Recent reviews by Sandshark

Seeing the 9th wave of reinforcements spawn in is enough to put the fear of God in any man's heart.

In all seriousness it's fantastic.

• The sheer amount of content and attention to detail alone is astounding.
  
• Sprite animations, environment art, background art, and character art are all superb.
  
• In addition to the incredible length and depth of the game, the difficulty is also extremely unforgiving when cranked all the way up, which makes it all the more cathartic when you beat it.
  
• Soundtrack hits death-by-blunt-force-trauma tier hard.
  
• Story can be a little confusing but nothing detrimental to the experience.
  
• Only complaint is some of the stealth missions can be rather frustrating, especially when playing on the hardest difficulty with no checkpoints/restarts (like an hour of work can get swept away in one miscalculation).

Generally speaking, it's a masterpiece.

• In terms of art and presentation, the game is essentially flawless in my opinion. The setting is incredibly interesting and alluring, and the art style has a fantastic mixed tone of futuristic and old-fashioned elements. What little information you're able to gather about the setting only leads you to desire to learn more and experience it further.
  
• The story itself might be under a little more scrutiny than the art/presentation, which I can understand. The story is very, very abstract at times and it might leave some feeling less than satisfied (it only gets more abstract as the game goes on). Personally, however, I ended up feeling somewhat satisfied but also deeply wishing for more, which I suppose means it did it's job well.
  
• Gameplay is good enough. It can be a bit difficult to get used to at first but once you've got a handle on it the gameplay generally serves it's purpose well enough. It's engaging, sometimes challenging, and usually enjoyable enough. There's certain times where it can be frustrating, such as when you're trying to aim at an enemy approaching you and you can't stop auto-aiming at a downed enemy beside them, but for the most part it's perfectly serviceable. Some of the best moments are times when you can finally stop holding back and just start pumping lead into your enemies, very cathartic.
  
• Puzzles in this game aren't very complex (unless you're trying to do the secret ones which lol good luck), mostly consisting of moving things between locations filled with hostiles and limited ammunition and basic interfacing puzzles. It can be slightly time consuming but it's not egregious enough to warrant a complaint. The radio frequencies mechanic is super cool and, although not always present and important throughout the entirety of the game, is a really unique and fun aspect that I highly enjoyed interacting with.

Really my only complaint with the game is the god awful ending unlock mechanics. Actually trying to decipher the requirements for the different endings is like trying to crack the Da Vinci code. I ended up spending 22 hours (around 16 on this account, 7 on a different one) to get the same ending 4 times in a row. It was incredibly frustrating, to say the least. Especially since you can't actually tell which ending you're going to end up getting until the very end cut-scene. Now, I'll admit that the ambiguity of the ending requirements is highly likely to be intentional, and I can understand the thought process behind it, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating for spending 22 hours on the same ending 4 times. At least you can skip the uncertainty when going for the secret ending , which was a silver lining.

Besides that though, I essentially have nothing but love and admiration for the game. Both as a game and as an art-piece. Phenomenal experience.

Also one tiny thing that annoyed me was that there was only one male character (Adler the GOAT) in the entire cast, I feel that the story would be even better if the cast was more balanced. But that's hardly something you could register as an actual complaint. I think the devs just really suffered from same-face syndrome, which in their case was a vaguely feminine face lmao

The game is mid. If I could have a neutral review I would.

I'm a little bit biased because I'm a big Serious Sam fan, so my enjoyment of this game was probably inevitable, but I definitely feel like it's the weakest of the series. (If we're ignoring SS2 which is basically an anomaly in the game series)

- The best part of this game, which is a consistent highlight of the series, is the soundtrack. It's great. Very epic, zero complaints there.
- The scenery can be very pretty (when it bothers to load their textures), the skyboxes are always beautiful in Croteam games, this one being no exception.
- The oil rig was great, I definitely didn't expect it to turn into a horror game for 15 minutes.
- Following up on that, the weapons aren't bad. I still feel that they're the least satisfying to use when compared to other games in the series, but at least there aren't weapons that can only be acquired through secrets (that really sucked in BFE since it always felt like wasted potential). There's some new guns which are cool and fun to use, and some modifications to returning weapons that spices them up in a good way, so there's that going for it.

