As a connoisseur of the FPS genre, I welcome all variations of the genre, but still enjoy ones that are basic to the core. Whether it’s the looting frenzy that is Borderlands, the rhythm spin of BPM: Bullets Per Minute, or the rambunctious reboot of DOOM, I feel comfortable with a weapon in the bottom-right portion of my screen. In the case of Serious Sam, I had a blast in his first two expeditions but heard 3 was a hit-or-miss modern entry. So, will 4 pan out a bit better?

Honestly, the intro to Serious Sam 4 is some intense stuff. You are thrust right into a battle for humanity with what seems like hundreds to thousands of enemies on screen. Talk about cranking it up to 11 from the get-go! The game then flashes back and you’re back to the standard military-shooter affair that was tired a console generation ago. I immediately noticed that, even though I turned subtitles off, they were still appearing half the time.

Indeed, Serious Sam 4 is a buggy mess. From the selective subtitles to the menu requiring several clicks to load an autosave, there’s a serious lack of QA for the title. It was already delayed once, but only for a month, so I’m guessing there’s a strict release timeframe from Devolver that is holding this game back from being what it should be. Unfortunately, the game ended up completely compromising one of my monitors, requiring a hard restart. Serious issues like these need to be ironed out before being released to the public, so hopefully, Croteam is paying attention and will have a Day One patch ready.

Past the bugginess, there’s an underlying issue with Serious Sam 4: it just isn’t a game right for the end of the eighth console generation. When games like Matt Hazard and Duke Nukem Forever were lambasting the tired old Call of Duty formula an entire console generation back, why is Serious Sam 4 adhering to this formula? Serious Sam 3 had this problem when it released nine years ago and 4 hasn’t done anything to separate it.

In the game’s defense, it’s certainly playable and functional on a baseline level. Guns pack a punch and the promise of an onslaught of enemies stays true. The issue is you’re going to need a high-end PC to play at higher resolutions with a consistent framerate. Croteam suggests an eight-core processor, as well as 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1080. I experienced a lot of frame drops until I lowered my modest PC to medium settings, something I haven’t had to do in AAA games yet.

If Serious Sam 4 had some more time on the back burner, I’m sure this review would be more favorable, but it seems that Croteam’s FPS efforts are stuck in the past. Not only is the game a slack in the performance department, but it’s also missing what modern games necessitate to stand out from the crowd. Here’s hoping that this is just a hiccup for Devolver Digital, who has published some of the most fun games around over the years. For the time being, Serious Sam 4 is just too out-of-place to recommend.

A PC review copy of Serious Sam 4 was provided by Devolver Digital for this review.

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Serious Sam 4

$39.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Lengthy Campaign
• Humor is More Hit Than Miss

Cons

• Seriously Buggy
• Unoriginal
• Bad Optimization
• Long Load Times