Serious Sam as a franchise is something that never really crossed my radar. I may have seen its name every so often during a Steam sale or referenced in conversation when talking about how most FPS games do not let players run wild enough, although for the most part Serious Sam was an anomaly to me. That all changed however as soon as I first loaded up the newest game. How had I never played this franchise before? It looks like if someone made a game in Garry’s Mod about character named Sam who was just different enough from Duke Nukem so as to avoid any potential copyright infringement.

Serious Sam 4 has been through an excruciatingly long development cycle, with the game originally being announced in 2013 after having already started development back in 2012. 8 years later, the game is finally here and looks to be worth the wait! Currently the game is only available on PC, with both console versions sadly delayed to 2021. However a quick look at the graphics options for Serious Sam, and it becomes evidently clear that this game was made to play on PC with the highest of frame-rates.

Enemy variety is both absurd and genius at the same time. There is a wide selection of enemy types that range from your low level mobs to gigantic beasts that will force you to keep moving, struggling to figure out how to take them down on your first encounter. Much like the game’s narrative, the game’s enemy design lacks consistency but does this in favour of making interesting enemy types that make for dynamic combat encounters that requires you to think on your feet. You’re not just blindly gunning down aliens, you’re also employing best practice tactics to ensure your survival and that you’ll have enough health and ammo for the next encounter. As an aside, Vampires are so annoying, I just wish they would sit still!

Co-op is also apart of this game, and while it’s limited in terms of its options, it’s fun enough to revisit levels from the single-player campaign and experience them with a buddy to back you up. It also helps in clearing the various side objectives and secrets that are littered across each level, as each co-op partner can easily venture off and accomplish side content while the other keeps themselves busy with more shooting that probably needs doing. Side objectives themselves add a little bit of extra variety that rewards you with gun attachments, ammo, health, as well as points to level up various perks that slightly changes the way Sam plays. For example, I opted to unlock an ability that gave me health on each successful melee kill, which made for getting out of sticky situations a little bit easier.

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While the entire experience makes for a bombastic ride, there were a few technical hiccups that soured the adventure. One such example would be having to kill every enemy in an area before moving onto the next. Makes sense right? Not so much when the last enemy is glitched running into a wall and took you more than a few minutes to find. These moments are few and far between, but frequent enough that it was worth mentioning. Serious Sam 4 is a game whose ambition verges on the ridiculous, but that’s just this game’s style. It’s at its best when it’s throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you. You don’t care that your PC performance is tanking under the pressure, because the moment itself is so bombastic that it’s almost like your PC feels it too. Serious Sam indulges in its humour and while it doesn’t always land, it’s the continued effort, ridiculous premise and overall presentation that makes it charming enough to be unironically brilliant.

I think Serious Sam fans will definitely get a kick out of this latest instalment, whilst new players like myself will still thoroughly enjoy an old-school FPS that focuses on having explosive fun. A chance to turn your brain off and just play a fun video game. While console players are going to have to go without until 2021, I feel PC players are in for a real treat. And if you happen to be sporting a high-end rig, Serious Sam 4 scales incredibly well in the graphics department. It will be interesting to see how far the engine can be pushed as technology continues to improve, as I believe this game will become better over time as the tech improves. Just how many vampires, lizard men, hammer guys and kamikaze aliens can we have on-screen at once? 100s? 1000s? Now that would be insane.