Recent reviews by Rowsdower

You play as Sam Stone aka Serious Sam. Serious Sam 4 (SS4) is a first person shooter developed by Croteam. What makes it and the rest of the games in the series unique is the large number of enemies you face at a given time. This entry takes place after Serious Sam 1 The First Encounter (TFE) and Serious Sam 1 The Second Encounter (TSE) but before Serious Sam 3 Before the First Encounter (BFE). While this game does introduce great new features such as the skill points and weapon upgrades, the features that were marketed or at least suggested such as the horde system and open-world are non-existent.

This game can be played in single player mode or in coop mode. Unfortunately there is no split-screen support or leaderboards this time. This game also has Workshop support.

The weapons include the pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, rocket launcher and the usual series staples like the mini gun, grenade launcher, laser gun, and the incredible cannon. New additions include an auto-shotgun and a heat seeking buzzsaw gun which is so powerful that they give you barely any ammo for it. Each weapon is useful in particular situations. The weapon upgrades which I will go into detail later are a fresh addition to this entry and make the weapons more fun to use.

There are a lot of graphical artifacts, making it difficult to see enemies. The previous games had open areas with not so many distracting artifacts, including TSE with its grassy areas in the Aztec levels. Now you have a bunch of trees carts, and more. This is one step forward with SS3’s barren forgettable level design but one two steps back. Also the enemies occasionally blend in with the environment. Croteam needs to take a page from Sega where they chose a deeper blue for Sonic so that he wouldn’t blend into the level on Green Hill Zone.

You level up Sam by collecting alien artifacts. Each artifact gives you a skill point that you can use to give yourself abilities. This includes the ability to dual wield weapons, gain HP from melee attacks, reload faster, take less damage, and more. Unfortunately the variety of skills you can is low. 3 skills are an upgrade to Dual wielding, and 3 more skills are an upgrade to melee attacks. Also I played this on Serious difficulty and in my opinion there is absolutely no reason to contribute to the melee attack tree. The developers are very generous and allow you to re-allocate your skill points yourself at any point in the game by pausing.

You can also collect weapon upgrades and one-time use items by completing side missions. I will get to the side missions in a bit. Weapon upgrades include a device that lets you shoot 5 rockets at a time, a grenade launcher attachment for your shotgun, and a laser beam for your laser cannon. These are incredibly useful in certain battles and are fun to use. Items include drugs that let you run really fast, drugs that give you HP, a black hole grenade, a holodecoy, a hacked drone, and more. These items are also fun to use.

One problem is that the main way of getting these skill points, weapon upgrades, and items is to complete side-missions. The side-missions are just detours in the main level. If the goal is to get from point A to B with C being in the middle of A and B and D being a side-mission, you have to go from C to D and then D to C instead of D to B. In other words you take up a lot more time for items and weapon upgrades that you will need in the higher difficulty levels. This makes the first couple of levels very grueling. And the side-mission path can be very long especially in the French countryside levels.

Another way to get items is to discover hidden parts of the level known as secrets. Unfortunately most of them involve you doing parkour-style platforming to jump to high buildings or blocked off corners. These items are very annoying to get because the jumping is ass in this game; it makes Counter Strike 2 look like Super Mario 64. But this is a small gripe since this isn’t a platforming game.

There is a bigger story in this entry compared to the others, but it just equates to badly written dialogue and two dimensional characters. They employed the same writers of The Talos Principle but I imagine it was difficult for them to make an interesting story for a character who just spits out one-liners. They even parody this by having one of the villains give very long and philosophical speeches before you blow up his egg sack. The humor in the other entries came from the environment you were in. In TSE you find a pay telephone in the middle of ancient South America and a boxing glove and Santa Claus in the medieval times. But there are funny moments in this entry like when you run over enemies with a combine or complete a text adventure on an abandoned oil tanker.

I really liked this game and I think it is better than BFE. However it has about the same score as BFE even though it is much better than it. I have a couple of theories on why.

The first teaser for this game was Sam riding a motorcycle and killing enemies in the country side. When I first saw that, I and I suspect many others, thought that this game was going to be like Breath of the Wild. Even the removed subtitle, Planet Badass, suggests this. This was the only bit of information we got about the game for a while. But there are no open world elements in this game. You do get to ride a motorcycle in the countryside but you have to follow a set path.

The second marketed feature was the “horde system” which was the idea that you would fight an absurd amount of enemies (10,000) at a time compared to 100's like you normally do in this series with your army. This was a cheap bait and switch. You do this in the prologue of the game and on the last level in the game. But it is hollow and doesn’t require any strategy. Also most of the enemies are not even hittable. It is just a cheap trick. But I never really wanted this feature, I already have to fight 100's of enemies at a time and I think that is good enough for me.

At launch this game was buggy and many speculate that it a rushed release. But it works fine now unless you play it with the Vulkan renderer which looks terrible and runs at a noticeably lower framerate than the DX11 one.

I think the marketing team really screwed Croteam over. They tried to market small portions of the game as main features instead of a well-done sequel to Serious Sam 3. This is a great game but not the one they marketed.

Only get if you don't mind NES versions of the games; I personally miss the rainbow doors on Mappy and the multicolored fruits on PAC-MAN. Exclusive to this collection is a charming port of PAC-MAN Championship Edition for NES.

This is a really good game. The art style is great, the world you run in is is a bright mask of the corruption you are fighting. The first person view and sound design make for a really immersive experience as well.

However the base game seems to have a memory leak because I often had to reset after 30 minutes. It has been a while but I imagine this is still present. Hopefully there is a community fix.

Good game. I don't think its one that you need to play before you die but somehow I spent more time on this game than most.

Part 1 Naruto is best change my mind. But this game isn't that good. Way too hard to even progress. Also you are forced to complete missions in a certain order so the open world is pointless.

Boot up game, get bombarded with a bunch of update messages including one announcing some trading card mini game and then another one announcing its retirement.

Start the game, fight with Piccolo. Combat is not engaging

Go to Master Roshi's house, get disappointed with Kame's sidequest and predict that the rest of the game will be mediocre.

Forget about the game for months until I realize that I spent $25 on it. Ask for a refund, understandably refused due to the long period after purchase.

Really liked this game. Story is great and has some homages to the Twilight Zone. Arcade mode is also incredibly fun to play.

As an adult still don't know if you should shoot down Whirly or not.

Quake 1 has a very cool and foreboding dark fantasy environment and great levels. The sequel has oversized levels, annoying enemies, and a boring alien planet setting.

Not a bad game but definitely worse than Quake 1.

Really good game. I've never played a bullet hell game before but I think this one is really good.

Your ship can move in 8 directions and has a regular and special attack. You pick up gold from defeated enemies and when you get enough (very small amount) you can enter Vaunt mode.

About 5 seconds after you enter vaunt mode, you are temporarily invincible and while in it your damage and points are doubled. You can sustain Vaunt mode by collecting gold to prevent your meter from depleting. You can also trigger another invincible period by exiting Vaunt mode early but you won't be able to enter it again for a while (not too long). Vaunt mode is a great feature for this game. You can choose to enter it during a difficult portion of the level enter it as early as possible to get a high score.

The review says that I spend less than 3 hours on the game. It is a short game, however the levels are challenging really fun to play through (minus the last one). In order to unlock the last level of the game, you must beat all of the previous levels on Legendary. That may be a turn off for some but again the levels are short and its fun to see your leaderboard rank go up with each playthrough. I've only played with the first ship on solo but there are 3 other ships (7 if you have the DLC), challenge mode, and guantlet mode, giving players more content for their money.