I'm a 52 year old guy and been playing games since Atari 2600 back in 1977 and this game is awesome. It's very addictive, i just can't stop playing it. This was well worth the $6.42 on sell price that i paid for it. I can't wait to see what updates they do for it. I love most games but its very rare that i get addictive to one like this one. It's funny, entertaining, brutal, just everything in one, i wish it had more gore but thats me, maybe they can make an adult patch for it and add some cussing and body parts when they are killed lol. The only time i can really buy games is when there on special and im sure glad i got this one, good work. It just goes to show, you don't have to have a 100gb game for it to be good, in fact i have some 100gb games and this one is 100x better at a fraction of the size.

Updated April 25, 2022.
I wanted to give an update since the release of the full game a couple of weeks ago. Today is April 25, 2022 and im now almost a 55 year old guy lol. I dont do many reviews but I know I should, but I just love this game so much as yall can tell from the 552 hours now played as of this posting. I played 74 hours in about 8 days when they released the full version and I still love this game and stick with my original comment, and love there new levels and work thats been put into the game and I still recommended the game but the one thing that I was sure they would have added to the game was the ability to save the progress of a game but they didnt. For the life of me I cant understand why we cant save a game. If your playing for points it can take several hours for a game run depending on many factors but after 5 to 7 hours straight and still have plenty left I ended up just killing my character off so I can end the game. If you do need to stop for a bit you just have to pause the game and minimize the game. Im a very private person so I dont do discord or social medial and so on but I hope the Devs will add the ability to save the game and will never understand why it hasnt been added already, im not sure if I have a single game that I cant save my progress on other than this one. I would probably have a 1000 hours in the game if I could have saved my progress, just a shame its not there but other than that I do love this game and I want to Thank everyone for the awards that was sent. I dont know how to thank a person for sending rewards but I do appreciate it. Still a great game and at a good price thanks for all the hard work yall Devs did on it.

Serious Sam: Tormental is a rogue-lite spin-off of the Serious Sam series, this particular game is developed by Gungrounds as well as Croteam. I’m not exactly a fan of the Serious Sam franchise, I just picked this game up due to my interest in rogue-lites. So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It doesn’t really do anything unique, but it does the whole top-down shooter rogue-lite thing quite well, even just as it’s released in Early Access.

Note: Obviously, this is more of a first impressions type review, as such I will be updating this review as I continue to play the game, and I will be closely following it for as long as it’s in Early Access.

• Visually, I quite like Tormental. It has a nice blocky cartoon style, I do think it’s a bit reminiscent of mobile games such as Crossy Road, but I think it works well for the game so I’m not complaining. There are a couple of odd animations, but for the most part those are good too.
  
  
• Gameplay wise, Tormental is a fairly straightforward top-down shooter. It occupies a kind of middle ground between Gungeon and NT I think, a little more fast paced than Gungeon but not quite as hectic as NT. There’s a nice kind of feedback to the game, it feels punchy. Especially if you get a weapon mod to increase your knockback. But yeah, essentially, you’re shooting and evading for the most part.
  
  
• There’s a decent amount of weapon variation (but I definitely want to see more before full release). You have an evolvable gun and a ‘Serious’ weapon. The evolvable gun is essentially just a pistol, you start each run with it. You’ll find chests along the run that drop weapon mods to change what the pistol does, such as a chance to set enemies on fire; a chance to freeze enemies; homing rounds; shotgun modification etc. Your ‘Serious’ weapon is more powerful but is also more limited in use. You get one at the start of your run, and there are actually more Serious weapons than evolvable mods so there’s a lot of variation with them. I think they’re fairly well balanced, I haven’t really come across any that I think are over or underpowered.
  
  
• The game is nicely challenging. I don’t think it’s too difficult, but as with any rogue-lite there’s certainly a learning curve. For example, my first hour of gameplay saw a majority of runs ending at the first boss, and only a few making it to the second level. Whereas in my second hour, I’ve been more consistently reaching the second level.
  
  
• There aren’t exactly synergies, but there is some strategy to combining mods and Serious weapons. For example, the knockback mod compliments the freezegun Serious weapon really well. Plus, some mods go really well together.
  
  
• On the main menu you’ll find a ‘Mindmap’. This menu keeps track of challenges, mods, Serious weapons and powers. It’s a good way of keeping track of what you have done/unlocked. I haven’t gotten too far with the challenges yet, but supposedly you unlock more things by completing them. I’ll update this section as soon as possible.
  
  
• You don’t need any knowledge of the Serious Sam franchise to enjoy it. I’m having great fun with the game despite not really liking Serious Sam.
  
