Serious Sam 4

2020 gave first-person shooter fans two attempts at reviving an old-school formula for a modern audience: Doom Eternal in March, and Serious Sam 4 in September. Reviewers make that comparison constantly, and rarely in Serious Sam 4's favor — but the comparison also obscures what this game does get right, which is the specific, uncompromising thing the Serious Sam series has always been about: an absurd arsenal, screen-filling enemy hordes, and co-op chaos with three friends.

What "Serious Sam" was always supposed to feel like

For readers unfamiliar with the franchise, the pitch has stayed consistent since the first game in 2001: rather than a handful of enemies at a time, Serious Sam throws dozens to hundreds of attackers at the player simultaneously, turning positioning and weapon selection into a constant, escalating puzzle of crowd control rather than precision one-on-one engagements. That identity is the yardstick every review in the sample measures the game against, for better or worse — and it's worth understanding before weighing in on whether Serious Sam 4 lives up to it.

The chaos still works

Set the criticism aside for a moment, because the gunplay earns its praise honestly. Even the review sample's harshest detractors consistently carve out an exception for the weapons themselves — a huge, varied arsenal that feels powerful and satisfying to fire, backed by a new S.A.M. progression system that lets players unlock abilities like dual-wielding any weapon in the game, adding a light layer of build customization the earlier entries never had. Four-player online co-op remains, as it has for the whole series, the format this design is genuinely built for, and reviewers describe it as the mode where the game's rough edges matter least against how much fun screen-filling horde combat is with friends.

A troubled-sounding launch, in its own fans' words

The criticism, where it appears, is specific and comes disproportionately from the series' longtime audience rather than newcomers. Level design draws the most consistent complaint: multiple detailed reviews describe individual levels as feeling like they were built by completely different teams, swinging between genuinely excellent set pieces and boring, maze-like, or frustratingly overlong stretches within the same campaign. One of the review sample's most detailed critical entries, explicitly addressed to Croteam by name, argues this is the first entry in the series that deserves a negative rating on its own terms, not just by comparison to earlier games.

Performance draws an equally specific and corroborated complaint. Multiple reviewers report the game running measurably worse than Serious Sam 3 despite offering similar visual fidelity, with severe texture pop-in cited repeatedly as a specific, visible symptom rather than a vague "needs optimization" comment. Cutscene animation and character models come in for the same treatment — several reviewers directly compare the quality unfavourably to the previous mainline entry, released nearly a decade earlier, calling the visual work in dialogue scenes dated relative to what a 2020 release should deliver.

One detail worth flagging for context: several reviewers note that some early critical coverage, including from at least one well-known reviewer, was based on a pre-release build rather than the final shipped game, and push back specifically on that basis rather than disputing the substance of every complaint. That doesn't erase the technical and design issues independently reported by ordinary players after launch, but it's a relevant caveat for anyone weighing the game's initial critical reception against what actually shipped.

A franchise Croteam kept investing in

Whatever the rocky launch, the years since tell a story of sustained commitment rather than abandonment. Numbered patches continued through 2021, Steam Workshop and a level editor arrived to support a real modding community, a full standalone expansion called Siberian Mayhem shipped in January 2022, and the franchise has continued receiving new content and spin-off releases as recently as 2026, including a 25th-anniversary celebration of the series as a whole. That's a meaningfully different trajectory than a troubled launch left to fade, and it's fair context for anyone checking in on the game well after its rockier early reception.

A prequel that most players do see through

Story-wise, Serious Sam 4 positions itself as a prequel, showing Sam Stone's first outing rather than continuing chronologically from the earlier games — a choice that gives newcomers an entry point without prior series knowledge, even though the writing itself draws the tonal complaints described above. Global achievement data suggests the inconsistent level-design complaints didn't stop most players from finishing: story-milestone achievements early in the campaign clear well over 70% of the playerbase, a healthy figure for a lengthy FPS campaign, while the steepest drop-offs are reserved for optional secret-hunting and harder difficulty achievements rather than basic story progression. That's a useful, if partial, counterweight to the level-design criticism above — whatever specific stretches reviewers call weak, they weren't weak enough to stop the large majority of players who started from reaching the credits.

Verdict

Serious Sam 4 delivers the specific, uncompromising thing its series has always promised — absurd firepower, overwhelming enemy counts, and co-op chaos — well enough that it's genuinely worth playing for that alone. It falls short of a stronger score because its own most dedicated fans document real, specific problems at launch: inconsistent level design, dated cutscene work, and performance issues serious enough to draw direct, unfavourable comparison to a game from nine years earlier. Years of continued support have likely smoothed some of that over, but the base experience still carries the shape of a troubled development rather than the clean genre revival some hoped for.