Serious Sam 4

The game itself is simple: take a big weapon and kill ordes of cannon fodder monsters because they're bad and we're good :) But it's fun with its cheesy lines and playfully cliche' situations. The perfect game to stop thinking and escape from reality.

"Yeah I'd be mad too if I couldn't see my own junk."
- Sam Stone.

Pros:
It's Serious Sam.
The weapons are awesome.
The enemies are awesome.
The graphics are awesome.
The environments are awesome.
Fun gadgets. Portable black hole? Check. Gas to make monsters infight? Check. Holo-Sam? Check.
S.A.M. skill tree lets you dual-wield weapons and ride enemies around.
Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher. Say it again: Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher. Could there BE a more awesome weapon in name and concept? Executed flawlessly as well.
Cons:
Have to reload the Tommy Gun, Devastator, and Auto Shotgun.
You lose all your gadgets later in the game so you can't save them for the big boss fight.
No deathmatch (but who plays Sam for deathmatch?).
Dual-wielding drastically hurts accuracy so it's very situational.
Lacking some classic enemies.
Some open sections lacking enemies.
Secrets.
I found Sam 4 to be in many ways more enjoyable then Sam 3, and I like Sam 3 so they're both good games. The core gameplay is pretty solid. There are a few vehicle sections that are not entirely terrible, but I found the motorcycle section to be unpleasant. It's long, open, kind of boring, and for some reason riding the motorcycle made me feel dizzy. I didn't have that issue with the other vehicles, so I'm not sure what was up with that. Even outside the vehicles, there are some sections where you go a long way without finding enemies. Usually you trigger fights by picking up an item or entering a specific location, enemies spawn in, you fight, and it's over. First Encounter I think did the best job of making sure there was always someone to fight without having to run a long ways to find them. Sam 4 could have handled enemy placement a bit better.
New to the game are some serious weapon upgrades. The Rocket Launcher gets a multi-homing rocket attachment, the Grenade Launcher gets a multi-grenade remote detonation, the Single-Barreled Shotgun gets an under-barrel grenade attachment that is VERY useful, and the Laser Cannon gets a Death Ray. I have nothing bad to say about any of these upgrades. They all kick ass. That doesn't even bring up the FRPCL. It looks like a rocket launcher painted red, but that's where the similarities end. The primary attack launches a rocket-propelled chainsaw that homes in on its target and saws into it, doing massive damage. If the target dies the chainsaw will then find ANOTHER target and keep sawing until it does a certain amount of damage and finally explodes or hits a solid object and explodes. What's better is the secondary attack lets you use it as a melee weapon. Hordes of Gnarr or Reprocessed become piles of gibs and you get to save bullets. Who ever said that a chainsaw isn't a ranged weapon really needs to try this thing out.
Also new are gadgets. They're holdable items you can use whenever needed. These range from health boosts, a bullet-time device, a portable black hole, a holo-Sam decoy, attack drones, "rage" serum that ups your movement speed, fire rate, and damage, a mini-nuke that works like a Serious bomb (Only 2 exist in the game), and gas that makes your enemies in-fight. It is very satisfying to see a horde of enemies charging at you suddenly turn and start going after each other after tossing one of these, especially when there's kamikazes in the mix. Same goes for the black hole. Just throw it and see for yourself.
Last, there's what are known as Serious Artifacts of Might, or S.A.M.'s. Collecting these lets you pick abilities from a skill tree, from having enemies drop ammo when killed to dual-wielding weapons to performing melee attacks on progressively larger enemies. You can ride around on werebulls, hammer-wielding fanatics, Khnums, and even biomechanoids. You can upgrade your ability to reload faster as well.
My biggest gripe about Sam 4 is the secrets. There are a lot of them, but mostly they consist of finding a gadget hidden either behind a bush, wrecked cars, up on top of a ledge, or on a building's roof. I really, really do not like the jumping mechanics in the Serious series and having to parkour to get to yet-another-health-gadget is kind of obnoxious. The creativity with secrets from The Second Encounter is very much lost. There's a few health item traps to trigger some enemies, and two good callbacks to classic Sam trap secrets, but 95% of the secrets are just finding a hidden item tucked away. No exploding walls, no boulders rolling at you, no biomechs disguised as a bush.
Overall Sam 4 is a great game. It could be better, but it's a worthy addition to the series.

