Serious Sam 4 review: Seriously lacking on PS5

Title: Serious Sam 4
Developer: Croteam
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platforms: PlayStation 5 (reviewed on)
Release Date: December 7, 2021

The Serious Sam series is a bizarre thing to me and honestly, one I would have never thought in a million years would still be around for a 4th game — especially after the weirdly well-written Matt Hazard ended up flopping.  (For real though, it was a satire of everything in the gaming universe from JRPG characters overusing ellipsis and forced plot twists. It also had Neil Patrick Harris as the main villain. Why’d y’all sleep on this?)

But for Serious Sam 4 to come out on the PS5 near the end of 2021 is just baffling. Not only that, the character was designed as a knock-off of Duke Nukem who was purposely designed as the antithesis to other games like Doom. He’s like a knockoff of a knockoff. But it’s 2021, we’re in the worst possible timeline, and Serious Sam is still here. Seriously.

Dear reader, I want you to understand, I went into this game hoping for a fun time. While I never got into hyper-violent stuff, I genuinely miss the days of linear FPS games where you just fight demons and find weird secrets everywhere without having to worry about some competitive multiplayer added on. This game has all of that, but unfortunately, it feels like most of those were delivered via Wish.

The intro of the game delivers a weird monologue from the majority of the characters.  Once Sam gets his opportunity to force some swearing through the gravel in his throat the camera swoops down to the planet where the camera pans over a sea of enemies.

Now, before I show you, I want to remind you that Kingdom Hearts 2 came out in 2005 on the PlayStation 2 and pulled off thousands of enemies way better than this. Watch what the game does on a PS5.

Do you see that? I thought my PS5 was going to yeet itself off my mantle in anguish. It makes no sense. Now pair that with incredibly long loading times that rival Skyrim’s when it first came out and it brings up a lot of questions about how “seriously” they took the coding.

The weapon system is also a weird mess. As I said, I don’t really play a lot of shooters but I understand them. So when I can’t hit a damn thing with a scoped rifle but am taking out snipers from afar with a single blast from a shotgun that raises questions. My primary sniper rifle throughout the entire game wasn’t the sniper rifle or anything with a scope, by the way. It was the handgun you default to should you run out of ammo. Here’s me taking out ridiculously far away enemies with it. This gun has more range than Henry Cavill.

The game occasionally has its fun parts — especially early. The cycle of this game is to introduce an enemy with a new mechanic, have you fight a bunch, introduce another enemy and have you fight those. Then you’ll fight a bunch of both at once. Every time you fight a new enemy, you fight a bunch of them and then a swarm of everything you’ve encountered thus far. It’s an interesting gameplay loop for the first three or four houses of the game but by chapter 4 of this 15 chapter game, it gets old fast.

Here’s an example of the chaos. In this video, I’m currently fighting slashing zombies, screaming gentlemen with bombs, massive bull demons that charge, slow-moving acid-filled giants that explode, vampires, things that throw energy attacks, and, at some point, I think a boney fellow or two. There’s a lot going on here.

And in every slow minute of the game, instead of swarming you with enemies, the game swarms you with terrible dialogue. The script for this game is more stilted than a house built off the Gulf Coast. Here is Sam placing a beacon. I hope you like the bacon joke because he does it like four more times.

Again, I wouldn’t have made it this far if I didn’t desperately want to have fun with this game but beyond the ridiculously dated graphics, the character models that move like PS3 NPCs and horrifically broken mechanics, Serious Sam 4 is not a game I could seriously consider worth getting.

Serious Sam 4 (PS5) Score: 4

A return to classic linear FPS gameplay is lost beneath a pile of broken mechanics, terrible dialogue, repetitive villain design, and some of the most boring environments I’ve ever seen. Serious Sam 4 is a remarkably dated game that should be reserved for the most “serious” of Serious Sam fans.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.