Serious Sam 4

Freaking goated game, lot's of fun action, hilarious. The writing is terrible, and that's good.

Brilliant game! Played it 4 times now and completed 4 times. Can't wait for SS5.

Эм, данунафиг. Игра слишком сильно пытается в реализм. От Серьёзного Сэма осталась только корабельная пушка и лазерный лазеромёт. Фантастика куда-то улетучилась. Не знаю как вам, но две первые части мне куда больше понравились чем третья и четвёртая.

I grew up playing Serious Sam first and second encounter and then I spent a bunch of time on Serious Sam 2. I played the games single player campaign and a bunch of co-op with my friend and his brother. This was back in the windows 98 days and forward when I was still in early school years. I have played and enjoyed some newer Serious Sam spinoffs and I think Serious Sam 3 is a big improvement in a lot of areas and offers great gunplay, graphics, music and sound effects. Sam has always been a corny but fun main character with his oneliners. I had hopes that Serious Sam 4 would be a continuation of the greatness that SS3 offered. This is sadly not the case with SS4.

Okay where do I even start? The cutscenes are dragging for way too long. The game engine seems to struggle with the game despite everything looking like some PS3-era game. There's bad pop-ins as you move through the levels, the characters faces look completely dead and unbelivable. Sams oneliners are rarely working and most jokes do not land at all. The side characters are complete nonsense, I could not tell you a single name or care about any of the characters. The level design is poor and the maps are for some reason gigantic and take forever to go through. I feel like the devs bought a bunch of assets and put them into this engine, because it doesn't fit and the levels are unnecessary large and tedious.

SS4 offers nothing new that is good. The weapons and monsters are almost completely taken from previous games so you understand from the beginning which weapons are good versus some types of enemies, etc. Dual-wielding is alright, but the weapon feedback is not that satisfying which is a shame since that use to be a core thing in Serious Sam-games overall. The devs have added in some new things like mech-levels and a part with a lawn mower but they make no sense in the game and they do not work well in the engine. Once again these elements feels like asset put in the game that doesn't work properly and they are wierd to control. These elements take away from the Serious Sam experience and you quickly want to move pass these segments.

Overall I was left pretty disappointed with SS4 despite the fact that I bought the game on sale. It's okay to play through the story once, but I kept rushing through the levels and started skipping cutscenes and dialogue due to them being so poor. The sidequests are perhaps the only idea in this game that I thought was pretty good as a modern touch, but the sidequests rarely did anything more then simple fetch-questing. I would recommend playing the game on an easier difficulty because the monsters become quite bullet sponge on higher difficulty and that makes the game even slower and more tedious. If SS4 came out ten years ago this might have been alright, but this simply doesn't hold up to modern standards in any area.

5/10. Worst Sam ever. Even Serious Sam 2 is much funnier to play.
Худшая часть, по-моему мнению. Миры огромны, но пусты. Сюжет - несусветная хрень. Он только портит игру. Тот случай, когда сюжет реально не нужен. Персонажи неинтересные. Лицевая анимация - просто ахтунг. Первый уровень - скука смертная. Еще и оружие отнимают пару раз за игру.
Я очень разочарован, правда. Очень жалею, что купил. Посмотрим, каким будет Siberian Mayhem.

Croteam's worst game yet. Any 'excuses' they had for Serious Sam 3 fall apart when they're apparently completely willing to ship something like this.

Play TFE/TSE, skip 2, 3, and 4.

Best SS game since SE. Reading the negative reviews, it feels like a lot of people bought a Serious Sam game expecting something else. Weak point is definitely level design, as they are mostly empty streets and giant empty fields, but the combat shines here and the dual wielding mechanic adds a fresh layer of strategy for a Sam game. I also enjoyed the cheesy humour and the story and seeing how crazy it would get. If you are an actual Serious Sam fan don't skip it. But if you got bored with killing seemingly endless waves of enemies years ago this won't change that.

Not perfect, but not awful! Feels and plays like a true-to-core PC FPS, and thats fine... (for me)

Music is also pretty bangin gud too

If you haven't played a game in this series yet, IT'S TIME TO GET SERIOUS.

Originally, I was not going to write this review, but the mecha section not being skippable was the final nail in the coffin of my neutral stance towards it. This is the type of game you will only want to play only once to finish it and never touch it again, due to the many gruelling sections that sap this game's replayability. Just stick to playing the second encounter, at least that game had none of this game's bad design.

Edit: The penultimate boss is the worst designed enemy that I ever had the displeasure of "fighting".
Also the France levels feel lazy and empty.
The only good stage is the final one but the experience to get to it is not worth it.

