Serious Sam 4 from Croteam and Devolver Digital is the highly anticipated sequel in the long-running franchise. Check out our Serious Sam 4 review!

 

Serious Sam 4 from Croteam and Devolver Digital is the highly anticipated sequel in the long-running franchise. The game is set as a prequel to Serious Sam 3: BFE, and after launching on PC in 2020, it finally got a PlayStation 5 release. After a huge portal opens up in Tunguska, Russia, Mental’s evil forces set out to invade the whole planet. With everyone trying to repel the invasion, a special unit from the Earth Defense Force led by “Serious” Sam Stone is sent to Rome. It is there that he must find Father Mikhail, who claims to have found clues that can lead to the Holy Grail, a mighty artifact hidden inside the Ark of the Covenant that can help to end the invasion.

Before you start to play Serious Sam 4, you can select between one of five difficulty settings of an increasing challenge: Tourist, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Serious. There’s also the option to customize your experience by selecting the base difficulty setting, allowing or removing health items and armor items, adding an extra strength boost to your enemies, and even activating infinite ammo if you just want to run around and shoot at anything that moves without having to worry about locating more ammo for your weapons. There’s also the option of favoring graphics or the overall framerate, based on your preference.

 

You can play Serious Sam 4 on PlayStation 5 either from a first-person perspective or change the camera to a third-person perspective, changing between the two by pressing down on the D-Pad. The left analog stick can be used for running, with the right one used to look around. Press in on the left analog stick, and you can sprint. Press in on the right one, and you can use items when near them or use it for a powerful melee attack whenever an enemy has gotten a bit too close to you.

Sam can jump (or swim up) with the X button and crouch (or swim down) with the Circle button. If you need to reload one of your weapons, you can do so with the Square button. You can fire your weapon with the R2 button and can use a weapon’s secondary fire mode when available by pressing the L2 button. You can check the weapon wheel with the L1 button so that you can pick the right weapon to get the job done. You can also toggle dual-wielding with the R1 button when possible.

 

There’s a packed list of trophies for you to work on during your time with Serious Sam 4, with 48 Bronze trophies, 5 Silver trophies, and one lonely Gold trophy to unlock before you can add a new Platinum trophy to your collection. Several of these trophies will pop as you progress through the game, and you can unlock the rest by finding some collectibles here and there, by killing 100 enemies by way of headshots, defeating 11 different enemies by way of melee attacks, and some other miscellaneous objectives.

It’s been a long wait, and while the game is not perfect, Serious Sam 4 is a fun arcade-style experience that certainly pays homage to the other games in the long-running series. While the graphics certainly don’t scream “PlayStation 5 optimized release,” they get the job done. You can customize your experience based on what difficulty setting you want to play at if you want to favor framerate or visual fidelity. You can also customize your character by way of the game’s skill tree by spending skill points to, for example, have melee attacks heal you, or having enemies that you defeat sometimes drop items. Serious Sam 4 is out on PlayStation 5 with a $39.99 asking price.

Disclaimer
This Serious Sam 4 review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Devolver Digital.