  
• The devs are super responsive in the forums, which is great to see for an Early Access game. I posted a thread and had replies from two different devs in under ten minutes.

• You fight the same boss at the end of an area each time you get to the end of said area. It’s not a huge issue, but it definitely makes the game feel a little less varied to me than I would expect from a rogue-lite.
  
  
• Enemy variety is also a little lacklustre currently. Each area has a handful of different enemies, and some of them are essentially just bigger versions of other enemies. It’s not awful, especially for an Early Access game, but this also has an impact on the feeling of run variety.
  
  
• No way to save and quit during a run.

Serious Sam: Tormental’s Early Access release offers a good foundation for the devs to build upon. The gameplay is punchy, there’s already a lot of weapon variation and it offers a good challenge. It lacks run variety, but at $12 I’d still recommend it to rogue-lite fans. At the very least it’s certainly something that’s worth keeping an eye on.

If you found this review helpful, please consider following my curator page: Kemo's Corner.

This is actually a super solid twin-stick shooter.
Shooting feels fantastic, the music is amazing and the writing made me laugh several times.
The simple aesthetic makes it easy to follow the action and it's adorable.
I would put this game above Enter The Gungeon and at the level of Nuclear Throne.

The writing, sound, and simplistic are style are great, but there's just not enough variation in levels and game play.

I can’t really imagine trying to balance a roguelike. More than any other genre, roguelikes live and die on the razor’s edge of difficulty. Too easy, and people blow through it in a few runs. Too hard, and frustration claims most of your would-be player base. It took me awhile to come around to the balance struck in Serious Sam: Tormental. There are some choices here that I wouldn’t have made, and some mechanics that weren’t immediately apparent despite how important they were. Still, it’s solid enough to take more than a few hours from me, and I will admit that every time I came close to frustration, I discovered something that kept me going. If you’re down for that kind of rollercoaster, read on.

I’ll give Tormental credit for somehow having one of the more unique premises for a Serious Sam game. Somehow, Sam “Serious” Stone has been transported into the mind of the mighty Mental himself, and must fight his way through the memories and imaginings of his arch-nemesis to reach the secrets locked away in his vile psyche. All sorts of nightmare beasts roam the imagined halls, along with strange new weapons and powers for Sam to claim as his own. But there are also unexpected allies to find here, other figments of twisted imagination that will provide guidance, clues, or challenges that will help our boy gain the power and knowledge he needs to beat Mental from the inside out.

There are certainly clever elements to the presentation that bear out from the concept. Everything has a cartoonish, dreamlike quality to it, especially the enemies which feel more like simple ideas of enemies rather than direct pulls from the other games in the series. Mental has “moods”, which translate into unique difficulty modifiers for each area that you can manipulate to get the challenge you want. The meta-progression also takes on a new dimension as you hunt keys to clear the big mental block at the center of Mental’s psyche, and this is done by far more than just beating runs. You even get some clever twists on existing characters, like the strange robotic presence that Mental envisions Netrisca as being.

Beyond that, Tormental is exactly the kind of run-and-gun top-down romp popularized by Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon. Sam enters a dungeon that is a short, linear sequence of randomized rooms, he kills all the monsters, hoovers up all the loot, beats the boss, and moves on to the next. “Linear” is an important factor here, as there is none of the exploration or multiple routes that you might expect from a game in this style. You’ll find loot, keys, chests, shops, and some unique rewards behind locked doors, but it’s still very much a straight shot through to the boss. Weapons are another departure from both top-down roguelikes and other Serious Samses. Your main gun is a pea-shooter with unlimited ammo (unless you opt for a mood that changes that), and you earn modifiers to it like rapid fire or ricochets by beating the bosses. Other weapons like shotguns and grenade launchers are secondary weapons, which you can have many of but only equip one at a time, and their ammo is very limited.

It’s the mechanics where this game really sets itself apart, and as I’ve already illustrated it does so in mixed ways. Bombs are a big part of the game though you cannot place them yourself. They appear in almost every room, and they can be swatted around with your melee weapon to blow up enemies. Even some of the perks you pick up affect bombs directly. Your dodge roll is HUGELY important, as dodge rolling through weakened enemies is a “brutal” kill that nets you bonus items. It’s never really emphasized just how important it is, but the economy of the entire game is balanced around you brutal killing most of your foes for extra health and keys. This is also where I can mention the less forgiving aspects of the design, like the absolutely absurd amount of damage many of the most common attacks do, and the fact that pickups vanish a few seconds after they appear. I particularly hate that last one, because it means not only do you have to do a careful dance of death to survive each room, you have to do it as close to the foes you’re killing as possible, and ALSO be near the exit when the last one dies, because bonus items will spawn there for only a few moments.