Think of the story what you want, but the gameplay itself is still a ton of fun!

I love Serious Sam. It's just plain stupid fun. So many guns and so many monsters. Plus this one had a lot of laugh out loud moments. I want more!

At face value it looks like it'll be very similar to Serious Sam 3. Once you start playing it, you'll notice that it feels a whole lot "tighter" in ways hard to describe. The guns feel great, the environments are huge, the enemy variety is insane. To me, this does everything I want a Serious Sam game to do. It's doing very much what the original from 2001 did. Not being "the perfect game" by any means, but a really good and unique experience that is even better with coop.
I recommend this. Just know that it won't be a AAA quality game.

It's a great simple and classic FPS. Run and gun like the old days and is a lot of fun with simple controls. If you live FPS's like I do, this game is a must have.

The game runs very well in 2024, stable 100 fps, no crashes (Ryzen 7700 + RTX 3070ti). Shooting & weapons are pretty fun, vast arenas with insane numbers of enemies bring up some good memories from the First and Second Encounters. I guess I've enjoyed this game more than SS3.

It's fun, but clearly not the final serious sam that Croteam promised.
It is heavily focused on a boring story with weird character animations
Levels look all the same and also worse than SS3. The Animations suck.
Runs worse than SS3, but with basically the same graphics and complexity.
Maps are large but empty.
Rocketjumping has been removed because it is too easy to get out of bounds. Walk around in 3rd person and you will see the level just ending. Many times I thought I had found a secret with parkour but I just went out of bounds.

There is only one huge battle and it sucks.
My playtime is mostly running back and forth to look for secrets that were possibly hidden in far reaches of the levels.
Enemies are boring and not diverse like other SS games.

Graphics are really nice but the game looks like COD. Also enemies that normally pop-out, now blend in with the environment. This is not for me a negative.

For some reason it is another prequel, so you won't fight Mental.

I still enjoyed myself, but I think this is mostly because I am a big fan of the games.
You can skip this one. Play the 1st or 2nd encounter or Serious Sam 2 instead.

First Serious Sam game where I managed to obtain all achievements

Ansolutely fantastic, good ol Sam gifted me with so much fun this year, I am so happy to have played this game. I am from Rome and I loved smashing aliens in my hometown, I found it really really well made for a Serious Sam.

Wallmart Doom enemys .... but game is classic run and move down

Absolutely Serious (including the graphics, bc at 1440p everything set to absolute Max my RTX 4070SUPER + 14600KF could not handle it at higher than 55 fps on average).

run and gun serious sam like you remember

On one hand, I managed to have quite a bit of fun with the same explosive dose of brainless, uncompromising action that the franchise has been delivering for decades. On the other, it’s hard to deny that this feels like an extremely amateur production.

I enjoyed running around and bunny-hopping while massacring hordes of enemies with my gigantic arsenal, conveniently stashed in the pockets of my jeans, but this feels like a mod created by some folks with a bit more money and not much else.

And by today’s standards, I’d say it’s not at all difficult to find a mod far superior to this.

It’s almost unbelievable. You can’t even use the excuse that they were trying something different.

Terrible graphics that wouldn’t hold up against games from the start of the seventh gen (I wouldn't be at all surprised if the assets are recycled from the Talos Principle); Hordes that aren’t even comparable in size and complexity to those in previous entries of the franchise; Appalling performance; Long loading times; Flat lighting and terrible shadows; Horrendous animations and effects; Frequent interruptions to deliver a completely pointless narrative with zero charismatic characters and cheap production values that make every cutscene feel as robotic and clunky as a PS1 game; Level design FAR worse than expected, featuring a huge amount of purposeless empty space and unnecessarily large arenas without proportional enemy waves (Somehow, they managed to make exploration even worse than in Serious Sam 3); Poorly planned fights (No pacing or structure and multiple random difficulty spikes); A complete inability to produce humor that doesn’t feel delivered with the finesse of a bone saw.

Overall, there’s a lack of polish on what is good and a clear absence of any improvement (with some aspects actually getting worse, even when they weren’t never noteworthy to begin with).

Locking lackluster (but almost essential) rewards behind awful side quests, which only serve to artificially inflate the length of each mission (Which are already unnecessarily long), was a great idea.

I loved getting a new weapon only to find virtually no ammo for it for several missions afterward.

I absolutely loved going out of my way to explore gigantic empty spaces (which I obviously only discovered was empty after wasting my time), finding a mere generic armor item, being ambushed, having to waste an absurd amount of ammo to deal with the enemies, then waste a minute or two running to the part of the map I was initially in (The game is full of these godawful detours).

