing.
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