Serious Sam 4 has been out for a while on PC already, but if you're not familiar with it, imagine a Musou with guns.
My time spent mowing down aliens in the new PS5 port of Serious Sam 4 was absolutely bonkers in the best way. In the vein of Doom Eternal, this is a shooter based around constant movement. You hold still? You die. You've got to keep mobile, tearing through hordes at a surprisingly fast pace. The initial Musou vibes of the enemy waves worried me (I’m normally not a fan of the genre), but SS4 does a great job of regularly introducing new enemies and weapons to keep things interesting.
As for how the port runs, the game looks incredible on PS5, with the draw distance being astounding. The second level's Italian city scape is so vast and gorgeous, I whispered "wow" out loud like 4 or 5 times. There were some minor technical hiccups, but nothing that would detract from the overall experience. The opening battlefield scene stuttered pretty badly for the first 15 seconds but quickly caught up, and I didn’t experience any jitters like that again. More of an oversight than a technical issue, some enemies seemed to have a single voice/shout recording, so when I was surrounded by a dozen suicide bombers, their combined yelling sounded eerily similar to that Vine of someone pushing on a whole basket of rubber duck toys. The most common legitimate issue was texture pop in, sometimes having someone's face load halfway through a shot of them speaking during a cutscene. But as funny and charming as the dialogue and characters can be, you're not here for the cutscenes, are you?
There are a couple of missed opportunities with this port though. The Dualsense doesn't get any variation in rumble. It's either rumbling or it's not, so running into a wall feels the same as getting shot. The co-op is also limited to playing with other players over the internet, one player per console. This would have been a fantastic game for split-screen, so that's a bit of a shame.
But all in all, this is a great time! This feels tailor-made for people who've been playing shooters for 20+ years, but I think anyone who enjoys frantic gunplay will get a kick out of this one.
Oh and definitely set the Blood/Gore setting to Halloween. It's fantastic.
My time spent mowing down aliens in the new PS5 port of Serious Sam 4 was absolutely bonkers in the best way. In the vein of Doom Eternal, this is a shooter based around constant movement. You hold still? You die. You've got to keep mobile, tearing through hordes at a surprisingly fast pace. The initial Musou vibes of the enemy waves worried me (I’m normally not a fan of the genre), but SS4 does a great job of regularly introducing new enemies and weapons to keep things interesting.
As for how the port runs, the game looks incredible on PS5, with the draw distance being astounding. The second level's Italian city scape is so vast and gorgeous, I whispered "wow" out loud like 4 or 5 times. There were some minor technical hiccups, but nothing that would detract from the overall experience. The opening battlefield scene stuttered pretty badly for the first 15 seconds but quickly caught up, and I didn’t experience any jitters like that again. More of an oversight than a technical issue, some enemies seemed to have a single voice/shout recording, so when I was surrounded by a dozen suicide bombers, their combined yelling sounded eerily similar to that Vine of someone pushing on a whole basket of rubber duck toys. The most common legitimate issue was texture pop in, sometimes having someone's face load halfway through a shot of them speaking during a cutscene. But as funny and charming as the dialogue and characters can be, you're not here for the cutscenes, are you?
There are a couple of missed opportunities with this port though. The Dualsense doesn't get any variation in rumble. It's either rumbling or it's not, so running into a wall feels the same as getting shot. The co-op is also limited to playing with other players over the internet, one player per console. This would have been a fantastic game for split-screen, so that's a bit of a shame.
But all in all, this is a great time! This feels tailor-made for people who've been playing shooters for 20+ years, but I think anyone who enjoys frantic gunplay will get a kick out of this one.
Oh and definitely set the Blood/Gore setting to Halloween. It's fantastic.