High-performance playtime

Dual-wield miniguns and rocket launchers in this dated and ridiculous bit of retro fun.

While Serious Sam 4 feels like an old game, it isn’t a retro throwback. It’s just full of jank: battle music that ends the moment the last enemy is killed, cutscenes that start the instant a boss dies, clothing, dirt, and rock textures that pop in and out, and level events that occasionally fail to trigger, or won’t happen until you hunt down that one last enemy who got stuck running into a wall.

At least the jank is endearing (mostly), and Serious Sam 4 is fun – like the other Serious Sam games it’s still about murdering overwhelming hordes of aliens with enormous guns while moving backwards at the speed of a figure skater. You’re always on the verge of being overtaken, gripping the edge of control as you shoot at cyclops beasts, kamikaze guys, vampires, and insectoids, putting just enough space between you and them to give your bullets room to travel. That tension sustains almost all of Serious Sam 4’s ten-or-so hour campaign, which is playable solo or in online co-op.

A small but notable change

– in Serious Sam 3 (which is actually ten years old), you have to stop sprinting before shooting, and there’s a brief animation where Sam rereadies his weapon. In Serious Sam 4, you can just cancel the sprint animation by firing, and the shot is taken instantly. The change speeds things up for the better. It’s a lot of fun to sprint behind enemies who have front-facing shields and snap out a couple of shotgun blasts to their backs.

Serious Sam 4 is different from Serious Sam 3 in other good ways, too, but I’m disappointed that the changes aren’t bolder. The big technical achievement here is that many more enemies can appear on screen at once, but once the spectacle wore off my reaction was, “Ah, great, another wave of those skeleton bastards.” You can only focus on deleting so many beasts at once.

There’s no survival mode, at least yet. Serious Sam 4 is just the campaign, although you can play through the whole thing in four-player online co-op with customisable rules (turn on infinite ammo, among other things, if you fancy it). I gave it a try and it works fine, although I barely noticed my co-op buddy – it’s not really a game about working together. A few of the ridiculously large battles should get friends laughing together in co-op as they struggle to hose down lines of aliens with lasers. But where the new Doom games invoke the spirit of a classic with contemporary genius, this is just more Serious Sam: fun, janky, and thoroughly uncomplicated. TYLER WILDE

Serious Sam 4 is janky as hell, but mowing down thousands of aliens in Vatican City is worth doing at least once.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★