- However following up on the weapons, the arenas or environments where you're fighting in this game are far more open than in previous installments, meaning that certain weapons far overshadow others. Additionally, when you add the 'head-shot' mechanic that's present in this game, there's hardly any reason to use certain guns in almost any circumstance other than variety or ammo preservation. Now, to be fair, bullet based weapons (tommy gun/minigun) were still basically universal solutions in the previous games so it's not necessarily a new problem, but it definitely feels far more exaggerated in this game. You can take out enemies faster with your AR than your explosives if you aim for the head, which feels silly at times.
- The game is horribly optimized. Textures take several seconds to load once you look at them and seem to unload when you look away, meaning half your environment's looking like an abstract painting.
- The level building seemed to try and take a much more realistic approach, but there's some absolutely gigantic areas that really don't feel like they're doing the game any favors. Especially certain levels where you're actually expected to drive very janky vehicles through them (looking at you France), it feels like a bizarre concept and doesn't really have any upsides aside from the very occasional kamikaze running into the road in front of you which looks rather cinematic.
- The game tried to take a much more story driven approach, with many many more cut-scenes and dialogue than the previous games. Some people may have liked it, but I really felt like they weren't polished or well written enough to justify detracting from the main appeal of Serious Sam (the game-play). Many, many cutscenes had plenty of models clipping or had animation that left much to be desired. The dialogue was tongue-in-cheek and didn't take itself super seriously which was good but it still wasn't that appealing to me.
- There was no boss fights I actually enjoyed. The mechs sucked. Not good.
- The melee animations are all huge downgrades to the ones in BFE, the BFE melee animations were gnarly, the ones in this game feel like the same very barebones knife stabbing animation copied and pasted on each enemy.
- The game has what feels like 4x more secrets in it than the previous games, and with the new direction they took the environment and arena building in, it is not as fun looking for all the secrets, especially when there's 30 secrets in an accurately replicated italian neighborhood.
- Finally the game literally just throws you dozens of get out of jail free cards in the form of the gadgets you collect throughout levels. I get that they were trying to replace the power ups, but having a dozen different gadgets on hand at any given moment that all basically let you beat a fight for free, feels like it trivializes the game a lot.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but if I'm being honest, if it wasn't part of the Serious Sam franchise I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it enough to finish.
It's just mid. That's all I can really say.

Just realized I forgot to give this game a positive review after two years.

It's weakest points are the environmental aesthetics, basically everything is shades of turquoise and red, and the end-chapter bosses, which are a little lackluster. Besides that though, everything else is really superb.
The art is unique and charming. The level design itself is varied, enemies pose a variety of threats, there's a wide range of weapons all of which are really satisfying to use. The level of detail given to the firearms in this game is largely unseen in other games, and is easily one of it's strongest points. You load, reload, empty, change ammunition, and you can even have gun jams if you want to up the difficulty. Speaking of that, the amount of difficulty options and general settings is also very good. The lore/world building takes a back seat in the game (which is honestly a shame since the developer's shown to have a clear and interesting vision, albeit pretty depressing).
Honestly there's a ton of soul poured into this game, I really hope doekuramori's future endeavors are equally as successful.

devs lost the plot ages ago

incites gratuitous violence against small anime girls

From the prestigious game studio that brought you such classics as "It's never just one kamikaze" and "How to kite Kleers like you know what you're doing", Croteam brings you "Is that Witch sound cue in front or behind me".

It's not every day you find a game where over 90% of all characters introduced are good marriage material. It's simple. Keeps you busy. Extremely well written. If I had a hall of fame for visual novels I would put this in it. I don't know what else there is to say about it. If you've ever touched a book you'll probably get along well with this game.

After Ubisoft announced they'd be reverting the upcoming censorship changes to fit into Chinese regulations due to community backlash, I feel compelled to help remedy the review bombing. The game is really good, there's a lot of depth to it, which helps make it feel like more than just your average deathmatch FPS game. Like any online game, you'll run into toxcity if playing solo, however honestly in the grand scheme of things this game's community isn't bad. A few downsides include having to install uplay to run it, the awful ingame economy (new operators cost less than some cosmetics for instance), and the fact that the starter edition exists. (It's basically a trap if you ever consider the game just get the standard version you'll thank yourself for it.)

7/10 if you're playing solo
9/10 if you're playing with friends