This is triple A boy you gotta survive with style

Serious Sam 4 arrives nine years after the previous installment, which itself was a back-to-indie digital-only release across consoles and PC due to 2K Games kicking Croteam to the curb after the big-budget Serious Sam 2 failed to deliver on the promise of the hype generated by the original Serious Sam titles. It's simply the way of things that Croteam took what everyone loved about Serious Sam TFE/TSE/Xbox and upped the ante with the sequel, which proved to be too much I suppose for "serious" gamers unable to laugh at themselves or their games; there's some irony deep within if you care to go looking, although I'm not heading down that train of thought further. Serious Sam 3 then was a knee-jerk away from all that, returning the series to its tech-demo roots by basically being a playable showcase for the engine, and taking stabs at the expected gritty realism of what were then the dominant FPS lifeform of military shooters. The hardcore "gamers" got what they wanted, feeling like a Dollar Store Rambo instead of the coddled man-children they usually are. while the rest of us were left wondering why we were roaming for long stretches across beautiful, but mostly empty environments devoid of the usual Serious Sam secrets or Easter eggs as we slogged from one big fight to the next. Serious Sam 4 does seem to double-down on that particular element of the last game, so take heed if you are a stickler for pacing or wasted space in game environments, but also note that this time around, they're just one of the game's many meta-jokes.
If SS3 was a tech demo for The Talos Principle, then Serious Sam 4 is likely another tech demo for that game's pending sequel, or just anyone that wishes to license the insanely-capable Serious Engine 4. The game does seem to make fun of both itself and it's 9-year-old sequel by being a prequel to a prequel, detailing the very beginning of Serious Sam's fight against Mental, injecting a scary amount story to boot. In fact, the big-ticket joke of Serious Sam 4 is "this is a triple-A game" because once again, a Serious Sam game gets major funding and publishing in both digital and physical formats, just like 2K did with SS2. Since Devolver Digital was very happy with the turnout of the HD remasters and SS3, they pumped considerable resources into SS4 and final product makes light of that fact by having an actual attempt at both a cinematic score, character arcs, tragedy, and set pieces. Some of it is literal trolling of other genres, which some folks too busy being "serious gamers" may miss and instead cite as faults; examples include a 60 square mile overworld map literally just used as a single linear level (a nod to Alan Wake that one), except letting players actually roam for hours off the beaten path to no avail if they want. Having the entire castle of Carcassone rendered in detail and cordoned off in sections just to make into a Serious Sam level is also some kind of dual-purpose tech demo display and joke about level design, with all the areas explorable even if most of them have nothing in them.
When the game isn't poking fun at it's own pointless scale and budget values, it's bringing back the wackiness of Serious Sam 2 in very subversive ways, with ridiculous guns like the Flaming Rocket-Propelled Chainsaw Launcher (FRPCL), or letting Sam do stuff like drive a wheat thresher through crowds of enemies in a field of screams, or operate a bubblegum-colored mech through The Vatican. Being both visually stunning and having one of the most-epic soundtracks of probably any game to date, Serious Sam 4 does actually put those triple-A dollars to use, while still being Serious Sam in every meaningful way with the pop culture references, one-liners, and frenetic combat of 1,001 enemies that need mowing down with overpowered weapons that typically don't require reloading. All that extra level space is put to some good use in the form of side-quests, a new addition to the game as well as returning the copious secret areas and collectables from the first and second game to the mix. At least in Serious Sam 4, all the extra empty environments are totally optional to explore, rather than just have the player walking endlessly from one arena to the next like SS3, and you do get the random Easter egg too. Actually doing the side missions rewards players with upgrades, and the game also has a skill tree, likely another joke poking fun at the face nearly every game has RPG elements in it now, which you get points to upgrade by finding little weird purple balls filled with happy gas.
My only beef with the upgrades in the skill tree is they unlock abilities Serious Sam once possessed by default in the previous games, like dual-wielding or performing melee attacks on enemies of any size. Reception to Serious Sam 4 was rocky at first, because the die-hards still held hope that Croteam would dive 20 years back in time to deliver a rehash of the first game's vibe, while people who never understood the appeal of Serious Sam still could not understand why people like this series; but there was an added issue this time around: bugs. This game should have just waited out for a full 10 years from launch of the previous title and taken the time to address what appeared to be a litany of instability and visual anomalies in the game at launch. Many people were comparing poor old Sam to Duke Nukem Forever, although in the years since, Croteam has both patched those out and added even more secret content to make the levels even more explorable. All told, this is almost a perfect fusion between the visual fidelity of SS3, with the humor of SS2, plus the classic weapons/enemy balance of the first Serious Sam, including the return of the green "slow-light" lasergun. After taking classic shooters, space operas, and military shooters down a peg, Serious Sam's piss-take on the phenomenon of "Triple A gaming" is equally madcap and still a lot of fun, Is this the best one yet? I don't know, but it certainly feels the most expensive, while still just being hours of holding down the fire button while backpedaling or circle-strafing.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Simple but challenging and a lot of fun if you like basic FPS games