![]() ![]() Deeper than expected and with more cutscenes than you might expect to see in a Serious Sam game. ![]() All while blasting every single member of Mental’s forces. Their journey will take them to the streets of Rome, Pompeii and a volcanic eruption, the French countryside, Carcassonne, the Artic and Russia. Which is actually a powerful alien artefact that they think can be used to defeat Mental and his armies. “Serious” Sam Stone and his unit are sent to find the Holy Grail. The whole planet is engulfed in war, a war that humanity looks to be losing. Set before Serious Sam3: BFE, Mental and his forces have begun to invade Earth. All while keeping the more realistic graphics and putting a bit more work into the story. Massive levels with endless amounts of enemies and tons of guns to destroy them with. Seemingly aware of this response, Croteam have gone back to basics with Serious Sam 4. It was a good game but just lacked polish and that Serious Sam spark. As well as changing the graphical style to a more realistic look. A game that made some fundamental changes to the formula, swapping out wide and open levels for smaller, more confined environments. The first two games are pure thrill-rides and if you’ve never had the chance to play them, rectify that.Īfter the release of Serious Sam 2 in 2005, fans had to wait six years for the next entry which was Serious Sam 3: BFE. Serious Sam games love to throw humongous waves of enemies at you while giving you an array of weapons to take them all out. What made those games standout out from the pack was the choice of colourful graphics, huge levels and intense shooting mayhem. ![]() However, the first two games Serious Sam: The First Encounter and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter are two of the finest FPS games ever made. When people talk about great FPS games, the Serious Sam series’ is not often the first one that comes to mind. Developed by Croteam and published by Devolver Digital, it is a prequel to Serious Sam 3: BFE. Serious Sam 4 is a finished game that you will be able to enjoy without worrying about any Serious bugs (did you catch that?).Released on modern consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S/X) in December of 2021 following its 2020 release on Windows, Serious Sam 4 is the latest entry in the Serious Sam franchise. Other than some performance issues, I didn’t encounter any game-breaking bugs. Changing Serious Sam 4’s API doesn’t restart the game, so kudos to the developers for figuring that out. There is also a DX12 option if you are interested. With Vulkan, I was experiencing screen tearing, so I went back to DX11. However, you can change your API to Vulkan for a 10FPS boost. A day one update seems to have addressed some of the performance issues, but can still be an issue on certain missions. Reducing the graphics setting helped a little bit on these levels, but not by much. It’s also weird that a level where there are 100,000 enemies does not affect performance, but a random normal mission will tank your framerate. This is a big problem in a fast-paced shooter. ![]() In one particular level, my framerate went as low as the high 20s. There were some specific parts in some levels where my framerate would tank to 50 or even into the 40s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always like that. There could be 200+ enemies on screen and I was still able to play without lag or stuttering. For the most part, I was able to play with 70FPS, and the number of enemies on screen didn’t affect my framerate at all. From my experience, optimization is a mixed bag. My hardware felt a little short of the recommended system requirements. I played Serious Sam 4 on a mid-range PC with an i5 9600k paired with a GTX 1070 and 16GB of RAM. I can’t thank the developers enough for bringing back some of the original Serious Sam tracks to rock out to. The soundtrack greatly compliments the situation you are currently in. The music then ramps up when you are fighting aliens. When you are exploring, the music is slow and sets the mood just right. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to fight so many aliens if it wasn’t for the music. The music of Serious Sam 4 is much better than I initially expected. SS4 had some big shoes to fill here, and it did the job amazingly. I remember listening to The Grand Cathedral (Corridor of Death) as a child continuously. The music of the original Serious Sam games was downright phenomenal. I didn’t expect this from a Serious Sam game, however, I appreciate that it’s there, Kudos to Croteam for this. The map design was massive and stretched to three to four kilometers. There is one particular level where I spent more time exploring the map than actually doing the mission. ![]()
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