As you progress, each encounter involves more and more enemies (with the occasional boss battle) and forces you to fire at will rather than vary up your play patterns to overcome the demonic onslaught. One of my biggest critiques of Doom Eternal‘s DLC was that it amped up the waves of demons to 11 and threw all of them at you at once Serious Sam 4 follows this pattern. The demons themselves offer some variability, but each new demonic addition’s uniqueness quickly becomes a grindfest. There were several instances early on where I felt like I was forced to conserve ammunition because I was unsure if I would find ammo in the next area or if I would be SoL for the remainder of the level. Defeating enemies sometimes drops ammunition for the gun you’re using, and that ammunition is sometimes a quarter of what you ended up using to defeat the larger demons. Acquiring ammunition on the normal difficulty is inconsistent, as well. In some encounters, my shotguns were able to hit (and defeat, somehow) enemies that were quite far away. The guns of Serious Sam 4 feel inconsistent in the sense that the sniper rifle feels less accurate than either of the shotguns. I’m not using watered down lightly when I describe the gameplay of Serious Sam 4 when compared to Doom and Duke Nukem, as it incorporates the more annoying gameplay mechanics that make the game less strategic and more of a simplistic affair. While the premise itself is kosher and occupies a good niche in the FPS genre that’s overwhelmed by edgy military shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, Serious Sam 4‘s implementation feels watered down and emptier than what Doom and Duke Nukem manage to accomplish quite well. Once you get about a third of the way in, the dialogue will be washed out by the screams of demons (especially the bomb carrying ones who scream AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH until they’re slain). All this happens while cheesy dialogue (read: the driest of Dad jokes) occurs between the side characters and Serious Sam. You’re given a gun, a demonic enemy is introduced, you defeat a wave of that enemy, and then you move to a new area. Serious Sam 4 is best described as a Doom meets Duke Nukem FPS. Equipped for the next-gen? Absolutely not. After reviewing Doom Eternal on the Switch, I was excited for another opportunity to play a FPS demonfest on my PS5. Serious Sam 4 is barely more than a year old, and it’s already beyond dated.“Why so serious, Sam?” was a question I repeatedly asked myself as I played Serious Sam 4 (PS5). Things only got worse after testing the Matrix tech demo running on Unreal Engine 5, with its Metahuman models. Think of the most basic human models you can grab from an Unreal asset pack, with the most robotic of animations, and little to no facial expressions. The human characters, on the other hand, dear lord. The enemy designs are simplistic, but not hideous, either. The game isn’t exactly hideous, but next-gen this is not.
That introductory cutscene which puts you against literally a thousand enemies at once, that damn thing was running at a framerate that made Ocarina of Time feel like Doom Eternal in comparison. I can count the amount of times only a few non-boss enemies are thrown onto you during a combat section, so you can already imagine the outcome: Serious Sam 4 runs poorly on the PS5. The game occasionally runs at 60fps on Performance Mode (I was legit scared of playing it on Visual Mode to notice the difference), but the framerate would eventually tank the moment more than five or six enemies appeared onscreen. I would say it runs even worse on the PlayStation 5. Since Serious Sam 4 is all about shoving the screen with as many braindead goons a graphics card can handle, it ran poorly even on the fanciest of configurations.
The performance was basically tied to the amount of enemies onscreen: the more of them at any given moment, the worse the framerate would get.
#SERIOUS SAM 4 PS5 RELEASE DATE PC#
Remember how bad the performance was in the PC version of Serious Sam 4? We reviewed the game on a very beefy PC, and even then it struggled to maintain a decent framerate. Every other problem featured in this port, however, is inexcusable. Or at least not feel utterly irritated when witnessing them. You wouldn’t be able to fix those without completely remaking the game’s structure from scratch, so I can almost ignore them.
#SERIOUS SAM 4 PS5 RELEASE DATE UPGRADE#
Some of them were inevitable, such as the really poor level design, underwhelming voice acting, and terrible upgrade system (you need to unlock the ability to collect ammo from dead enemies? For real?). Namely, everything that was wrong with the original version of Serious Sam 4 is present in this PlayStation 5 port. It would have been a cooler intro if it wasn’t running at around 12 frames per second.
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