Kleer Skeletons, which charge toward you and then leap for a claw attack, can also be heard from a distance and are too fast to backpedal away from for very long – you have to turn, run, find a piece of scenery around which to make another sharp turn, then catch them from behind with a well-placed shotgun blast once they’ve made their leap. The Beheaded Kamikaze is still here, and still funny, but it also still works well to keep you from getting too focused on long-range targets or settled into one position.

The things that worked in the original Sam haven’t been touched, and the added elements consist mainly of new guns and new enemies that work well together with what was already there. Where Doom and Wolfenstein have become examples of modern design recapturing the feel of classic shooters as you remember it, Serious Sam 4 is instead an exercise in careful curation. Serious Sam 4 is elevated not by rethinking the fundamentals, but by slapping on a new lick of HD paint and providing arena after arena of grueling combat, as well as some genuine laugh-out-loud writing.Įach level gives you a chance to learn new enemies' behaviour before shoveling hordes of them at you all at once Serious Sam 4 has the same janky energy it always did, the same bonkers non-plot that sees Sam and his friends blasting alien creeps away by the hundred in various real-world locations, and the same raw shooter mechanics that have always made it a reliable FPS series. The fourth main sequence game does very little to modify the formula established in Croteam’s original Serious Sam, and the result, frankly, is glorious. Serious Sam 4 is a no-frills entry in one of the oddest but most enduring series in shooter history. There had been a lot of it as I’d made my way through the streets of Rome and the hills of rural France, and fans of Serious Sam will know the particular yell I mean right away: it belongs to the guy with no head, holding two bombs, who runs straight toward you, screaming in that one-note drone. My partner, as it turns out, had hit her limit on the amount of yelling she could tolerate. It was probably around midnight when I heard the door to my office softly shut behind me.

Serious sam character