Perhaps something went very wrong behind the scenes during this game’s development, but this comes dangerously close to being a bad joke.

They couldn’t even implement a decent dynamic music system!

During the levels, you’ll repeatedly hear the same first 20 seconds of a track every time an enemy shows up, until you manage to find a slightly bigger fight where the music can actually progress. Or worse, you’ll enter a monstrously huge arena designed for a pathetic fight with just a few enemies, forced to endure several minutes of epic symphonic metal blasting in your ears while you kill one or two enemies at a time.

It’s so archaic that the last time I saw something like this was probably when I played… well, Serious Sam 3. And even back then, it felt outdated.

Serious Sam 4 is by far the worst game in the franchise, and there’s no good reason for you play it over the previous entries. At least with the older games, you have a excuse to engage with this generic yet satisfying formula of a parody that stopped making sense a long time ago. They’re old and outdated, but solid.

SS4 has no excuse. It’s just bad to mediocre (In a franchise that never had high standards). Partially enjoyable under the right conditions, mainly because it’s incredibly hard to mess up such a stupidly basic premise—already outdone in execution and concept by nearly every other horde shooter. But they almost managed to.

If you’re going to buy it, make sure to get it at a very steep discount.

awesomely fun and wickedly satisfying. Lives up to the originals

I don't care how shitty the animations are, enemy spam has never been this fun.

Действительно хорошая штука, когда нужно выпустить пар! Кровь, монстры, супербыстрый режим убийства монстров! Действительно хорошая игра

It's only got 10 hours of campaign, and the last half feels unfinished

I have always loved everything about this series and this one is no exception. Seriously.

[h3]There are bugs, but the game plays well.

If you love Serious Sam series kind of "quirky arena/wave based FPS/Boomer Shooter w a tiny amount of intercharacter dialogue or "story" added besides monologue w Netty... this will NOT disappoint! New age SS feels right where it should be.

I enjoyed this. Not quite as good as the previous games, but worthy of the title. Some of the comedy moments were classic.

If it's your first time playing through, don't try to conserve ammo or abilities. I thought the difficulty was a bit off. I played on mostly on normal, and found 80% of the action was a bit too easy, but suddenly you'd be swarmed with dozens of enemies and it was as if the difficulty had gone up a notch. This was especially true of the end battle.

Run, gun, kill, die.

So so fun :)

I got this game on 80% sale, which imo was worth it, otherwise I don't think it's worth it. Obviously not as good as other Serious Sam games, especially not SS:FE and SS:SE, those 2 are just masterpieces. I'd even argue it's the weakest Serious Sam game, even weaker than SS3, because there's just so many flaws with it compared to the rest, like having to rely on other characters throughout the whole game, while in other Serious Sam games you're all on your own the whole time. Lots of cringe encounters as well, which doesn't fit Serious Sam theme at all.

Missions were fine, but a couple of them (very open ones) were very disappointing, purely because you had nothing to do in such an open areas, the lack of enemies is the main issue and things to do. I do respect them implementing unique stuff in this Serious Sam though, like use of Gadgets and Skill tree, which is a cool thing and I personally don't mind it, although I've heard people not liking that as well.

But yea, I don't recommend buying this game in it's full price, just wait for another sale before you buy it, because lack of Content (unless you're playing with mods) and weak polish of the game will leave you disappointed compared to other great Serious Sam games in the franchise. If I were to rate it, I'd give it 6 out of 10, definitely the weakest Serious Sam game in my POV, but I'd still recommend playing it if you get it on sale, because this game isn't worthy of 40 euro price tag, at max 20.

That's about it. Thanks for reading!

I love this game's theme. It reminds me when i was in elementry school and pretending i was fighting wierd creatures i made with my friends lol. Story kinda ass though ngl, kinda a waste of potential buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut... The gameplay is super solid and awesome!!! :)

Super epic horde killing. Auto shotgun is a great weapon for giant crab boss in Coliseum arena. La Nonna gives you a minigun when you're on your way to the Vatican Library which makes horde killing so much more fun, I really wish they gave us that gun sooner in the game.

Overall great game <3

It's made in the spirit of original Serious Sam 1 and is a ton better than garbage like Sam 2 and 3, highly recommend, it is very fun.

Its Serious Sam. you know what your getting.

A wide and wonderful array of monsters to shoot, stab, blow up and even Combine harvester them.

