![]() The gameplay, as I say, is Serious Sam again. Musclebound, violent and about as socially adept as a sperm whale at a birthday party. ![]() It’s Running in the sense of “goodness there’s a lot of pus running out of these open sores.” The story of Serious Sam 4 is a janky construct of awkwardly animated stock characters and badly established subplots and the main point I take away from it is that Croteam are a bunch of complete dorks, and Serious Sam the character is entirely what one should expect from a badass action hero as envisioned by a bunch of complete dorks. A running gag that runs a little too long for my taste. Logo T-shirt wearing kooky loudmouth Serious Sam Stone finds himself having to be haunted and sad over the death of an ally and it’s like watching Barney the Dinosaur trying to play Macbeth, then two seconds later they’re doing that running gag where they’re constantly struggling to come up with good one liners after killing something. All of these cliched demi-plots are handled fairly ineptly and the tone is all over the place. I guess a full story arc in which Serious Sam confronts his own prejudices would be a difficult thing to squeeze between all the casually murdering more aliens than a border patrol officer who hasn’t jerked off in weeks. That last one shows up for all of about ten minutes and then mysteriously vanishes from the plot. So Sam has an abrasive relationship with a no-nonsense commander who’s jealous of Sam being more popular despite wearing considerably smaller sunglasses, there’s a rookie on Sam’s team who needs to prove himself, Sam has to win over a foreign resistance group who distrust his brash American ways and Big Mac-scented farts, and then he has to team up with an alien soldier who’s joined the good guys and who he initially distrusts. In the course of a rather nondescript quest to recover a generic powerful Macguffin that could save the Earth but we already know won’t, Sam attempts to set a new record for most action movie cliches in a single plot. On a contemporary Earth not quite as ultrabuggered by alien invaders as it was in the last prequel there’s still enough of an official military around for Serious Sam to have a little tagalong brigade of quirky friends, so he can live out his dream of reenacting scenes from Predator but more importantly, so he can have a couple of nice convenient warm bodies to knock off every time a new monster needs to be established as particularly nasty. Gunning down nine thousand zombie soldiers might lose some appeal if we know that Sam’s doing it instead of picking up his daughter from hockey practice. There is very little backstory that would meaningfully enhance such a purely cathartic experience, although you might distract from it. You are a big strong man who can carry more guns than a military grade attack helicopter and run backwards faster than most ordinary men can sprint, here’s ten billion monsters in a series of open environments, piddly bam, pimply bum. So Serious Sam 4, then, Before-Before First Encounter, yet another prequel to the original Serious Sam, a game that required context the way a chimp requires a degree in molecular biology. God bless you, Croteam, for being as reliably unmoving as a donkey on a staircase. The Earth will continue to turn, the sun will continue to rise, if partially concealed by a haze of orange smoke like the face of a loved one appearing briefly at the surface of an unsanitary piranha tank, and the new Serious Sam game is going to play pretty much like all the other ones. In these uncertain times – is it me or is the phrase “in these uncertain times” starting to supplant the word “hello” – it’s important to focus on the stabilities of life. We have a new merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Serious Sam 4.
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