In the end, I definitely enjoy Serious Sam: Tormental, but every run I have to question some of the decisions that went into it. The vanishing rewards are the most common one, but I’ve also lost too many runs only because I tried to Brutal kill everything and the chaos of battle meant I took contact damage and died while doing so. Outside of spotty mechanics, though, it’s a perfectly solid roguelike shooter, and I do appreciate the unique hook and meta-progression. It looks and sounds great as well, even if some fights get a little cluttered with bulky enemies and bullet-hell-style attacks. If you’re ready for a steep learning curve and need something different from the current crop of roguelikes, I’d say give this one a serious try.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

In the current state I can not recommend the game.
On the surface it Looks like an amazing game that has potential with a artstyle that looks rather cute, vivid colors and that arcadish feel. You can see a lot of care went into the presentation. However deep down it seems that "Mental, the demigod who's mind we are invading" has a rather shallow imagination and likes to bug us with the concept of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting things to change. change they do. But not in a way you'd find enjoyable. Unless doing the same thing over and over is something you enjoy, then yes this game is a perfect match.

This game has 5 levels, 6 if you count the tutorial level which you can't turn back to. the first level is in a hub world, which you will be going through a lot. Each level can take up 5 minutes of your time depending on how well you do. At the end of each level there's a bossfight.

I played the game on sleeper difficulty to see how far I could get, in less than 30 minutes I made it through all 5 levels, In that time I died twice, The first time was at the end of the first level because my curiosity got the better of me. Don't jump into the vacuum eye things at the edges of the level after blowing up walls. They don't play nice. The second time was after I made it to start of the 5th level, the Vault.

My curiosity got once again the better of me. I jumped into this portal that appeared right behind me without exploring the vault. This was a mistake. I ended up on a beach with in the distance some sort of gargantuan fish lurking in the water, I ran to the right and was met with a dead end, at that moment 10 of those fishes jumped at me I realised there was no way out. I was doomed and my fate was sealed to be eaten by gargantuan fishes, much like the eye balls they did an insane amount of damage. Later was revealed these unkillable fishes were there because the game was being played on "Sleeper mode". To progress further the game's difficulty had to be cranked up. So I wouldn't meet a fate of becoming some Guardian Fish's dinner.

Back in the hub world I was met with a challenge. Clear the first level without firearms. Sure no prob I thought by myself. I could use the rewards from this quest. After completion I received some sort of ominous key. I returned back to level 5, the vault. After exploring the vault I found myself at a gigantic locked door with atleast 50 keyholes. I was told I had to gather all keys to face off against "mental". Then it hit me, I came to the realisation that in order to complete the game I had to beat all sort of ludecrous challenges on a difficulty mode that is rather unforgiving over 50 times.

The Gameplay that "Serious Sam: Tormental" has packed wasn't the kind of experience I was looking for.
I was looking for a long dungeon type of shooter where you work your way through an unholy amount of enemies in Rogue format. The kind of experience Serious sam is known for. Instead the experience this game provides is, complete the first level with only an sledge hammer, make it to the second level as a bomb guy. Creating an illusion of longevity by tasking the player to replay the same level countless of time in order to progress. While infact the game is no longer than 30 minutes.

Additionally the multiplayer only supports Lan through controller, like playing an plug and play arcade game on the couch with a friend coming over. There's no option to invite a friend over on steam to play the game with.

I'm sorry Croteam but It's safe to say this kind of game experience isn't my cup of tea.

It's like an arcade game. The developers are open-minded, sociable and generous.

So i gave it a try, and it's meh:
Incentive to dash through ennemies, but no invincible frame, sometimes ennemies are on a trap or spawn some others mob on top of you; dash is useless otherwise and jump barely works, and only for sam (!). Loot disappears way too fast, super annoying. No icon in hub to know which NPC is a quest giver or got a reward. No meta progression, just a few powers to unlock. No xp level up, just uninspired upgrade for the base gun. keys are some alternative money, some machines function with money, some with keys, no logic here. limited ammo sucks sorry, it's just not fun.

This game was fun once, I really like it, but with every update it got more irritating and less fun.
No real content update besides new weapons and perks which break the game balance even more. While the devs try to balance some aspects of the game, the core game got changed. At first the game had lots of enemies with little health and you could choose the rooms/challenges you wanted and the rewards coming with it, but you had to fight through a horde of enemies. Now the the devs changed the core game to less enemies which do more damage and have more health, you can't choose your rooms anymore but the rewards after defeating a boss or at the trader.

wow no more Early Access..

so seems to be a nice game so far.