At the end of each level there’s a big boss that you’ll kill by shooting at it a bunch, there are optional side areas that reward you with gun upgrades and you can find magic space orbs that give you skill points. You use huge guns to kill hordes of enemies in order to get through gates that are arbitrarily locked, all while dodging attacks by double jumping and circle strafing. Each level in the game starts you out in an overly convoluted situation that ties into the main story somehow, where the only way out is to kill thousands of aliens. Over the next 10 hours, you play what boils down to a less refined verson of the aforementioned Doom reboots. This time around, you’re told that in order to save the planet you’ll need to find The Holy Grail for some reason, and without much more of an explanation than that, you’re set loose to make one-liners and wreak havoc across 15 semi-linear levels.

As the name suggests, you take control of the trying-to-be-serious Sam Stone on an Earth that’s been completely overrun by aliens. Serious Sam 4, then, is the latest installment in the franchise that did Doom before Doom got its reboots. Save for the occasional Devolver Digital game and the rare gems like Bulletstorm, there have been almost no “B games”, an issue that has been made slightly less problematic by the release of Serious Sam 4. What makes these observations relevant to this site, though, is that this somewhat popular trend of passively moronic action media has never really caught on in video games. Between the terrible effects, dumb one-liners and almost complete lack of self-awareness in these movies, they’re some of the most fun you can have on your couch if you’re not looking to exhaust all your energy. Although there are definitely better ways to kill a few hours if you’re the type to enjoy fine brandy, for us normal folk, there isn’t anything quite like killing an afternoon with a dumb action flick. For all the crap they get, you gotta love a good B movie.

Serious sam 4 ps4