Serious Sam 4

Lore & Background

Serious Sam 4 is a prequel set an unknown amount of time before Serious Sam 3: BFE. The plot follows 'Serious' Sam Stone and his Earth Defense Force unit as they investigate the Holy Grail, which is revealed to be a powerful alien artefact hidden inside the Ark of the Covenant. The story involves a traitorous General Brand, the alien general Lord Achriman, and a climactic battle at a superportal in Tunguska, Russia. The game ends with Sam indicating their next mission will be in Egypt, leading into Serious Sam 3: BFE.

Gameplay retains the series' hallmark of fighting massive hordes of enemies in large areas, with no weapon limit. New additions include a skill tree progressed by finding Sirian Artefacts of Might (S.A.Ms), side quests, gadgets, weapon mods, and a greater emphasis on vehicles, including pilotable mechs. The knife from the Encounters replaces the sledgehammer, and reloading returns from Serious Sam 3: BFE but is less necessary.

Development began in October 2012, with the game confirmed in June 2013 via a Humble Bundle sale to help fund it. The game was announced as Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass in April 2018, but the subtitle was dropped by May 2020 due to localization difficulties. The game was delayed from August to September 2020. An exclusivity deal with Stadia led to confusion about PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions, which Croteam stated were never planned.

Reader's Guide

Serious Sam 4 received 'mixed or average reviews' on Metacritic, with normalized ratings of 68/100 for Windows, 65/100 for PlayStation 5, and 57/100 for Xbox Series X/S. OpenCritic assessed that the game received fair approval, recommended by 38% of critics. The game is notable for being the first mainline entry in the series since Serious Sam 3: BFE (2011), and for introducing several new gameplay mechanics such as a skill tree, side quests, gadgets, and weapon mods. Its development history includes a detour when the 'jammer' feature was repurposed into The Talos Principle (2014). The game's release was complicated by a Stadia exclusivity deal and subsequent confusion over console versions. A standalone expansion, Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, was released in January 2022.

Did You Know?

• The skill tree is progressed by finding objects called Sirian Artefacts of Might (S.A.Ms), of which only 10 exist in the game.
• The game's plot involves the Holy Grail being a powerful alien artefact hidden inside the Ark of the Covenant.
• Development began in October 2012, and the 'jammer' feature was later repurposed into The Talos Principle.

A Hero Against the Stars

Serious Sam is a first-person shooter franchise created and primarily developed by Croteam. At its core, the series tracks the exploits of Sam "Serious" Stone, a protagonist who repeatedly confronts Mental, an extraterrestrial overlord bent on annihilating humanity across different eras. The franchise made its debut with Serious Sam: The First Encounter, which hit the Microsoft Windows platform in March 2001 and set the template for everything that followed. Beyond Croteam's own entries, the brand expanded through licensed spin-offs handled by outside studios. InterActive Vision produced a Palm OS port of The First Encounter, while Climax Solent delivered Serious Sam: Next Encounter for the GameCube and PlayStation 2. Climax London adapted the formula for the Game Boy Advance with Serious Sam Advance. All three of these offshoot titles carried the Global Star Software publishing banner, extending the series' reach well beyond the PC audience that the originals were built for.

Building an Engine from Nothing

When Croteam set out to develop their Serious Sam titles, they faced a significant financial hurdle: licensing an existing game engine could cost upwards of one million US dollars. Rather than take on that expense, the team built their own proprietary engine from the ground up to power both The First Encounter and The Second Encounter. Their initial blueprint mirrored the feature set of the first Doom engine, which rendered pseudo-3D spaces within a 2D framework and lacked the ability to aim above or below the horizon. However, the competitive landscape shifted dramatically during development. Duke Nukem 3D introduced free-look targeting in all directions, and Quake delivered a fully three-dimensional rendered world. Croteam had to scramble to fold both of those capabilities into their in-progress engine just to remain viable. The situation grew even more complex when the first dedicated 3D graphics accelerators appeared on the market, forcing the team to pivot from software rendering to hardware-accelerated graphics to keep their game competitive.

Pushing Hardware to Its Limits

Once the foundational challenges were resolved, Croteam set out to make their Serious Engine do things no comparable title was attempting. They designed the system to handle extraordinarily large open environments with virtual view distances stretching beyond a kilometre, while also incorporating physics simulation and the capacity to render up to one hundred hostile enemies simultaneously on screen. Remarkably, all of this was expected to run on the processing power available in low-end machines equipped with the original Pentium processors. To make that feasible, the team engineered an object path caching system that let them skip collision checks against static environmental geometry for several seconds at a time instead of evaluating them every single frame cycle. They further accelerated collision detection by approximating the surrounding world with spheres rather than the more computationally expensive box shapes. This spherical approach also unlocked multidirectional gravity mechanics, which the developers put to use in designing hidden secret areas scattered throughout the levels.

From Open Source to HD

The Serious Engine has evolved across multiple generations, each bringing substantial visual and technical upgrades. The original Serious Engine 1, which powered the first two encounters, has since been released as open-source software, making its code accessible to the broader development community. Serious Engine 2, built for Serious Sam 2, added support for modern GPU features including pixel and vertex shaders, high dynamic range rendering, bloom effects, and parallax mapping. The HD remakes of both classic episodes ran on Serious Engine 3, which introduced more detailed shading, re-modelled enemy characters for a more realistic appearance, and was further developed to exploit the full potential of HDR and high-definition texture mapping. An updated iteration, Serious Engine 3.5, powered Serious Sam 3. On the audio front, the iconic protagonist is brought to life by voice actor John Dick. In terms of distribution, Devolver Digital stepped in to re-release both original encounters in 2010 and Serious Sam 2 the following year, keeping the franchise accessible to new and returning players alike.