SERIOUS SAM 4: PLANET BADASS Review
0SERIOUS SAM 4: PLANET BADASS
Are you tired of carefully preserving ammo, cowering behind cover and taking measured shots? Serious Sam is back to save the day as he runs around like an Olympic sprinter, throwing highly explosive C4 around like rice at a wedding. The Serious Sam series is known for a less than entirely serious take on the FPS genre, showing an affinity for classic genre staples of wanton destruction seasoned with a goofily fun narrative.
Serious Sam 4 starts Sam off in the middle of Rome, travelling with a convoy of hoo-rah military stereotypes, trying to fight through hordes of alien invaders and help to liberate Earth from the extraterrestrial yoke. Not having played a Serious Sam game before, I didn't know what to expect from the gruff-looking protagonist. When his compatriots were talking about the Da Vinci Code and asked his opinion on the famous book, Sam replied "No literary merit" I genuinely laughed out loud. Though the shades wearing hero has a craving for destruction as deep as his gravelly voice, he often shows surprising intelligence and sensitivity, which often works not only for comic effect but also to give the narrative real heart beneath the bombast.
What is far more serious (I was always going to get that pun in, deal with it), is the chaotic, visceral nature of the combat. Blistering speed and loud bang-bangs is order of things in Serious Sam, with massive hordes that frequently attack in waves and, for the most part, can be dealt with by pointing in the general area and squeezing the trigger. Serious Sam doesn't expect you to be particularly precise or skillful, but you do have to be very nimble and be able to gun while on the run, as the hordes come at you from all directions and, if you stand still, you will be swamped.
I like how it does away with cover mechanics, stealth sections, and, for the most part, AI. The environment design does make a little satirical nod to that stuff at times, as there is the occasional barrier strewn around as per modern shooter best practice, but you'll never make use of them. For the overwhelming majority of the game, you'll be entering arena environments, getting an escalating range of powerful guns, and then blasting away at increasingly powerful swarms of enemies. It is shallow, but it's exactly what the Serious Sam fan would want.
The truth, though, is that it's no surprise that Serious Sam 4 struggles at times, as the action truly is mental. Environments are large, and while the visuals aren't the best, they still are rather nice. There's an impressive range of enemies for you to face, too, and you're rarely up against just a handful of them. Sometimes you'll find yourself up against 100 enemies or more, truly testing your abilities to circle-strafe and effectively pick off targets. There's nothing else quite like it. Or at least not on this scale.
Sam has a large arsenal of conventional and imaginative weapons. He starts with some cool toys, too, like a device which creates a holographic copy of himself. There's no lock on, and aiming down the sights can be frustrating and imprecise because there really isn't time to do it in the middle of circle strafing. Weapon balancing is an issue, too, with some pistols being more effective than rifles, for example.
It seems nit-picky to worry about that. After all, Serious Sam is an arcade shooter where the enemies are often ridiculous. The reason it is worth mentioning is that those absurd enemies are almost weak to a specific weapon. If those weapons are awkward to use or poorly balanced, every battle becomes (even more of) a slog.
Like every other game before this, Serious Sam 4 is an arcade shooter at its core. You'll pick up all sorts of new weapons along your journey, all with their own dedicated ammo pools. You'll carry an inventory consisting of over ten different weapons and gadgets. Many weapons should be familiar to the fans of the previous games like the minigun, cannonball gun, rocket launcher, and more.
This is also the type of game where there are health pickups. Sam doesn't recover health passively like you would in a typical shooter where you just have to be out of combat for a few moments. Pickups and inventory management are a big part of the game, and that still holds true.
However, it seems like each new addition is a trade-off. The story is a nice addition to Serious Sam 4 because every other game before it only had minimal cutscenes. This game has full-fledged cutscenes, dialogue, and NPCs to actually make the player care. It does work at times but feels like a very loose and uninspired version of something like Borderlands.
Every character has their intro cutscenes and a tiny blurb to give us an idea of what role they play in the grand scheme of taking down Mental. The intros are basically the game as Borderlands as well, with the freeze-framing and dramatic effects.
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