The Serious Sam series has always been wonderfully silly and absurd violent. It’s a brain-off, guns-up, explosion-heavy slice of pure gameplay that, even with its original game in 2001, was seen as a throwback. Theoretically, it should work incredibly well as a roguelite, because getting more of that gameplay into your veins can only be a good thing. It’s a boomer shooter, but not like the new Doom games are, like the original Doom games are. You run, you shoot, that’s it.
Serious Sam: Shatterverse aims to make it into a roguelite, and lets you and up to four other players run through missions together to try and save the universe, and also the other universes. You take control of one of several different Sam’s each of which has its own unique abilities, but largely, you’re going to be shooting things.
Runs start off small with just a handful of enemies at a time, to the point that it really doesn’t feel like Serious Sam, which is known for its mindless hordes of onrushing enemies. Later rooms and levels will channel more of the Serious Sam style hordes of enemies rushing towards you, with things like challenge alters demanding the sacrificial defeat of enemies within its radius.
Thankfully, there’s a large arsenal of weapons to choose from… sort of. One of the large issues here is that you need to spend your hard-earned catalysts to unlock new weapons. You get a lot of these by successfully completing a run, but that means that until you do so, you’re stuck with the basic pistol, shotgun and tommy gun. You’ll get no crazy weapons and you’ll have to try and like it, and I do not understand this decision at all. A lot of games like this will lock new weapons behind challenges, like killing an amount of a specific enemy or something. That’s a good way to do things because you’re always moving towards new unlocks. With Shatterverse, you’re only slowly creeping towards stuff unless you win. That’s frustrating design.
The same is true of the other Sam variants too, so you can only be Retro Sam to begin with – bizarrely with a much lower polygon count than the original Sam. I have nothing against old people, but it’d be nice to have more options to kick things off, you know? It’s just a maddeningly choice that means that you just have to grind for stuff. You only get stuff if you specifically want it, and then what’s the point of playing any more?
It wouldn’t be so bad if the upgrades were interesting during each run, but they’re really not. You’re getting a 5% speed boost, a little extra health, better reload speeds, that kinda thing. There are some which are more adventurous, like doing more explosion damage when you’re in the air, but that’s not what you’re getting for the most part. It’s painfully paint-by-numbers, but with only three paints to start things off. Not even the good ones, one of those is puce. Ew!
You will take damage, of course, with health regained by performing a finishing move on low health enemies. It’s like 2016’s Doom, but it just doesn’t feel as satisfying. Enemies aren’t put into a staggered state for you to harvest, and will instead keep on coming for you, making the juggling act trickier to manage, and the melee moves here are far from spectacular.
Still, you can play with friends, and that’s always great… though in this case it’s more like a sorrow shared. There are some serious bugs in this game too. If you’re downed, you don’t bleed out, but are stuck in place until someone can reach you (which isn’t always possible) or until they can reach the next area. You can also sometimes fall through floors and all of that good stuff as well.
