It was probably around midnight when I heard the door to my office softly shut behind me. My partner, as it turns out, had hit her limit on the amount of yelling she could tolerate. 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.
Serious Sam 4 is a no-frills entry in one of the oddest but most enduring series in shooter history. 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 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. 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.
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