Shred the floating alien mage with the rocket launcher! Shoot the cyclops orc! And the 25 rampaging bulls stomping towards you! Puff, click, puff, click, splatter, bounce - on it goes. At best, the eternal loading times or the stupid cutscenes, which essentially serve as a template for Sam's grotty, partly self-deprecating one-liners, distract from the continuous action here. Something about alien invaders, a powerful artifact, an earthquake machine, and overly pathetic military personnel who, oddly enough, only sporadically help Sam out with vermin control. Watch out, a one-eyed gorilla! And behind it, 50 screaming suicide bombers, which can be nicely used as explosive charges for galloping bone beasts with the precise, crisply direct controls. Sounds brutal - but it's not really with such an overdone art design.
As before, you should rather use the alternative first-person view, in which Sam's wooden animations are not so noticeable. But even then, the visuals look utilitarian at best - with late-loading textures, architecture popping into view, undynamic botany, interface bugs, and choppy shadows - even if the wildly jumbled enemy design still has a certain trashy charm.
Then there are various small bugs, sound dropouts, and even occasional crashes. Especially in co-op, the campaign for up to four players doesn't like it at all when someone accidentally switches to a program running in the background. Sometimes, however, without any intervention from a co-op player, the weapon disappears and is replaced with the Windows mouse pointer. A nice idea for pacifists, but extremely impractical when you're surrounded by dozens of aliens who want to have a nice barbecue with their flame beams.
Once you've come to terms with all these aches and pains, sometimes it's a case of brain off, primitive shooter fun on! Why not just shoot everything away, jump, frantically tear the mouse around and let the subconscious take over like in a bullet hell?
Conclusion
Serious Sam 4 is not a pearl of shooter history. However, those who put up with the overly flat sledgehammer humor, many small bugs, and the frequently prevailing assembly line dispatch of the enemy masses will experience solid old-school baller action in between. The old-school principle doesn't seem as polished and rousing as in Doom Eternal or as dynamic as the exchange of blows in Halo. But thanks to the overwhelming number of crazy enemies, you are often put under pressure - and you can also fight back properly with the crisp controls.
