I came to the game fresh from The Last of Us Part 2 and, despite the undoubted brilliance of Naughty Dog’s game, I found Sam to be a refreshing experience. Add in some truly enormous boss fights and the usual ludicrous hordes and you have the perfect antidote to the cinematic, sneaky-stealth shooters that Sam has always been set against. The sound design as a whole is surprisingly effective (with some pretty decent music too) and really goes to ensuring that trademark Serious Sam feel. There was a terrific sense of nostalgia continually invoked by the screams of the headless kamikaze bombers and the hiss of the scorpion’s miniguns warming up. The aforementioned enemies and weapons are the real focus of Sam 4 though. ![]() If you’ve got the hardware you can easily shoot for higher resolutions and frame rates for even slicker performance. An upgrade to a GeForce 2060 and a quick test on a Vega56 let us ramp up the graphics to Ultra and still easily reach 60fps. ![]() The epic battles were totally playable at a consistent 60fps. I initially started playing on a GeForce 1050ti that hovers just above the game’s minimum specs, and while it wasn’t particularly good looking, I was really impressed with how smoothly the game ran. Character models are less impressive, although the familiar enemies have clearly had a lick of HD paint applied. Though not giving Unreal Engine 5 a run for its money, the visual design of Sam 4 is wonderful, and there are some genuinely gorgeous vistas and cityscapes to take in if you get a moment’s respite. The game’s open areas are perfectly suited to this and it really comes into its own when it reverts to this kind of environment. Unlike the recent Doom games which emphasised getting up close and personal, most battles in Sam 4 will see you running backwards and employing plenty of circle strafing. Whilst looking like a military shooter such as Battlefield, the game is still very much old-school Sam, with over the top gibbage and ludicrous weaponry. The end result of this backstory still amounts to ‘shoot thousands of enemies in series of arenas’ but rather than historical ruins and open spaces, Sam 4 drops you into guerrilla warfare across the streets of Rome and Paris.
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