Old school blastery at its finest

As a longtime fan of the Serious Sam franchise I was disappointed with this one. The game runs poorly and lacks optimization (even though it doesn't even look that good, a little better than BFE (2011) at best).
The animations look unfinished and unpolished, especially in the cutscenes (where they look really bad, sometimes even like something from back when Serious Sam 2 was released).
The gunplay is actually pretty good! Still, pretty much the same as BFE, but the first-person animations do look pretty decent, and most guns are satisfying to use. Although the newly implemented gadgets you're probably going to save and not even use for the entirety of the game since there isn't really a point to it most of the time.
The music is, as in all Serious Sam games, really good! ..except that sometimes it doesn't even fit into the fights anymore and is too "epic" for its own good. Sometimes you'd hear electric guitar with the choir playing as you fight 2 weaker enemies in some small alley. The soundtrack itself is mostly great, though.
Map design was either way too big for the amount of things you had to fight, or too small. The LeGiOn SyStEm wasn't an actual legion of monsters , and turned out to be mostly a bunch of sprites , a real letdown with how much it was advertised :/
The character designs and most monster designs look pretty bad; I much preferred the direction Croteam took in BFE, even with some experimental realism that Croteam was doing back then. The witch-bride is much more fun to fight than she was in BFE, and there was much less unavoidable (hitscan) damage you take, which is a plus.
The story is pretty bad too. Which isn't that big of a deal. Serious Sam was mostly the game based around the gunplay, but unlike Serious Sam 2, it takes itself more seriously and makes a larger accent on the progression of the story, and it really wasn't an enjoyable experience for me.
And lastly, the NPCs and forced, unfunny humor they were going for were just the nail in the coffin for this game. It all felt really forced and made me wish they never had added any character interaction in the first place. (Except for Charlie, love Charlie<3)
The humor of this game is really corny as well and makes you cringe pretty hard in combination with the blank expressions of those characters and how uncanny their movements look.
I cannot recommend this to anyone, unfortunately.

The game is not bad
I was so excited when they uploaded the trailer of SS4 after 9 years of SS3 release, the only thing i enjoyed so much is the gameplay and to be honest the game has some glitches at least they fixed some of them when they updated some stuff

Pretty fun. Worth $20; $40 is steep. Runs well on PC.

Me got jumped by the whole army for having a slightly disagreement on their opinion.

But good game, I love being jumped

I have come to accept that "boomer shooters" are not my thing, and it took playing this buggy mess of a game to make me realize it. I can't help but get nauseous moving around.

At least DOOM had some kind of story... I also realize this is fiction, but the characters and enemies were so outlandish here that it went beyond being cartoonish.

4.5/5
The funniest and the most fun Serious Sam game ever.

Short version: Get it.

Long version:

Ever played Serious Sam?

If you say yes, get it.

If you say no, get it. This game is a prequel to Serious Sam 3 and 1, 2 is the sequel to 1. You arent missing out.

You play games like Doom and Quake? Get it.

You play games like Painkiller? Get it.

Any games similar to those above that involves slaughtering alot of enemies? Get it.

If you want a game where you want to fight bunch of enemies, this game is perfect for you. Its definitely worth picking up.

Always good fun no matter how often played

S. Sam 4 is a fun game worth buying, I wish though they looked more on their older games the first and second speically:P

Classic run and gun game. No Woke A$$ BS here!

I always loved the minigun in the serious sam games...and SS4 does not disappoint...it turns my enemies into chunky salsa without any waiting...and then, with just a few skill points...I found out I could dual wield them.

Play this game and turn people into mince as well

The humor and the one liners are great.
only complain is about the outdated graphics.

whats not to like about Sam, Good action. Plenty of guns and ammunition.

Playing on Hard and enemies are already annoying, as in things jumping at me from all direction while I only have slow weapons isn't particularly fun but I know later I will have proper weapons and upgrades so maybe then I won't feel like this...
One thing is for certain, the game has a certain feel to it, kinda like the Operation Flashpoint games back in the day. As in the environment seems to not be part of the game, almost as if this was some highschool guy's first attempt at 3d. Blocky maps, most areas being on 1 plane unless deliberately terrain-y (roads are a good example, they are fully level with all around them), walls are usually just big boxes with low res textures being stretched onto them with their tiling turned up high... tiny bricks? And I'm playing on high graphics?

The whole thing feels like how I would expect an indie game to be despite indie games nowadays looking better? It's off, even the parallax feels blurry if that's even possible. Right! Reminds me of those "fake games" you usually see in movies where the kid is playing and you briefly see the screen.

Game is still fun-ish but I seem to recall even SS3 seemed to have better combat and the preceding ones even more so. Buy when discounted I guess.
Might update this as I progress but it's not likely anyone's really waiting on My review especially to decide to buy the game or not years after its release :)