Serious Sam 4

the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ painting lost all of its detail right as michelle was talking about how beautiful it was which is really funny Anyways, graphics are really jank and distracting, cutscenes look absolutely terrible and I don't even get an ironic sense of enjoyment or actual amusement out of them unlike with SS2 or any other games, neither do I care about most of the characters or the focus on oneliners that just come off as cringy, and the story and characterization are really weak and not enough to make me even want to care about them, especially when I'm being distracted by the damn textures popping in randomly or losing detail and staying that way through the entire cutscene with really ugly/broken lighting sometimes that happen in the levels sometimes. The fights are less interesting and feels more like enemy spam in big environments that is just like the other one you just did a while ago, there are too many gadgets and some are redundant and even make it difficult to see the gameplay sometimes. Vehicle sections are usually very uneventful and nothing really happens aside from driving over big open fields and sometimes getting off the vehicle to fight because it's frankly easier to just fight on foot than on a vehicle, and mech sections feel like an autoscroller and loses a lot of what makes serious sam the way it is and makes it feel more like just a game of shooting the other guys before they shoot you too much, most secrets are either boring and uninteresting or really, REALLY janky and annoying platforming that are overwhelmingly common and sometimes too precise as well. levels are difficult to remember sometimes and I mainly remember most of them as either some city or ruins or open fields in either Rome or France, with the volcano level, oil rig that looks like an asset flip (it probably is), and the final level being the only one I actually remember in some capacity. I'm fairly certain there were meant to be more levels in the Russian episode (which we eventually did get in the form of Siberian Mayhem which is actually much better than this game), but they got cut so the game could get released, leading to the oil rig level feeling like a huge, underbaked asset flip of a level with terrible gameplay in my opinion and a lot of strange efforts to bridge the gap between that level and the final level. I used to enjoy this game on my first playthrough, but now I'm not even sure after my 2nd playthrough, because this game feels like it gets worse as it goes on and doesn't really compare to the other serious sam games. It feels like this game got hit by the Duke Nukem Forever virus where the game tries a ton of things to be badass and cool and it ends up being really messy and mediocre at best. I have a really strong PC, so performance wasn't too much of an issue for me, but that is a common complaint I've seen and I do notice some frame drops sometimes so be wary of that. If you want something like this but actually good, go play Siberian Mayhem instead, it's basically the same game but nearly everything (aside from the performance) is improved.